Welcome, unsuspecting peasant, to...the Hall of Discarded Ideas! [cue evil laughter] Ah ha ha ha ha ha!
Back in 2021, when I started working on plot ideas and concepts for my graphic novel Juliet Prime, I didn't have a clear idea of the events that were meant to happen in it. So I decided to make a list of every type of scene I wanted to see in a comic, and put it in. Most of the things on that list ended up in the finished book, but quite a lot didn't.
In the next few posts I will detail those rejected ideas here. Mostly because this is a web log — a time- and date-stamped record of my artistic doings. I also find that it helps to never fully discard your comic ideas. Just because these things didn't fit into my story doesn't mean they won't fit anywhere else. Hold on to them! They are probably more interesting than the slop being served up by 'Hollywood' these days, anyway.
Here's the first dropped idea that I wanted to make mention of.
Early on, I developed the conceit that the main characters Juliet and Seymour were time-travellers. I thought it would be interesting if, in this story set in the year 2112, that the protagonists were from another era. I thought this might go some way to explaining why their appearance isn't so 'futuristic'. Juliet is dressed like she's from the 1800s and Seymour has a striped rugby jersey redolent of a British public school boy. You could safely predict that no one will be dressing like this in the 22nd century and you'd be right.
A year after I first created these characters, there was a Blackadder special called Back & Forth. The Blackadder series was notable for showing iterations of the same characters in different eras, but in this one they actually travel through time, resulting in scenes like Blackadder going back to the reign of Elizabeth I and punching Shakespeare in the face. I could do that with my characters, couldn't I? Juliet goes back in time to meet the Roman emperor Diocletian and...? Some stuff happens?
In the end though, I couldn't think of a way to make this idea fit in, and I didn't really want to write a time-travel story. Juliet and Seymour are not time-travellers, nor are they under the delusion that they are. They are just two kids in the future who dress like they're from the past.
~to be continued~
