TV has been running multiple reruns of
every Star Trek show produced for the past few weeks now. Last night while watching some episode or
other of Voyager I got an idea for another ‘cat in the box’ adventure. Usually I use the two ‘mad scientist’
characters for this but there’ve been a few times in the past where it was only
one cat to the box and I’d give them different markings. Such as when Marcus got stuck inside one and
was Origami Cat till the box was tipped over and he got loose. Or the big, fairly fatal pretend Kayak
Adventure one of them took. Or the Dr.
Who aficionado in his ‘too small’ box.
This idea covered 4 strips before I
was done, all sketched in during the one hour episode I was casually
watching. I fudged ‘official’ comic
strip writing rules where it’s sort of an unwritten law that the text need to
be less than 25 words per panel, and
just filled each panel in with as much as I could fit.
One cat was in the box, the other was
making comments from the side as the first focused on doing his space adventure. I used ALL the tropes/clichés known to
Science Fiction. Well, as many of them
that I could fit in that is. Even with 4
strips that’s 16 panels chock full.
The cat outside being more of a non-sf
fan pointing out all the problems as the first cat has himself a space
adventure, ending in a warp core breach where you eject the core. Turns out the core was a roll of toilet
paper.
Don’t get me wrong, I love SF, but
after some 40+ years of Star Trek, All the Star Wars, All the other sf movies ever made that I saw
in the theater and as TV movies, you HAVE to admit that much of it is formula
now and it’s very, very difficult to come up with something truly original
anymore.
Which was half the fun of MAKING FUN
OF IT with two little cats in a comic strip. J
