Early Setting Notes (Patreon)

Since we're celebrating our third anniversary this month, I thought it might be fun to brush the dust off some of the very, very earliest concepts for D&W.

Starting the planning process, we were very much in unmapped territory. Mary's standalone comics hinted at a grungy near-future city (back then simply "City One") overwhelmed by a Brazil-esque surveillance state, but that was already start and end of it. However, Mary had been drawing little bits and pieces of what would eventually become Unylsk since the 2000s, leaving a surprisingly rich "canon" of material to work with. 

Sorting through those old sketches, comics, and cast-offs, I flagged whatever concept might still make sense within the purview of a longform webcomic, as well as the areas where we'd have to invest more work. Looking at "Drugs & Wires" in its entirety also helped me better understand the overall tone and elements of the setting, even if these were more unconscious than explicit. In this initial phase, I approached the process of writing like I was dealing with a licensed property. Even if I was being given the liberty to put my own spin on Dan and company, it was important that the end result would feel like something Mary herself might pen. 

In an old article on worldbuilding, I talked about the need to find a "mission statement" for your setting and develop specifics around it. With Mary's D&W, the clear constant was misery and authoritarian bureaucracy, so I pulled together ideas that would reinforce those themes and make interesting art and story material, adding a few others culled from Mary's own backlog. Some of this you might recognize; other parts were a little too over-the-top in the long run. Nonetheless, all this gave us a foundation from which we could continue developing the very particular '90s hell Dan currently finds himself in.