Rummaging around my hard disk, I came upon these notes from a brainstorming session circa 2002. Reading them cracked me up, so I thought you folks might get a snicker, chortle, or possibly even a muffled guffaw out of them, too.

Mise en scène: The ex and I were probably sitting either in a coffee shop at the Suncoast Hotel in the middle of the night, or under the spritzers at the Starbucks next to the Borders on Rainbow Blvd., on a scorching Vegas afternoon. I would have been blathering non-stop. She would have been typing like a madwoman on the fold-up keyboard of her Palm Pilot and, when the spirit moved her, tossing ideas of her own into the mix. (She was highly creative and very witty in her own right. I can’t pinpoint her contributions to this session, but the “tuna” line and the one about the rock band sound a lot like her.)

The material is, of course, both unstructured and uncensored. That’s the point of a brainstorming session, to let ideas flow free and unrestrained. Critique comes later.

One other thing you need to know before you read further: At the time, I had just finished up the *Howard the Duck* Limited Series for Marvel Max, and Marvel had offered me another assignment — scripting the book that would eventually be published as *Marville*. I turned it down because I wasn’t prepared to participate in the character assassination of someone I’d known for thirty years and whom I value as a personal friend.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve yet to be offered another assignment by Marvel.

That said, here are the notes:

• “The High Life” — about lowlifes. Alt. title: “High Rollers”. Haunted money. Haunted casinos, gambling tables, etc.
• Soul-eating whorehouse on wheels called the Suck-You Bus.
• “upwardly mobile vampires”
• Sexual terrorists — something to do with kidnapping fundamentalists and corrupting them? bumper sticker: Jesus Is Coming. Subversive Muslim rock band —
  Quran Quran, “Girls on Camels”
• S&M aliens
• Allah does not forbid tuna.
• Miniseries or GN titled “Smallpond”. Story about 2 captains of a dead industry fighting for the last microgram of the industry’s market share. Blood feud. Franchise blacksmith shops, last two manufacturers of 8-track tapes. 2 companies are both subsidiaries of much larger companies that don’t realize the small companies still exist. They service a market that consists of 11 specialty stores, all serviced by one distributor. Distributor has just discovered CDs. Problem with these two companies is that they are staffed entirely by strange little fat boys with beards who only understand 8-track technology and think CDs and cassettes are a passing fad. Not only that, there’s recently been 70’s retro movie released that made $114 million its first weekend and both companies believe that this is a sign that the public is really interested in 8-tracks — they just need to get the word out. One manufacturer, the young upstart, has recently withdrawn from the RIAA and decided to pursue his own standard of recording. The other manufacturer perceives this as a potentially lethal threat to its catalog of Journey and Air Supply and Kansas 8-tracks. In an effort to wipe out the competition once and for all, the young upstart manufacturer decides to unleash a hot new album, available only on 8-track, entitled “MyCompetitorSucksville”. The more established company lashes back with a new album called “Our Second Oldest Act Strikes Back (If It Isn’t Dead).” To the horror of the young upstart, the OSOA album outsells every new release that month. So the upstart decides there’s only one thing left to do — kill the older captain. Meanwhile, 99.9% of the population of the universe doesn’t care.
• Alternative ideas, also called Smallpond: Two gangs of bloodthirsty guppies locked in a life or death battle over a small swatch of plankton on the surface of Farmer Brown’s fish pond. Knife fights, chain fights, swim-by shootings. The pond is awash in blood. Which side will triumph? Ending: Farmer Brown paves over the pond and puts up a strip mall.
• New romance series: Israeli/Palestinian Heartthrobs. Hamas discovers to its horror that Palestinian boys are blowing themselves up over failed romances with nice Jewish girls.
• Dick the Dead Horse — keeps appearing in inappropriate places, and people try uselessly to get rid of him by beating him.
• Rose Hips, Health Food Hooker — hangs around outside health food stores and exchanges blowjobs for vitamins. For a bottle of essential amino acids, she’ll go around the world.

And you thought all the fun this week was in San Diego.

[‘New Comics Ideas – 2002’ is Copyright © 2006 Steve Gerber. All rights reserved. Because you just never know…]

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