Ideas Left Behind

A number of times in the past I have got so far with my ideas for comics only to realise that I'm simply creating something I've already read. It may be a single thing or an amalgam of source ideas but once I've realised the fact then the impetus kind of goes out of it for me. I know there's no such thing as absolute originality but even so, some things are just too close to keep going with it.

One such was a story I've been sketching ideas for and writing down outlines for a while now. With a provisional title of 'What We Leave Behind', it was about an ageing man who was once writer and artist on a famous British comic strip pulp hero called 'The Soldier'. Now in a nursing home suffering from alzheimers, reality and fiction merge as he and the family around him struggle to comes to terms. His daughter had been much neglected by him as a child as he locked himself away in his studio to work through much of her childhood. A kind of icey hostility would manifest itself through both her visits to the home and through the pages of 'The Soldier'; I intended to distribute the pages of a 'Soldier' comic through the actual story where characters in the present-day and in the faux strip would interchange and react.

And then I happened to catch an episode of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective and realised I was rewriting it in comic form. I don't know why I hadn't realised it sooner but there you go. I did labour on for a while; perhaps no-one would notice; perhaps I could rework it; perhaps I should just do a pulp-style comic of 'The Soldier' and froget the rest of the story.

In the end I just felt I was no longer going anywhere with it and decided to lay it to one side as an unused idea and focus on something else. Somewhere there must be an afterlife where old and unused ideas go to live out eternity, the eternal 'what if?'. Anyway, I might as well show off the pages somewhere so here you go, the first two pages of what might have been...