Air Raid Robertson

Author notes

Make Mine Aristophanes Page 3

Air Raid Robertson

on Feb. 29, 2012

Happy Leap Day, one and all. This marks the tenth (and final) page of Air Raid Robertson for the month of February. When you combine that with the eleven pages I did for January you will find me well on way to my goal of a hundred pages in 2012.

When I was thinking about this sequence I knew that I wanted it to be a one-page splash that had Robertson and Ridley floating through a surreal, psychadelic representation of time travel. I thought that including a giant hourglass would be a nice touch, and then I came up with the concept of having them move towards it and then away from it.

One of my earlier ideas was to have a personification of Father Time or a mystical time goddess appear in the background. I thought that this might detract from the idea of time travel, however. I considered it essential that a random person could look at this image and, knowing nothing of the previous pages, be able to infer that the two protagonists were travelling through time.

I then thought about a similar-looking splash page I drew for a story I did about a year ago. That found Robertson and Ridley walking up a series of staircases that resembled the paintings of MC Escher. That made me think of Salvador Dali, one of my favorite fine artists.

And then, of course, it felt perfectly natural to lace the background of this page with Dalian soft watches.