(no subject)

[scarfman]

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. This is the last one. It was composed for Tumblr Self-Insert Week.

When there was Tumblr self-insert weekend about six months ago, I drew new art of pretty much all my self-insert stories ever. There is, however, one I neglected to mention. Perhaps because describing it entails recapping nearly the entire two-plus-decades history of my pre-internet “blue binder” journal comics. Yes, it’s a biggie.

For me (as I shall refer, for simplicity’s sake, to my avatar in the cartoons), it all started in the middle 70s when I was a junior in high school and had been drawing a cartoon every school day for about six months. Glowing gateways to other universes where favorite fictions are set began appearing to me and my high school buddies. I named them “fiction-plane doors”. They appeared according to no pattern we could determine, not that we were scientific observers. Invariably they transported the traveler(s) to the home plane of (one of) the traveler(s)’s favorite set of characters: For me, commonly the Enterprise or the 4077th; for my friend Holly, Camelot or Tara (the plantation from Gone With the Wind); etc. They continued to appear to my friends and younger siblings even after I graduated high school and left Omaha.

I left Omaha to go to college in the Chicago area, where one of my dormmates was Newton Dexter, whom you may recall from previous Tumblr posts about Infinity Labs, the science fiction club that was a secret space exploration program behind which Newton was the brains*. By an astounding coincidence, at the beginning of the 80s about the same time I got involved with Infinity Labs and started watching Doctor Who, the Doctor began showing up in Chicago several times a year - though never in incarnation order - and having adventures with Infinity Labs.

After Infinity Labs’ successful first interstellar contact mission, Newton decided he wanted to build an interdimensional travel machine, so he did, which he called the Interdimensional Interface Generator or IIG. When a fellow Infinity member treated me with a surprise visit to the universe where M*A*S*H characters live just before the series finale, I casually mentioned to Newton that I used to visit there all the time when a high schooler. Driven by curiosity because an effect so like the IIG’s couldn’t possibly be the natural phenomenon my buddies and I had always assumed, Newton promptly went to visit Omaha to investigate the fiction-plane doors, staying with my friend Holly though neglecting to call ahead to ask before he showed up at her door. To make a tangential story short, Newton discovered that the fiction-plane doors were generated by a non-Infinity secret science project manned by a couple of sf fans Infinity Labs knew who worked at Fermilab. The II fields they were generating had, unknown to them, appeared for years in Omaha instead of in their western Chicago suburban lab because [element of Newton’s tangential adventure redacted], and Newton’s intervention had finally solved that problem for them. Fiction-plane doors stopped appearing in Omaha.

They were sworn to secrecy, though, so Infinity Labs didn’t know until years later that the other secret project’s head was the Doctor, in an incarnation that had not appeared on television yet on our plane. A Labs member who was a science journalist and another who was a cop both happened to be checking out his adopted identity for professional reasons one day, and ended up assisting him in defeating the plot of the Master’s which had standed him in the Chicago metropolitan area for the previous few years. The Doctor having no further use for it, the other secret lab was annexed by Infinity Labs.

The Doctor’s final adventure with the 80s incarnation of Infinity Labs, before our archenemy got it disbanded, involved the Master seizing control of the Temporal Control Room on Gallifrey and sending all thirteen of his incarnations across the fiction-planes attempting to unhappen the secret origins of the top 80s screen genre heroes. In order to run the Time Lords’ operations while they were incapacitated by the Master’s doings, the Doctor also used the Time Lords’ power to gather all thirteen of himself. However, one of the control stations was booby trapped and destroyed the first incarnation who had never yet appeared on tv on our plane, and all the incarnations after him were also unhappened. The remaining Doctors split up the Infinity Labs members present into teams like an issue of Justice League of America and sent them into the fiction-planes where the teams of Masters had gone, and the Masters were defeated. However, since the incarnation of the Doctor who had generated the fiction-plane doors had been unhappened, so had the fiction-plane doors. Everyone who had once been a Omaha fiction-plane door traveler, including me because I hadn’t been among the Labs members who had been on the mission to Gallifrey, now no longer remembered them because they now had no longer existed.

Forward about ten years to the mid-90s. Infinity Labs was now an umbrella organization monitoring all Earth’s secret space, time, and dimension exploring organizations that had sprung up in the years since the original Labs had been exposed and shut down by the U.S. government which had then tried to write it off to the public as a hoax. The Doctor** would pass by Infinity Labs HQ in Louisville now and again, and one day he stopped in because he had discovered something new about the fiction-plane doors. While the fiction-plane doors had been totally unhappened from our plane where they originated, on other fiction planes the events including myself and my buddies had not been unhappened. Younger versions of us still had always popped out of fiction-plane doors on Tatooine or in Narnia and popped back into fiction-planes doors when they were done, even though they no longer departed or arrived on their fiction-plane of origin where we, their original selves, had no longer ever gone on their adventures. It was determined that these cross-dimensional ghosts were separate beings, and each of them would be stopped from entering their final departure fiction-plane door and set up on another planet under the Labs’ new interstellar colonization program, for good measure on another fiction-plane entirely. So Infinity Labs’ first interstellar colony was populated with fifteen- to twenty-four- year-old alternate versions of me and my buddies from high school … including a version of the girl who broke my heart sophmore year, and who had tried to respark things after our college freshman year only to ultimately be rejected. The version of her in the colony was too young to know how that had turned out, though the version of me was years older than that. The colonizers were left with an IIG of their own, as a survival aid since for crying out loud they were basically high school and college students who couldn’t stay on Earth through no fault of their own and were being sent to live on an uninhabited planet in another dimension. When the Doctor found out what planet we’d put them on, he realized that eventually that colony was going to become the Time Lords.

Then one day in the late middle 90s the Doctor stopped in to visit my wife. He confessed that he was nearly as ignorant of his own history previous to the first events depicted on Doctor Who as Doctor Who viewers are. But he had calculations and readings which gave him temporal coordinates that should be the moment in time from which followed everything he was now. For reasons I don’t recall now, if any, he asked my wife to accompany him to view the events as observers only, and she agreed. They got in the TARDIS and arrived at the coordinates, and discovered me in the future in mourning at her grave.***

From there future me used the Infinity Labs IIG to go visit the Time Lords, the present Doctor and my wife following but continuing to only observe. Somehow, I had figured out that it was my fate to become the Doctor. Of course, I couldn’t keep the preknowledge of my future that my familiarity with Doctor Who presented, so inappropriate foreknowledge and any other anachronisms or paradoxes being manifested would have to be eradicated by the Time Lords’s advanced time tech before I could start; and they had no choice but to cooperate because I had shown it was a predestination paradox.

Meanwhile on the fiction-plane travelers’ colony planet, in the prehistory of the Time Lords, the younger versions of me and of that one girlfriend had grown old and had become the colony’s leaders and preeminent time scientists. Unfortunately, they had gotten along increasingly poorly as time went on, and now she was so resentful that she murdered that version of me and set out through time and space to trace me and murder me as well.

As the Doctor and my wife watched, the alternate girlfriend arrived on present-day(ish) Gallifrey (the Doctor’s past Gallifrey) and attacked me just as I was entering the Time Lords' fix-everything booth, trapping us both inside just as it started operating. Once the sparks settled down, the Time Lords found that I had become the clean slate I needed to become in order to go on to be the Doctor … and the alternate version of my high school girlfriend had become just enough of a clean slate, but still with the murderous hatred of me, to become the Master. Both of us were allowed to steal TARDISes and escape Gallifrey. The Doctor brought my wife home, their minds blown. EDIT And my wife, who through her meditation studies was an expert astral plane traveler, resolved to reincarnate into each and all the Doctor's female companions in sequence.

So to summarize: at or near what has turned out to effectively be the end of the chronicles of the “dailies”, “blue binder”, Infinity Labs universe, it is revealed not only that I am the Doctor but that I am Rassilon. Perhaps the reason my occasional attempts since then to bring that universe online have never lasted is because there’s just no way to top that.

* Originally, in my cartoons, Moebius Labs, staffed by the members of Chicago’s sf comedy troupe Moebius Theatre still in operation today. But when I started drawing my dailies again in Louisville in the 90s, I excised all others’ intellectual property from them.

** As noted in the previous footnote, when I started drawing my dailies again in Louisville in the 90s, I excised all others’ intellectual property from them. This included replacing the tv characters who appeared in my dailies with thinly-veiled parodies of themselves: the time traveler Captain X, Captain Astro of the Starship Shipstar, Captain Escargot of the Shipstar III, wacky army surgeon Dr. Tarzan Blade, etc. If you dug out the 90s blue binders with the original cartoon story being summarized here, you’d find Captain X in it instead of the Doctor. But for the present exercise I’m not bothering.

*** Perhaps I didn’t remember of this story six months ago because I wasn’t ready yet.