#030 - You don’t have to beam home but you can’t stay here

Thirty strips! It’s a round number! It’s not a very big number, but at the same time it’s a pretty big number for what started as a pretty one-shot joke. I hope you’re enjoying it; I sure am!

And I think these crazy Enterprise kids have finally thrown caution to the wind and just plain started getting into the spirit of things. I’m prouder for my fake versions of fictional characters than I really probably ought to be.

Process talk! Some of these I write around a specific joke or a specific key interaction — I’d say most of strips #10-#25 in particular were from ideas already in the can when I sat down to flesh them out into actual strips — and with those I tend to not really laugh at loud while I’m making them because I already got my giggles in when I sketched out the basic idea. At the end I tend to mostly be doing a sanity check (does this joke still work? Is it actually funny? Is there a better way to get this bit of story/character done?) and running it by my wife for a fresh reaction.

But today’s is more on the improvised side (had a late night, didn’t get the strip written earlier in the day yesterday like I ought to have), and that’s a little bit nerve-wracking because it means trying to pull a rabbit from a hat, but the upside is I don’t actually see something like Troi’s “thirstier than I thought” line coming until it comes out of my keyboard, and then I get to cackle at it right then and there. That being the sort of thing that apparently makes me cackle. So! Upside to riding the damn tiger.

Do you think Geordi had this outcome in mind? Was he planning to use Quark’s nephew as bait, or did Troi surprise him as much as anybody with her announcement that she was bailing? I’m leaning toward the latter — I bet Geordi was just trying to set up a little drama on the station, maybe the arrested Ferengi wasn’t even supposed to be related to Quark or anything. Way to think on your feet, Picard! Or on your butt. They may be sitting down, it’s pretty hard to tell when you can only see them from the shoulders up. Maybe they’re lounging in some sort of space-age beanbag chairs, eating synthetic kale chips, a Zep album on in the background.