Olaf's comics blog

There are probably tons of stories about the afterlife. But I don’t think I’ve seen this exact description of the afterlife before, so I’m posting it here as an idea for you to take if you want it.

The story starts in a different dimension than ours. Or perhaps it’s in our dimension, but it’s on a different planet. The point is, it’s a world very much like ours, but still very different. Perhaps all the people look like shrimp or something. I don’t know.

You start out with a chapter showing the life of a person in this world. Perhaps he’s¹ a theologist who’ve been studying the afterlife for some time, perhaps he’s just a regular guy, perhaps he’s something inbetween. But he should probably have some opinions about what the afterlife is like, and discuss this openly with his friends in this chapter.

Then, in some sudden and unexpected way, he dies. Everything goes black.

“Where am I? What’s going on here?” He opens his eyes. It’s still black. He remembers what happened. “That hovercar… that was coming straight against me… Did it kill me?” Am I… dead? And why do I feel so claustrophobic here?” A sudden thought appears. “Wait. Why am I conscious? Don’t say that they’ve buried me, and that I’ve woken up again in the coffin?” He reaches out. “No. I don’t know what this place is, but it’s not made of wood. But why are my hands so weird? It’s like… This isn’t my body? Am I resurrected? No, that doesn’t make sense. Okay, where the heck am I?”

“Oh well. If this is the afterlife, I expect that somebody will show up and explain to me how this works eventually. I should probably just sit back and relax in the meantime.”

But nothing happens. For months, there are no signs of other people anywhere. Just him, in a body he doesn’t recognize, in a dark place where absolutely nothing happens. Occasionally he hears strange sounds coming from the outside, but they don’t make much sense. He doesn’t have much space to move, but he can get some sleep when he needs to, and fortunately he doesn’t seem to need food here.

“Okay, so afterlife consists of being bored to death in a dark room. Yippee. Not exactly what I had expected.”

Cut to several months later, when the afterlife suddenly takes a swift turn: Birth. Yeah, in case you didn’t guess it, our protagonist was reborn in our world, as a human embryo.

“Whoa, what just happened? Bright light… Must adjust… Whoah! Who are all these scary-looking monsters? Are they… Angels? Demons?”

Nope. They’re human beings. You’re just not used to them, having grown up in another dimension or another planet or whatever. But you don’t know that, and only experience will teach you that they’re friendly-minded.

“Okay, it looks as if they’re not trying to hurt me. Perhaps I can try communicating with them? GREETINGS, FRIENDLY GIANT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND SHRIMPANESE?”

They don’t. To them, all the words that come out of you mouth sounds just like screaming.

“Okay, this isn’t working. If I want to have any chance of communicating with these brute creatures, I guess I have to learn their language and a bit more about their culture…”

So yeah, basically, the plot of this idea is to tell the story of the life of a human baby – but through the eyes of the person from another dimension who was reborn as this baby. As a visitor to our world who doesn’t know the rules, he will have a hard time learning about our culture and society. But he really doesn’t have a choice. For all that he knows, he’ll be stuck here forever.

As he adapts to our world, he grows fond of it. Eventually, he will forget some details about his previous life, and by the time he learns to talk, everything he knew about his previous life will be lost. He is now one of us. Or perhaps he remembers some vague memories from his previous life, but he doesn’t know that he used to live them. Perhaps he once he grows up manages to create an invention that was actually a very popular object in the world he used to live in – but since he doesn’t remember that life, he thinks it’s a brand new idea. You know, things like that. Vague memories from a previous life is one thing, actually remembering that you’ve had a previous life is another.

And if you let the comic go on until he reaches old age and dies in our world, too… Perhaps he’s reborn in his old world. Or perhaps he just passes on to another. I don’t know.

I love the thought of presenting the world we live in as an afterlife, and I think that in the hands of a good cartoonist, this would be an awesome comic. And once you’d read it, you would probably never look at babies the same way again.

And with that notion, I’ve reached my goal of giving you one hundred ideas in one hundred days! Wow! I will post more detailed reports on how it went later. Right now, I’m thrilled that I actually managed to do this – I’m not quite sure that was what I had expected.

If you like one of my ideas and think that you can turn it into a good comic – feel free to take it, that’s what the Creative Commons license is for. Just credit me, and I would love it if you actually sent me an e-mail about it. If you want me to elaborate on one of my ideas and perhaps cooperate on developing it further, you’re can also send me an e-mail about it. As usual, I would love it if you write comments to my ideas and tell me what you like and what you don’t like about them, or let me know if you’ve already read a similar concept somewhere.

Like I said, more detailed information later – but I’m definitely getting some sleep first.

1. I’m using “he” here because I tend to pick pronouns on random and this time it was “he”‘s turn, but there’s no reason this character couldn’t be female. [back]

One good starting point for coming up with new comic ideas is telling yourself “Okay, if I take the society we live in and change one thing about it to the polar opposite, what will happen?”

Of course, what you change is up to you – it can be a moral guideline, it can be a law, it can be a law of physics, it could be the effect of an object.

If you have a scientific mindset you could probably try creating a comic set in a world exactly like ours, but with no gravity.

If you want to be wacky, you can create a universe where it’s encouraged and perfectly normal to not wear pants, and you can be arrested for not wearing pants.

If you have a sick and twisted enough mindset to do something really dark, you an create a universe where it’s encouraged perfectly normal to molest your children, and you can be arrested for not molesting your children.

But I’m not here to tell you how to come up with ideas, I’m here to give you one idea for free. So here’s a scenario for a possible universe.

You know how smoking is really bad for you, and it weakens your body, and you die faster, and how some countries have banned tobacco advertising because smoking kills, and all that stuff? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed any of that. But just for laughs, wouldn’t it be fun to create a comic where tobacco gives you superpowers?

Yeah, tobacco. And it doesn’t even have to be special super tobacco, just regular tobacco. Smoking cigarettes makes you stronger, parents encourage their children to do it at a very early age, and athletes aren’t allowed to smoke cigarettes six hours before they perform because it’s considered cheating?

And that one specific tobacco brand is so awesome and powerful that it serves as the power source for a superhero? Obviously, this specific tobacco brand wouldn’t be for sale in stores, it would be a private supply that only this person had access to, otherwise the villains would buy it too. But still, tobacco would be the awesome stuff that made everybody stronger.

And the moral of every story would be “Remember to smoke your cigarettes, kids – that’s what builds muscles!”

I think that the result could be pretty fun. Some people are guaranteed to disagree; they will say that a comic that encourages to smoking is a really bad thing. But hey, then you can yell at them for not understanding the irony. Come on, it’s obvious you don’t actually mean this. And then you can tell them to be happy you didn’t pick the “molest your children” idea instead.

99 down. One to go…

There are many things you can do in comics that you can’t really do in other media. But there are also many things you can do in other media that don’t really work in comics.

Which is why it would be pretty interesting to create a comic where the plot really plays on these things.

For example: Comics don’t have sound. What if you create a comic where one of the things the heroes talk about all the time is how the villain has such a squeaky, silly voice? And everybody makes fun of him for his voice? Or you have a sequence where the hero is navigating through the dark and has to identify a nearby voice to be able to proceed?¹

Or, let’s say that you make a black-and-white comic, and you have a sequence where the characters being able to tell colors apart is really important.²

By doing something like this, you have created something your characters know about, but that the reader has no knowledge of. He knows that the voice is sounding very familiar, but he hasn’t heard it, so he’s left in the dark when it comes to recognizing it. Or he can watch the characters laugh at the knight in pink armor, but he can’t see that it’s pink, so he can’t really laugh himself.

There are tons of ways to do this, but I think that if it’s done right, it could be pretty amazing.

98 down. Two to go.

1. Okay, I know that the amazing Tore Strand Olsen already made an Ørn Bjørn & Jørn page which played on this. [back]
2. I actually did this for humor once: The characters were headed for “The Blue Gate”, and they came to a magnificent looming gateway. The one who hasn’t been there before heads towards the gate. “Where are you going?” the other one asks. “Isn’t this The Blue Gate?” “Don’t be silly, that one’s not even blue! We’re headed towards that [much less impressive] door over there!” [back]

I bet that every adaptation in the world has angry fanboys whining that the adaptation sucks.

I remember seeing the first Harry Potter movie, thinking “Wow, they really managed to cram most of the book into this movie”. Then I talked to a big Harry Potter fan who was really upset with the things they had omitted. I was baffled, as I didn’t feel those things were terribly important (like, cutting down the number of tests they had to pass on the way to the stone). She was a much bigger Harry Potter fan than I was, though. Likewise, I have never read The Lord of the Rings, but I’ve seen enough of the Internet to know that many people find it horrible that the movies didn’t include Tom Bombadil.

Hey, it’s a different medium. To turn any book into a movie, you have to change something. And one of the rules for a successful Hollywood movie is that it can’t be seventeen hours long. The same thing goes for turning it into comics or any other medium, of course: Adaptation is not just a translation from one medium to another, the content has to change to adapt to the new medium.

But still, that made me wonder… Would it be possible to create an adaptation of a known work where you omit something really important – on purpose?

Take a fictional work, a book or a movie perhaps, and create a comic book version of it. But in the process, omit something you know the fans will really miss because it’s very important.

For example, imagine a comic retelling the story of Star Wars, pretending to be true to the original work, but omitting the character of Darth Vader.

Or a comic retelling the story of the Harry Potter books, pretending to be true to the original work, but omitting every single reference to magic.

Or a comic retelling the story of the Bible, pretending to be true to the original book, but omitting God and every single reference to a God.

I think the result could be interesting. If you don’t want too many fights with copyright lawyers, you should probably pick an original work so old it’s in the public domain, of course.

Bonus points for pretending to be a true adaptation to the original (“of course, I couldn’t include everything, I had to leave some parts out to actually be able to turn it into a comic”) when advertising this comic to the original work’s core fanbase. Or wait, is that what they call “trolling”?

97 down, three to go. Not much further now…

Here’s a fun idea to create new characters. I would suggest that you need three people to do this, but I guess you could also do it with four to six people.

First, each of you draw a rough sketch of a new character. The sketch should be a visual representation of the character. No brainstorming at all – you draw one character each, without meddling with how the other people’s characters look at all.

Now, assuming you’re sitting in a circle, pass the sheet to the person sitting on your right. That person should now come up with a name for the character. Done that? Good. You now have three (or four to six) characters with designs and names.

But you don’t know anything about them yet. That’s the next step.

Pass the sheet on to the person on your right again. He or she now has to come up with one character trait for this character. For example, “lawful good” or “easily embarassed” or “talented musician” or “very religious” or “vegetarian”. Don’t pick this out of thin air, it should be something you feel is appropriate for the character you’re giving it to – but being creative is okay.

Now, pass the sheet on again, and the next person should now come up with a second character trait for the character. You’re not allowed to use a character trait that is impossible in combination with the first character trait – for example, if the first trait is “good”, you can’t say “evil”. But you can say “kleptomaniac.” You also can’t go against the character sketch – if it shows a skinny girl, you can’t say “fat” – but you can say “chocoholic”.

Pass the sheet on again, and repeat until each character has five or six character traits. You now have three (or four to six) characters you can introduce in your webcomic – or, if you prefer, clash them all together to create a new webcomic. Share brotherly with the two (or three to five) other people you’re creating them with, of course.

I think that this could be a pretty interesting way to develop characters, and assuming I manage to get a couple of people together I will probably try this once.

96 down, 4 to go. That’s FOUR to go.