Unfinished Time Travel Pitch
This was, a long time ago, a pitch that I wrote up for Larry Young’s AiT/PlanetLar (We’re talking 2000, maybe? Early 2001?) that I then reworked for a Scottish webcomic site in mid-2001 (It was accepted, but the site didn’t go anywhere, as far as I remember), and then there was this reworking, which tried to restructure the thing as a three-issue regular mini-series. One day, I still want to write this, although I remember thinking that Bruce Almighty ruined the ending for me. Also, I never really came up with a good title for the whole thing.
(Also, “Jamie Couper” is such a Scottish name.)
One sentence pitch: It’s “Back To The Future” backwards.
High concept or what?
The slightly longer pitch: We’ve all been there, haven’t we? There you are, sensitive young thing dumped by your latest love and you don’t know why. Or rather, she’s told you why but it doesn’t make any sense; it’s something that you can’t quite get your head around, can’t quite solve. Your days are all full of self-loathing and “what if”s, and you live your life like a zombie, wishing you could just wipe her from your mind.
That’s what Jamie Couper is going through right now. He thought he’d found the perfect woman; she was beautiful and funny and kind and all the things that you lie awake in the middle of the night wanting in someone but never really confident enough to think you’ll actually get it. Everything had been going fine until one night, they’d been discussing their future, and she’d said that she could never settle down with someone who didn’t believe in God. So she ended it.
He feels like shit, of course. He wishes he’d never met her. And then one of his friends phones up. He’s found a time machine…
(Yeah, fuck it; it’s comics. We DO time travel around here).
A man depressed, Jamie steals the time machine and steals back in time, with the most obvious mission in the world: to stop himself from meeting the love of his life.
***
He doesn’t succeed, of course. At the heart of this, is a love story – it ends with a literal deus ex machina where, after suitably messing about with history for awhile, God himself (herself? Itself? We’ll never really see the deity itself, thereby not pissing that many people off) will pluck Jamie out of there and tell him in no uncertain terms to stop fucking around, then put him back where he came from so that he can go and tell his love that he does now believe in God and all problems are solved. It’s a cop-out, sure, but one that’ll be telegraphed far enough in advance for people not to be TOO surprised or let down by it (if they are at all; I kind of dug the divine intervention cop-out in “A Life Less Ordinary”).
The religion thing will be kept in the background for the majority of the story. We wont know WHAT faith the girlfriend has, beyond fairly-fuzzy Christian, and when God appears, it’ll be off-panel. This isn’t really a story about religion. It’s also not really a science-fiction story; the time travel element is more or less a McGuffin. A machine will be found, we don’t know where it comes from and we’ll never really find out, either. It’s not really that important. It IS a story about fucking about, though; about how free and odd it’d be if you could walk through your memories, but have complete freedom to change everything. No Star Trek “Prime Directive”s here, my friends. Old scores could be settled before they’ve started, money could be made, you could teach a young Travis a song called “Why Does It Always Rain On Me”… you could do ANYTHING. Imagine being faced with that opportunity.
Three issues of traditional 22-or so page length, breaking down more or less as:
Issue 1: Jamie fucking with the past, changing history both “willy” and indeed “nilly”. We get the back story of the time machine here, and the beginnings of what happened between he and Kate, his ex-girlfriend. Issue 2: Jamie getting down to business, only to find out that things don’t exactly go as planned… The remainder of the Kate backstory comes out, and everything seems to be relatively set-up for the big conclusion… Issue 3: Jamie meets God, and tries to convince Kate that he’s seen the light. Not that she believes him, of course.
It’s fairly lighthearted and humorous and not uncomfortable being weird, to quote Elliott Smith, very throwaway and “pop”. A dumb romp of a story, the equivalent of a cheesy romantic comedy at the cinema that you’d go and see, enjoy, but more or less forget about once it was over. The first four pages of the first issue follow on, after this… but what do you think?
