Welcome to Marooned Classics Week! As I mentioned I’m on vacation this week, but I’ve picked five strips from earlier Marooned days and spruced them up for a walk down memory lane this week. I only wish Marooned could be 5 days a week every week!

My choices weren’t because these were necessarily the best, but because I found something interesting to share about them. So here we go…

Marooned Classics: #10

This strip is interesting for a couple reasons. You may remember that right after John met Ugo, he was brought to this dome where Ugo claimed he lived with his brother Olaf. At the time, I had planned on using the dome as a kind of base of operations for the strip, where John could relax and banter about with Asimov and the two martians.

In fact, the 2 martians were going to be a sort of “odd couple” with Olaf being the nutty one. By the time I got to this strip, however, I was already changing my mind about that. I didn’t want to be locked to the dome, and I didn’t want the goofiness of the two Martian brothers.

Then we have one of the few sightings here of Olaf, Ugo’s supposed brother. In the original, they are slightly different colors, although now it makes sense to me that they are the same. He has this weird way of speaking, which in hindsight I don’t like so much.

On this strip I of course recolored, and added the light and shadows which gives more depth. In addition to Olaf being the same green as Ugo, the punchline has been changed. I had not yet really found my feet on writing for the strip, and the original punchline (which I cannot remember at the moment) was pretty bad, and I couldn’t leave it when I did the “strip refresh” last year. (For those who don’t know, I basically redrew and recolored the first couple months of Marooned in the middle of last year).

I needed some kind of joke that I could replace the third panel, and the only thing I could think of without totally making the strip make no sense at all was to have the whole “beauty in the eye of the beholder” switcharoo. Here the aliens think John (who is alien to them) is ugly and grotesque. And of course, Asimov might agree with them.

I still consider this strip “canon” though. The dome still does exist (Ugo recently mentioned it in regard to his solar lamp being charged there), and maybe Olaf still hangs out there. Remember it is also the access point to the Martian haven.