abandoned stories: Ajax and Lounger

Over the years, I have abandoned many different stories (“How to Draw Comics the Right Way” is one example). Sometimes plots get away from me, sometimes character motivation becomes unintelligible, and sometimes I just lose interest.

“Ajax” was a story idea that I had for a long time and that kept coming back and bugging me. The basic idea was that it was loosely based on the Sophocles play but set in a Masters of the Universe kind of world. It’s not the kind of story I usually do, but that attracted me as a challenge and I had a very clear concept of how the story was going to end. I’ve actually tried starting it a few times over the years. The two pages below are the most recent attempt. This time I stopped because I realized that I didn’t want to add to the fetid pile of stories about tough über-masculine warriors who are idolized by nature of their being the main characters. The ending was going to undermine that narrative somewhat, but I was going to have to tell the story straight first to get to that ending. And I just didn’t want to commit the time to that enterprise.

“Lounger” was going to be a post-apocalyptic story about a group of people surviving a mass plague. They were holing up together in a house, but the focus was going to be on a drunk who spent all his time on a lawn chair outside. The character was based a bit on Bernard from the show Black Books. While the story was pretty worked out, the limited setting was a bit boring to draw over and over. And the character conflicts that developed seemed pretty petty and superficial. On top of that, I didn’t feel that the story was going to cover any new ground that hadn’t been already better covered by the scads of post-apocalyptic stories out there. I have a special love for tales set after an apocalypse, so expect at least one from me some day. But it won’t be “Lounger.”