Still More Rejected Narbonic Plots

SPOILERS: I couldn’t use the “Sensitivity” storyline because the exact functioning of Dave’s brain ended up being enormously important to the larger story arc of Narbonic. There’s a lot of stuff I wrote early on that had to be jettisoned in service to the plot.

At one point I loved both of these storylines a bunch. They say in writing you have to kill your darlings. These are a couple of dead darlings.

13 thoughts on “Still More Rejected Narbonic Plots

  1. I drew a cartoon of a bunch of robots holding signs protesting the increase of automation.  I couldn’t decide whether these were robots that had been rented by striking humans to do their protesting for them, or if it was the robots themselves that were protesting because of the increased competition from new robots, but I decided it worked either way.

    • Oh, yes, definitely, nyao! Shaenon, bring back Narbonic so we can see some of these rejected plots rewritten and used! Please, nyao!

  2. Dave looks so haggard wearing those electrodes – as if awakened to never-before-experienced sorrows of the heart.

  3. Oh, my goodness! That last panel in booth babes – the one with the spectators – is JUST AWESOME!!!!!

  4. (TUNE: “Take The ‘A’ Train”, Duke Ellington Orchestra)

    Am-pli-fy your right brain!
    Soon … sensitive sensations you’ll be thinking!
    You … might feel a slight pain,
    As … electricity your brain is drinking!
    Listen to how smart you’ve gotten …
    “Lethal Weapon IV was rotten!”
    So when … you boost your right brain,
    Then … you can sit through “Beaches” without blinking!

  5. I can Dave with a new shirt, half flannel, half something in natural fibers from Patagonia. 

    • Since when has English bothered to uphold a separation? In a particular sentence a word might be definitely a noun or definitely a verb, but in the full language corpus “both, and then some” seems the typical classification of a word.

      However in this sentence I don’t think ‘Dave’ is a verb. Rather, ‘can’ isn’t auxiliary.

  6. @Ed We could certainly use it as such with minimal trouble. “Somebody Dave’d all over Conference Room 3.”

    Think Gallagher as a verb, but with more scorched electronics.

  7. @ Sean & Diane: Well, I Dave’d my laptop a couple of weeks ago and couldn’t MacGyver it back together, so now I have to use my iPad to read this comic.

  8. On the other hand, when you have a fanbase of geeks who accept narrative dodges like parallel universes and “imaginary stories,” you can go ahead and resurrect your darlings as out-of-continuity side-stories after the fact, should you ever feel moved to do so.  🙂

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