scarfman | (no subject)

If you remain a fan of the invented characters in my blue binder cartoons, the ones you were in: I had fun blogging kind of a lot about them recently at Tumblr and I decided I should reprint those entries at LiveJournal as backups.

Infinity Labs was the 90s dailies' version of Moebius Labs which was the 80s dailies' schtick that the Chicago sf comedy troupe Moebius Theater was cover for a secret outer space/alternate dimension exploration program run by sf fans. Newton Dexter, a nerdy scientific genius and the head of science at Moebius Labs, had previously appeared in dailies at the end of the 70s as Akili Tembo's dorm roommate, the year I was at Northwestern, before either character was revealed to be attached to his own secret scientific institution. You may remember some of Newton's exploits adapted to the contemporary arc of Arthur, King of Time and Space, where Elaine of Carbonek instead of being a real person was one of Arthur's college dailies' characters and ran a variation of Infinity Labs based on Arthur's college science fiction club.

In the late 80s, my dailies' Infinity Labs was found out by the government when our archenemy Professor Arthur Jamesmorey contrived to be elected to the Presidency of the United States in an alter ego. Newton Dexter and his robot wife Monica retired to the Philosopher's Club, an organization of anyone from Earth's history who was clever enough to deduce its existence, date, and location and then get to it.

Of course when I moved to a new city in the 90s and revived the dailies I had to revive the Labs too, which I did on the premise that Newton wanted to defend others from the muggle persecution that he'd suffered. Though Infinity Labs enjoyed a clandestine mutually beneficial relationship with the US government in the late 90s, after the 2000 election that went sour and Infinity Labs went undergound again. For my dailies' 25th anniversary in 2001 there was going to be a story in which all the invented characters except Aihok and Effex, including all Moreau Project "children", left Earth by means of the colonization plan Infinity Labs developed in the 90s; but by 2001 all I was drawing was internet fanfiction.

It was retronamed from Moebius Labs to Infinity Labs in the 90s because I was editing other people's intellectual property out of the dailies. The dialog in the final panel here is swiped from Diane Carey's novel The Final Frontier.

I closed the 2003-2004 online revival of the dailies' characters with one of Newton's people crashing their spaceship into the White House on CNN. The natural progression of the story was demanding that Infinity Labs go public though I had no idea where to go with that. But I was retiring dailies characters from my website because I was going to start Arthur, King of Time and Space, so this way I didn't have to figure out what happened next.