Ben Paddon

Category: Jump Leads

  • Jumping Ahead

    I will confess to you – about a year ago, I began to lose interest in writing Jump Leads. I was having severe difficulties coming up with stories that interested me. That’s the most important thing at the end of the day, and if I’m not satisfied with a story why the Hell will anyone else be? Dozens of scripts were started, dozens of scripts were shelved.

    A few months later, I hit upon a way of revitalizing my interest in the story by giving Meaney and Llewellyn some direction. I won’t spoil anything for you, but over the last few months Eugene, Euan, Andrew, Paul and I have been working on the direction the comic is going to take, and in doing so we’ve actually scrapped about two years’ worth of future scripts, finished or otherwise, to make these changes.

    We have a story arc, spreading out over about six issues in total. We’ve more or less got an idea of where it’s heading although we still need to join the dots. What’s more, I know where it’s going once that arc is finished.

    It’s a remarkable feeling, knowing where your story is going. I must confess that when Jump Leads first started I had only the vaguest of ideas of what I wanted to do with it. The concept has a formula and a loose structure but it’s difficult to write for, and now we’ve worked together on giving it something to work towards I feel completely revitalized. These are decisions I wouldn’t have made a or two ago, but as I become more confident in myself as a writer I feel more prepared to take risks, and more capable of pulling them off successfully.

    Gentlemen, to the future. …Oh, you don’t have glasses. Well, just pretend.

  • An Interesting Problem To Have

    Example of a "Deleted Panel" from Issue #3I’ve nearly finished putting together Jump Leads Vol.2: Looking For Hub In All The Wrong Places (keep in mind that title may change before the book is published in the new year), and I’ve come across a rather interesting problem to have – I have too much stuff to put in the book. Issues #3, #4 and #5 are going in without a problem, but JjAR has sent me a lot of additional material – about twice as much as was in the first book – and I’m wondering if I can fit it all in without upping the cost of the book.

    One particularly interesting inclusion is what he calls “deleted panels”:

    Sometimes I draw something that I dont really like in the end. In that case I just take another paper and draw everything (ok, not everything, just a bad part) one more time. Sometimes It’s just a not so good sketch, sometimes it’s a bad single panel, but sometimes it may be even a half of a page.

    He sent me three deleted panels, and I’m struggling with whether to include them or not. If I doinclude them, how do I go about doing it? So I just include the unused panel? Do I include the entire page? If I include the entire page how do I position it on the… on the page? There are three of them, after all.

    One possibility is to not include them in the book, but have the book include a link to a webpage where they can be viewed. Some books provide web-content exclusively available “via” the book. I know this because I have a couple of books with URLs in them that I can’t be bothered to visit. Is it worth it, I wonder?

  • Search for a Star

    I was looking at the analytics statistics for Jump Leads, and I discover that rather a few people have found the site by searching for “british comedy sci fi” (oddly enough, most of these searches seem to be coming from Google UK). Out of curiosity, I thought I’d find out where we stand on Google’s search results.

    The results are… well, see for yourself:

    Google UK results for "british comedy sci fi"

    I have to say, I’m rather proud of this. Which is, I will admit, rather silly. But there we are.

  • Jump Leads #1 “Training Day” script added to my portfolio

    Today I added the script for Jump Leads #1: Training Day to my portfolio. It’s not a great example of my work – the stage direction is overly descriptive, for one. This was always true of the script, even when I submitted it to the BBC back in 2006, however I wanted to put it up mostly for comparison as within the next few days I’ll be posting a revised, “clean” version of the script that I intend to use as part of a television pitch later in the year.

  • San Diego Comic-Con 2009

    I’ll be at the SoulGeek booth, which is booth #2517. We’re right by the Bongo booth (responsible for Simpsons Comics and Futurama Comics) and the Dark Horse booth (responsible for… well, tons of cool stuff).

    I’ll be sharing not just with SoulGeek founder and voice actor Dino Andrade (who webcomic aficionados will know as the voice of Skull the Troll in PVP: The Series). Joining us at the SoulGeek booth will be none other than star of not one but two Battlestar Galacticas –Richard Hatch! He’ll be right there sat next to me. Which will be weird.

    We may also end up being joined by Crispin Freeman, a voice actor who has made use of his talents in Hellsing, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Naruto. Which is pretty damned awesome.

    Michelle will also be wandering around at Comic-Con this year, so you’e got an opportunity to meet both of the writers of Boomer’s Day Off! What more could you ask for?

  • Ben’s Boomer’s Day Off FAQ

    I’ve been getting asked a lot of questions about Boomer’s Day Off lately. Has there been a resurgance in its popularity? I’ve no idea. Anyway, I tend to get asked the same questions over and over, and I’m going to go ahead and answer them here as best I can before I climb into bed.

    Will there be any more episodes?

    Honestly, I don’t know. Michelle seems to want to do another one, and I’d love to do one if we can come up with an idea that actually furthers the story of these characters. There’s a lot standing in the way of us doing another episode, though – it all depends on whether the cast want to do it. It’s a huge ordeal getting everybody together, getting the make-up ready and so forth.

    What would the fifth episode be about?

    We have’t yet hammered out a concrete idea. Michelle had some rough ideas. She reads the comments on YouTube and the feedback we get through Steam, and where possible she tries to give little nods to stuff the fans want. One of the things people really wanted to see was Frank the Tank, and she spent some time last month looking into how we could do that. I’m perhaps a little bit more skeptical as to whether or not we could pull off a Tank on our limited budget, but anything is possible.

    Can you give me Tim’s/Michelle’s/Ben Dunn’s contact details? He/she is so awesome.

    No. Sorry. Michelle and I made our Steam handles available on the videos, and our email addresses are both publicly available, but that’s about it. I’m not going to give you Ben Dunn’s address or Tim’s phone number. (Yes, people have asked. Creepy, creepy people.)

    Are you going to boycott Left 4 Dead 2?

    No bloody way. You know how utterly ridiculous the entire boycott is? People are complaining about how the game hasn’t had any serious content added to it, but you know what? We got an entirely new gameplay mode and a map to play it on. For free. We’ve had hundreds of hours of entertainment from a game that cost us $50. Compare that to some games, which offer only six or seven hours of gameplay for $40-60. Some people claim that the development of a sequel shows that Valve had no faith in the original, but they started development of L4D2 almost immediately after they finished development of L4D. You don’t jump straight into developing the sequel if you think the game isn’t going to sell in the first place.

    Left 4 Dead continues to be an utterly fantastic experience and in all honesty I don’t expect the sequel to be any less.

    Are Tim and Michelle a couple?

    Nope!

    Are you and Michelle a couple?

    Nope!

    Are you and Tim a couple?

    Nope! I just let him jump on me sometimes.

    What else are you working on?

    Kill9 have a few projects in store for later in the year, and I’m not going to be involved in writing any of those. Kill9 will be doing a musical, and I’m considering auditioning for that, but I’m not sure my voice is quite up to par. We’ll see.

    As for me, I continue to roll on with Jump Leads (we’ll be at Comic-Con this year, more details to come shortly) and But, Sir…, and today I launched a new podcast called Ben Paddon’s Feeble Excuse wherein I interview people I want to talk to just for the Hell of it. PodWarp 1999 is more or less done but we may be doing a reunion special in the near future. And I’ve started drawing again, so there’s a chance I may launch a second webcomic – one I’ll be drawing myself.

    I think that pretty much covers every question I’ve been asked so far. I’ll update this list as time goes by, assuming anyone asks me anything that isn’t “wen r u doin part 5????”

  • Jump Leads Posters!

    This is a glorious day for wall decor enthusiasts everywhere.

  • Beaten To The Finish Line

    Because Science Fiction is, as Kris Straub describes it in the foreword to Jump Leads Volume 1, a “thousand-limbed, vein-husked blood sac, its million hearts pumping away,” it’s all too easy to come up with an idea that someone else has already thought of. There is simply far too much scifi out there for one man to reasonably sit down and process all by himself and no matter how hard you try to avoid it you will invariably wind up doing something that’s already been done before.

    Interestingly enough, however, I’ve experienced this in the reverse. There have so far been two occasions where I’ve come up with an idea for Jump Leads that has later been developed somewhere else – Doctor Who, one of the shows that inspired Jump Leads’ creation in the first place…

    The original draft of Issue #2, “It Came From Space!“, was originally a lot more… well, boring. The Flurry arrives on a dilapidated space station. The power is failing, the hull is buckling, and to make matters worse the entire station is beginning a slow descent into a sun. The episode revolved entirely around Meaney deciding he’s capable of saving the station, coordinating with the crew (Anderson, Lloyd and Tudyk) to try and save it. They fail, and the station plummets into the sun only to discover that it’s not a sun at all – it’s a wormhole.

    I didn’t enjoy writing this version of the story, to be honest. The threat didn’t seem tangible enough to work and the ending was lazy and uninteresting. So, at the end of 2006, I scrapped this version (originally called “Pressure Cooker”, and later “Here Comes The Sun”) and began working on what would become the story as you’ve (hopefully) read it. Six months later, the BBC airs an episode of Doctor Who called “42“, in which the TARDIS arrives on a spaceship which is making a slow descent into a sun. Also of interest is the film “Sunshine“, which came out the same year.

    There was another Jump Leads story which I started writing in 2007 but later abandoned (although I like the idea, so I may come back to it). Meaney and Llewellyn arrive at the Library, a Lead facility containing books from every corner of the Multiverse. If a book existed somewhere in the infinite span of reality, it could be found there (rather like the Discworld’s L-Space, only much more physical). Strangely, despite the gargantuan size of the Library, it’s suspiciously empty. The facility has been long-abandoned, and is now home to a race of jaguar/gorilla hybrid creatures who prey upon whatever they can find there.

    It was an interesting idea but I felt that I’d already done the “running away from a monster” idea in ICFS!, and what’s more I’d done it better than I planned to here. Just as well really, because the idea of a ruddy great big library infested with strange, carnivorous creatures would pop up in the brilliant Doctor Who series four two-parter, “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead“. It was much better-executed, too. Gotta love Steven Moffat.

    This sort of thing happens in scifi all the time. Any number of scifi serials have done the “mysterious clone of principle character” storyline, for instance, with recent webcomic examples being Starslip and Good Ship Chronicles. It just goes to show you that no matter how great you think your idea is, someone has likely already beaten you to it.