Episode 91 - last post before Christmas

Script by MGHC & TMJ --- Artwork by BASC

That time of year again.  Christmas does have a habit of disrupting our webcomic posting schedules, and this year is no exception.  Since Alien President and Sidewards both finished over the summer, we've now only got three webcomics still going, and they're all taking a break during the festivities:

• Fort Paradox will be taking three weeks off, resuming Backstage posts on Tuesday 10 January 2012 and episodes on Friday 13.
• Brothers in Shells is already in the middle of a longish break and due back online on Monday 16 January.
• Cylinder and Miserable is going out of action for even longer, as today marked the publication of the 855th and final episode of Series 2, and the comic will take a multi-month hiatus before embarking on Series 3 sometime in the spring.

Hope you all have a happy holidays, and we'll look forward to seeing you again in January!


- The Colclough (on behalf of itself & TMJ & SRJ)

FP Backstage: The Rise and Fall of Bubble-07

It's all Matthew's fault, really. And Oney's. Allow me to explain: first things first, you'll need to watch Alpha One's Quantum Shampoo, and take special notice to the cgi title sequence, which was kindly created and animated by Matt. In order to keep track of all the different cgi elements for the sequence, Matt named all the bubbles, giving them the designations Bubble-01, Bubble-02, Bubble-03 etc. etc. You can see where this is going... Someone (I can't remember who) suggested that the name Bubble-07 would be a good premise for a story. I started to write a story, but got 'writer's block' two episodes in, as I'd backed myself into a bit of a hole story-wise.


So, I present, Bubble-07: All Two Episodes Of It.

Okay, it's not great, I agree with you. That's why I stopped writing it. If you're extra observant, you'll have noticed that the recording icon swapped from the left-hand side of the panel in Bubble-07, to the right-hand side of the panel in Fort Paradox. There's no great rhyme or reason, other than, in retrospect, I thought it would have looked better of the right, so I swapped it round for Fort Paradox.

There was talk of Bubble's continuity being resurrected in 2010, but it never came to anything, so when Fort Paradox was being developed, we decided to include Bubble in that, instead of trying to milk out a story from the ruins of the failed comic.

-TMJ (on behalf of himself, MGHC and SRJ)

Episode 90

Script by MGHC --- Artwork by SRJ

FP Backstage: One of the Interquels

It often happens on this project that we script two episodes back-to-back, but they end up getting separated as other episodes come in between.  A case in point was that Episode 25 was planned before the second half of Chapter II was sorted out, and at one point we thought it would be the 23rd strip - but then Tim came up with another idea, which led to the following piece of concept art:

Episodes 23 and 25 in draft, by Tim

We then agreed that Tim's introductory panels would work perfectly well as a separate strip (i.e. they became a new Episode 23), and the last panel would stay as a self-contained episode in its own right, briefly identified as "Episode 24".  And then, despite having begun life as a single strip, even this pair managed to get separated as Tim added what became the actual Episode 24, and decided that it should be presented in between the two window strips.

Note also the interesting interpretation of the outside of the Fort.  It's partly based off my own comments ("blah, something half-way between a starship and a mediaeval castle, blah something"), but we've since agreed that the Fort probably doesn't look like this drawing.  Not that we've worked out what it does look like, mind you...


- The Colclough (on behalf of itself & TMJ & SRJ)

Episode 89

Script by TMJ --- Artwork by MGHC