The Immortal Man… is Dead

For many, many years I wrote (and pixeled, and drew) a webcomic, CVRPG. It’s a comic that started as a lark, and then went on to be my most expansive, and longest running, project. It spanned 19 years and 8,000 comics, and what just a ridiculous undertaking that, had I realized how much work went into it when I first started making the comic I might have gone, “you know what? I’m sure I have other things to spend my time on.” Not that I hated doing the comic. It was great fun and I improved my writing and drawing skills over the course of its time. Just… man. That’s a lot of time invested.

Still, once you get the bug for making a webcomic it’s only natural to continue on in the genre once one project ends. Most comics don’t get to 19 years. Hell, most don’t make it past a single year. But those that do tend to have follow-up projects, spin-offs, related works, and more. My comic was going to follow the same route, and I had the perfect idea, I thought, all lined up to take the crown from CVRPG once that comic ended: The Immortal Teddy Roosevelt, a time travel adventure featuring the 26th President of the United States.

The premise was both simple and incredibly ridiculous. After defeating Death (quite literally, punching the Grim Reaper in the face after losing a game of Chess), Teddy rises from his deathbed with renewed vigor, ready to find a new challenge to defeat (with his fists and manly bravado). He teams up with Nikola Tesla, who has just invented the first time-traveling stage coach, and together with Teddy’s “manservant”, a brown bear named Scout (who is actually possessed by the soul of Rasputin), they set up shop in the hollowed out head of Teddy Roosevelt on Mt. Rushmore and use it as a base of operations to travel through time and fight time crimes.

You know, as you do. I didn’t say this was going to be a realistic depiction of the president, just a fun one.

CVRPG ended in April of 2022 and the plan, originally, was to start the next comic up a couple of months later. It has now been two years and one month and, I will point out, The Immortal Teddy Roosevelt has yet to start. I have a little bit of art I drew up for it, and I bought the domain name to use for the site, but actually committing true pen to paper (digitally speaking) and making the webcomic itself hasn’t happened. And, as of right now, it still isn’t happening. For me, at this point, the project was a non-starter.

There are a few reasons this happened and, I figured, for anyone that read through CVRPG and was wondering where Teddy went, I at least owed an explanation after teasing the comic was coming. The first, and easiest, explanation was writer’s block. While I came up with the wholly ridiculous idea one random afternoon, the actual story for the comic never came to me. I know I wanted to make Edison the rival to the time traveling team, but I didn’t ever get farther than that. What Edison’s goal was, if he was the true villain, if there was something else going on, none of these questions ever got answers. I need to know those kinds of things before I can write a story and, all these months later, I still don’t have answers.

When I write a story I come at it with two specific things I need to know: how the opening scene will play out and what the ending will be. While I don’t like to plan out my endings in too much detail, because I know that as characters are developed and plotlines evolve, things can change, I still need to know the “goal” of the story. Who is going to do what, how are they going to accomplish this, and what is the meaning of it all? You have to have a semblance of an idea for the story’s destination so that you can arrive near there properly. For CVRPG, for example, I knew the heroes would fight the Elder God (a Cthulu-like beast) and then get a message that Dracula was off somewhere so they could fight him. That was the ending I wanted and while the journey took a lot of unexpected twists and turns, I did eventually arrive at that scenario. Right now, Teddy and friends have no end-goal, so while I know what the opening scene would be (Teddy punching Death) I don’t have an ending.

I probably still would have been motivated to work on it except there was another factor complicating things: my writing partner on the project, Josh (who was also a host on the podcast for a while), wasn’t able to come up with stories. He’s a history buff and I’m not, so while I could come up with crazy ideas (see the whole concept of the comic above) I wasn’t really the right person to write anything anywhere near close to historically accurate. Time travel, even a ridiculously devised version, should have at least some historic fact in it to sell what’s going on. Josh would have been great for that, and since he’s a writer, too, he could have done some of the scripting work. But that didn’t happen.

Thing was, he was excited for the story ideas as well, and when we first started discussing the comic he immediately asked to join the team for it. Thus, in my head, it was a shared project and when one half of the crew wasn’t able to work on it, the whole thing kind of lost its luster. CVRPG didn’t have that because I devised it on a long car ride with my sibling, Meb, and even though I was the creative lead on the comic, we’d talked out so many details (at least for the first full arc of the story) that I felt assured I could carry it on. I never felt that even footing with The Immortal Teddy Roosevelt.

It’s a pity because I do think, in the right hands, the comic could be brilliant. I keep mulling it over, trying to come up with a way to unlock the story and get the comic moving, but still, two years later, it hasn’t come to me. I hate when I have a good idea and I can’t write it down somehow because then it lingers in my brain and won’t go away. I’m hoping that just writing this here will help to clear it out, or get my creative juices flowing on it. Either would be fine. I just want it to go, one way or another.

But for now, the project is dead. I’ll keep the domain name for it, and all the art I doodled, but until the story unlocks itself for me progress won’t be made (and I’m not expecting that to happen, at least not anytime soon). For those waiting for my next comic project, I don’t know if I have another in me. CVRPG might have been it but considering how well that went, and for how long it lasted, I feel okay with that. I left my mark and, right now, I feel like that was good enough.