ideas

i was thinking about ideas for dangerman vs missilemaster today. trying to work out the various bad guys and where they came from was giving me trouble for awhile since i had no idea who they were and what their goals were, other than ‘blow shit up’.

then i remembered mike mignola’s first rule of writing; when in doubt, nazis.

sweet. dangerman and his grandfather team up to fight the reichmaster and his ubermensch, free at last from the stasis bomb oppenheimer built for the allied super-legions.

also working on character and ship designs for ’suits’, which is sort of a superhero fbi organization. i’m basically recycling my character designs from revolt! and making them more interesting people, giving them all superpowers, and setting them down in the wierd universe timeline i’ve created with dofa, apollo, and mentalism.

designing the ship has been great. i love designing starships becuase you don’t have any arbritary limitations unless you want them. does the ship ever land? does it need to function inside an atmosphere? how advanced is the technology we’re working with here? what kind of materials are available? how many people is it designed to accomodate, and what kind of facilities do they need? is it a ‘car’ used only for travel to and from somewhere, or do they live and work on it, making it an office crossed with an apartment building?

suits is set at a point in my timeline where, technologically speaking, it’s star trek the next generation. very advanced, but not quite at the indistinguishable-from-magic state yet.

this means i’m pretty much free to design whatever the hell i want; make it look good, and just assume they can make it structurally sound. all the glass is really metal, there’s energy shields and grav-shields and structural integrity fields and so on.

additionally, i can design a ship that’s truly all purpose, which means i can take them absolutely anywhere i want; this is totally freeing as far as the kinds of stories i can tell with it.

sublight and hyperdrive engines. capable of operating in vacuum, atmosphere, or underwater(or inside a gas giant). well armed enough to hold it’s own in a fight, blast through asteroid fields, or protect the weak against pirates and villainy. comes loaded with a multi-purpose shuttlecraft for side missions or short hops, and plenty of room for more small vehicles on-deck or in the cargo bays.

inside it’s all good looking, all style. on the main deck, clear walls everywhere. a big rec room/lounge that fills the heart of the ship, vaulting two decks with full-on holographic display walls that can be set to exterior view, and centralized access to all areas of the ship. extra quarters for transporting diplomats or refugees, or extra personnel on special assignments. fully outfitted kitchen and gym facilities; dojo for combat simulation and gravity therapy(independant gravity control to simulate +/- 1g). bio-lab, med-lab, machine shop, comm room/library, two cargo bays, living quarters and bath/laundry facilities to handle a crew of a dozen.

the trouble is that i envision suits as a live action syndicated tv series. i’d love to do it as animation, but who knows how successful it would be in either form. if it was live action, the set requirements would be pretty extensive. no worse than ds9 or sg-1 though, i suppose. but i’m not sure how well they’d translate to someone’s cheap version if it came to that.

then again, i’m getting attached enough to it, maybe i’ll just do a graphic novel or two of various cases and then let other people take over, like warren ellis and the authority, or mignola and bprd(to an extent).

have to come up with a few good cases then. ideally it’d play out like the ghost in the shell and/or dominion: tank police manga; following the team around on a few lesser cases with a larger plot brewing in the background and coming to a head at the end.

then if it’s good and people like it, i can license it for further comics, or an animated series, or a tv series, or movies, or all of the above. spinoffs about other investigative teams in other parts of the universe.