Today I think I will reveal a bit about the origin of the concept of Professor Saltine's Astrodynamic Dirigible.

In high school, to help cope with the boredom of a dumbed-down curriculum, Jon and I started drawing a new comic. We've drawn comics before, but this would prove to be our first collaborative effort and would turn into our largest project to date. I think Jon started it. He drew up half a page; it was some silly story about him being abducted by aliens. I took up the abandoned idea and continued it; soon we were passing it back and forth and the idea grew horribly. I think over the course of the last three years of high school we put together about 400 pages or something. Although Jon and I were there as narcassistic props, we eventually "left" the scene and let the other characters take over. Some of them (Plumbing Boy, Joe the Stick Figure and The Sums) were holdovers from previous cartooning projects. Others (the dastardly Universal Conquest Club, Flork the Snock, and Dr. Saltine) were new creations for this project.

We called it the Reticulan Fiasco. And it was a fiasco. Every single idea of the moment was mixed in with a miasma of sci-fi parodies (i like some of our "matrix" stuff the best) and current events (Dubya Boosh was an alien who got elected president. We stopped the comic before Iraq and Getmo and Abu Grahb and torture and Valarie Plane and Blackwater and Katrina and wiretapping and pretzels...there would have been so much material).

In college, I did not have as much time to cartoon, but I did do two projects. One was a Lord of the Rings parody set in the Reticulan Fiasco universe. I didn't get very far with it. The other was a reboot of RF, but with new charecters ("Ron""Pheobe""Dale") taking the main roles, with the others supporting. In this reboot, as in the previous edition, Dr. Saltine was a generic scientist type. (although he did stand in for Gandalf in my LOTR parody)

Last year, Jon and I started discussing doing another reboot of RF. It never made it off the ground. But in January of this year, Jon mentioned that he had an idea of a back story for Dr. Saltine. It involved a bunch of steampunk and time dialation stuff. I listened, but I knew right then and there that we had a new idea. Ron, Pheobe and Dale were retired from the project. Dr. Saltine became Professor Saltine. And the rest is history.