#developmenthell

This part of my story takes place much earlier than my previous blog post, but makes sense as this is the story of my current web comic Ice Cream Truck of Doom. 

Ice Cream Truck of Doom is actually Hawk and Flo’s first ever story that I wrote, it’s in fact so old that when I first had the idea for the script it wasn’t an Ice Cream Truck. It was a sweet shop and the title of the story was ‘The Sweet Shop Invasion’. The Plot of the very very first draft was a young boy saw some freaky happenings at his local candy store, so he goes out at midnight and decides to go investigate it. The concept of really strange really cool trippy things happening in the store was great and much of it remains unchanged in Ice Cream Truck of Doom itself. The Scene where the Burgers attack Hawk and Flo was in the very first draft of the story and the concept of the villain being a murderer with food monsters was established early on as well. It just had 1 quite crippling problem.  The main character was as dull as dish water.

No matter how hard I tried with Miles Knightley the story just wasn’t working, his reactions weren’t fun or relatable enough. Nor was he very interesting as a character so I decided to just replace him with anything I could think up. In the school Library I wrote a short comedy sketch called Birthday cake which took place on a mysterious abandoned Island. The script featured a brother and a sister that were stranded in the middle of nowhere but wanted to bake a cake for their friend who was a shaman. The Birthday cake script was great and not wanting to waste Sweet Shop Invasion I transplanted the two lead characters from Birthday cake into the Sweet Shop script and it’s how Hawk and Flo Adventures as we know it today was born.

It get’s even crazier, originally Hawk and Flo weren’t birds and at the beginning they didn’t even have names they were originally Humans. Yes you read that right Hawk and Flo were originally Humans in a completely different story. It’s part of why getting a first episode made was such an absolute and complete nightmare from a narrative perspective because there wasn’t one. It took Hawk and Flo 15 years before a first episode (Last Space Wizard) was finally made. In those years Hawk and Flo didn’t have a back story, which no doubt everyone and their pet goldfish turned round and told me ‘comic books have back stories they have to have backstories, they have to have origins blah blah blah’. So It’s the main reason it took so long, Ironically every episode of what would have been the first season of the show was written and in many cases drawn before the first one to start it all off finally got off the ground. 

Development Hell, by Joe Luna A new 25-part poem published by Hi Zero, with illustrations by Martin Steuck. Designed and typeset by Ian Heames. Printed on Risograph by Earthbound Press. 36pp saddle-stitched on Munken Lynx paper in black, red, and aqua blue inks. Published November, 2020. 

£10 UK + EU incl. p+p £12 ROW incl. p+p Paypal using the link: paypal.me/hizerohell or the e-mail address: [email protected]

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