Inventory: INTERPOLATION (Patreon)

 Welcome to the first post in our "inventory" series! Now that Wasted Talent has concluded, I wanted to review the other stories that I've been toying with. They all sit in different phases of development, and I wanted to share them all with Patreon so you would all have context as I post future sketches or previews for these series. Or not! I'm not sure what I'll be pursuing, and I'd love to hear your feedback on all of these ideas. 

The first hardly has any art at all, but LOTS of writing and notes that I've been accumulating for many years. 

INTERPOLATION was born of my desire to tell more stories about Engineering. "Corporate drama" is not a space that is widely explored in fiction, but there's so much opportunity there! Most "corporate dramas" are centered around interpersonal conflict or romance, but I'm interested in how teams interact, inter-organizational drama between teams, corporate politics, and the unified group against a common goal. It's almost more a like a sports drama in that way! 

My idea for this comic is for it to be another lighthearted comedy, similar to Wasted Talent in tone and style, but completely fictional. I want it to be set in the near-future, and I want to setting to be a large, cutting-edge technology company. The twist is that instead of in Silicon Valley, I want this tech company to be headquartered in a remote town in Northern BC. 

This setting is really interesting to me, because when I was working for energyWise I had the opportunity to travel to a lot of these "one-industry" towns around the province. These towns were dominated by a giant mine or pulp and paper mill, and everyone else in the town was just there to support those who worked at "the company". This was a fascinating dynamic to me, and there was a lot of fear in those towns about what would happen if "the mill" closed. "What if," I wondered, "an advanced tech company then decided to open in one of these dying one-industry towns?" I thought it would be interesting to see what type of engineers would sacrifice their preferred lifestyles to move and work for a company like that, and what kind of adjustment it would take? I was interested in the urban/rural culture clash that would result. 

And there's also something interesting to explore in the culture of small-town Canadiana itself :)

In terms of this project, I have the most work done for the writing. I have a basic plot structure that I can begin to work with, and as described I have a pretty solid handle of the tone and what I'm trying to achieve. This needs to most work in character design, really figuring out the details of the team members and whose stories I will focus on. Then I can start making chapter drafts!