Once upon a time, the great and mighty Joel did place, at random points in space, two spacecraft. Eightballs is the story of the space travelers who got the tails side of the coin and do not know it. The joke is on them in that we are not going to tell them. Telling them would be the job of their creator and he has selected to keep said information from them.

Eightballs takes place on the spacecraft Octowaffle. Notice the clever title which is a play on the ship’s name. All memories of the 5 astro-nuts have been wiped. They only know what the computer tells them and the computer decides what it is going to tell them. These words which follow are the words of the creator himself.

“When you consider for a moment how much of our world view, or opinions, our so-called ‘facts,’ and everything we believe in relies on our memories, there’s really only one conclusion you can come to. We are creatures of memory. We are ruled in every thought and action by what has come before. What previous programming our brains have had access to. So when I woke up one day with an ‘Access Denied’ stamped across that portion of my brain, you may be able to get some idea of how confusing that was.”

The whole point of the slideship drive system was to get these ships lost in the middle of nowhere. We do not know the nature or the location of the second ship. The fact that there ever was a second ship is lost on the crew of the Octowaffle. As we enter the story, we are every bit as lost as everybody in the story.

This actual strip was born as an influence of “Cowboy Bebop” and Joel’s dissatisfaction with a well drawn but lackluster comic that appeared in Pariah when the two of us ran Pariah Online Magazine together. Joel wanted to produce a better comic in space and, as a very good writer, the storyline is well thought out. If you have been reading “Secrets of the Universe” for any period of time, then you know that Joel is good with story arcs. He was trying to do better than a joke-a-day strip with Eightballs.

I have always felt blessed to work with a writer having Joel’s talent. It is something that I hope to be able to do again, in the future. You will see the seeds of Joel’s future work in the plotting of this strip. His artistic skill had not yet been developed to his current level, but this strip is pure Joel C. Furches.

Please enjoy this addition to the universe of Secrets of the Universe. I will now stop writing before I start babbling and make myself look even dumber…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 1:00 am and is filed under Eightballs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.