After three Tuesdays' worth of prevarication and history lessons, we finally reach the point in the story where Fort Paradox as we know it began to exist - Fort Paradox Backstage: The Fateful 22nd of July 2010.

I'd had Tim and Sarah staying at my place for about a week, and we'd had one or two too many late, sugar-fuelled nights full of Lego, fictional planets and stuff, and sometime during the evening of the 22nd of July, we decided it was time to do something about the long-gestating notion of a cross-continuity webcomic.  Having listed which characters we wanted to use (see last week's bit of paper), we pulled out an A3 sheet and started jotting down script ideas for the first few episodes.

The resulting document more or less covers Episodes 1 to 7, along with quick notes which got fleshed out to form Episodes 8, 11, 15 and 17.  As you can see, Episodes 2 and 3 were originally going to be one long wordy strip, and Episodes 5 and 6 were originally planned in reverse order.  Other points of interest include a slightly more complex version of the FP logo, a subplot with the snails being antagonistic to Cylinder (which got cut) in Episode 2, another out-of-character moment for Forkley in the draft of Episode 6, a stylistic variation on the snails which never ended up getting used in the finished strips, and a random bit of corridor.

The lower-right corner has been blurred out because it contains a preliminary sketch for an episode which we still haven't used after 16 months and 100 finished strips, but we still think it could come into the plot sometime, so we didn't want to spoil the surprise.

Fort Paradox: the First Scripts

Then we started drawing - I got all digital and made Episode 1, while Tim and Sarah took a pencil each and drew Episodes 2 and 8 respectively - although we didn't finish the first strips until the small hours of the next morning, hence FP's official birthday being on the 23rd of July instead of the 22nd.  And it's gone from there...