WHOA. Original written content on my Tumblr blog? Yeah, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? But I thought I’d share with you guys something about the stuff I’m doing now.

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Someone during my university years once described to me how Waterworld was likely to have been Kevin Costner’s dream concept—the one movie he had to make. The movie had massive budget issues and developmental setbacks, but Costner just had to finish it! Unfortunately, when you ask me about my thoughts on the film, I tend to find it boring and silly with a poor execution on the world-building in the narrative. The most interesting elements I find in the film are the characters, but they all seem too silly or out-of-place because of the lack of quality story elements surrounding them. When you think about it, it’s really too bad that it was how it turned out.

“What does this have to do with me,” you may be asking.

Near the end of my years at UWaterloo, I was planning to start a cyberpunk webcomic called Deathblossom: Twins With a Dark Past; you can read the prologue pitch that I wrote for it years ago here. The idea was easy to grasp; it’s a revenge story set in a cyberpunk and PMC-run Toronto, starring test-tube fraternal twins that were made to be super-soldiers but have been on the run since childhood. In other words, it would be my tribute to all things John Woo and urban science fiction. It’s sounds wacky and fun enough to work, doesn’t it?

This concept has been in my head since high school, so I think it’s fair to say that Deathblossom is my dream concept. Unfortunately, over the years I hit a few snags narrative-wise. I came up with all the pivotal moments in the story—all the keyframes, if you will—but I had no way to tie them all together. Also, I started to like the secondary characters more than the main characters to the point where I did a better job writing side-stories for the comic instead of the actual comic itself. In fact, I realized late in the game that I still didn’t really have a voice for either of the twins. I had archetypes but no real individual personalities.

It started to remind me, in one way or another, of Waterworld. Because of that, I’ve had some faulty starts with writing this comic and posting it online.

A few years later, I wrote and drew the first few pages of “Little Motel”, which later became the first chapter of Maddy McGee, P.I. I’m a fan of the 1950s era, particularly the noir genre that developed out of it, and it almost surprised me how much I enjoy writing under that genre. I like writing characters, interaction, and dialogue, so I guess I should’ve seen it as a no-brainer to write a story like Maddy. Of course, I couldn’t steer away from the science-fiction element so easily, so that’s in the mix too. Apparently I was doing something right with the comic, having people that I know and have met  that genuinely like it after reading the pages.

I almost hit a snag again with Maddy story-wise, but Britt saved that! Not to flatter her or anything, but when you ask someone to guest-write for a chapter one day, and on the next day that person also suggests a really cool set of plot devices for other chapters, you just don’t walk away from that. It’s also fun to have someone to bounce ideas off of and have that done to you as well.

So what does this mean for the future of Deathblossom? That’s a simple answer: I start from scratch and have Britt as co-writer from the start! We’ve already tossed around a few ideas back and forth, and once we hit a certain amount of comics with Maddy, we’ll be ready to make Deathblossom happen.

In the end, Deathblossom may not be the original dream concept I once thought up. But hey—

…at least it won’t be Waterworld.

TL;DR – I bash Waterworld, I call Deathblossom my own Waterworld, Maddy fortunately did not become Waterworld, Britt is helping with Maddy (and in the future Deathblossom) by not turning it into Waterworld.