The Future of Human Transportation

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Notes

Like most truly great ideas, this comic started off as idle chit-chat over the phone. A few months ago a friend and I were talking about the people who park on the sidewalk at the mall even though there's plenty of parking nearby, and that, given the option, they would take their Range Rovers inside the mall itself and drive around the aisles of the Hypermarket. We talked about the rising number of five-to-ten year olds we see being carted around in prams (or strollers as some call them), and how we were never considered so delicate by our parents and had to walk around just like them (to no ill effects, I might add). My gears started turning, of course, considering the future of Human Laziness, and thus the idea of giant robot baby carriers for adults was born.

We've already seen people come up with personal transport; the Segway is probably the most famous and visible -- indeed, one mall here in Dubai uses them to transport security guards (the same mall also has a golf-cart shuttle service to take people along its length). Recently at the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show, a couple of personal transport concepts (from Suzuki and Toyota) rekindled my robot transport idea, and figured it would make a good comic.

I didn't really decide on a page count for this, figuring that perhaps like last time it would only take two pages. Indeed, had I stuck solely to the robots it may have been, but I think the other stuff about the consequences of Human Laziness are worth the extra page. I wondered if it might come out to two-and-half pages or some odd amount, but luck was on my side and it comes in at three pages even (of 8 panels each).

This time when pencilling the comic I put in more shading in the pencils themselves, but it's still rough. I coloured it in inkscape but integrated those colours with the pencils in the GIMP (instead of vector-tracing the pencils or inking them seperately). I did it on the new laptop, mostly to see how the colours translate across monitors. On my net computer's wonky monitor it looks very dark and some of the text isn't well defined. It looked fine on the laptop which, I assume, is closer to most people's experience, but if any of it doesn't look right to you please tell via a comment below.

There are a couple more comic ideas floating around my head of a similar nature (i.e. with 'me' narrating) but I don't know when that will be done. It depends on how fired up I am about them or if, like with this one, something shows up (the Tokyo Auto Show concepts) to remind me of it.

V