I thought "Hey, I think I've got something here", so over the next few months I made some preliminary drawings and then dove right in and drew a Sunday size strip.
That seemed to go well. I tentatively named the strip "Weebles In Space", because everyone I showed it to commented that they looked like Weebles. (Weebles are a series of children's toys - "Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down"). I decided to do another one and explore the body shapes a bit further. This gag was re-used later in Series 31.
At this point I could see a problem. I had a lot of trouble depicting the characters walking. They had no legs!. They looked OK standing, but in motion the design just wasn't going to work. I flirted briefly with a full-body look:
... but I didn't like that. So I decided to put stubby little legs on them, just enough to enable me to depict motion. At that point I was ready to try an actual daily-style comic strip. The date was May 9, 1999. I know this because I didn't want to get ink on my desk, so I put a piece of the previous days newspaper down. It was the front page of The Flint Journal, containing the oddball article "Boy mimics Elmer Fudd, punished on gun charges". Ah, Flint! Anyway, I'm still using that same piece of newspaper eight years later. Crude though it may be, here it is, the first official Orbits strip:
By the way, in case you're curious - Mister Sakto was named after a 1960's Detroit childrens show character called Sergeant Sacto (on the Captain Detroit show, played by radio DJ Tom Ryan). I have no idea how Captain Fenkle's name originated, it just came to me. There was a vague feeling at the time that it came from an old Don Knotts movie, but I've never been sure. It's Gaelic and means "a bend in the road". Miss Kinderhooks name came from a sign along I-69 near the Michigan/Indiana border. I used to drive that route fairly often. I assume it's a town of some sort.
That train of thought led me think about how people two hundred years from now would think we live now. And that, believe it or not, made me think of Star Trek.
It occurred to me that many people today think of Star Trek as our most likely immediate future. Unlike most science fiction, it's a generally optimistic view, and tries to extrapolate where we're going assuming we don't majorly screw up somehow. But how accurate is that future view?
Suppose you pulled someone from the eighteenth century and let them live with you for a month, then returned them to their time. They would return with a fairly accurate view of the future. But suppose instead you took that same person and put them on the bridge of an aircraft carrier! They would return a month later with a concept of the future full of snappy uniforms, high-tech equipment, jets roaring off on exciting missions, and trained, disciplined men and women doing important jobs. Their view of the future would still be accurate, yet at the same time totally wrong because, of course, most of us don't live like that.
Given that, I concluded that the "Star Trek" view of the future must also be completely erroneous. Most people of that age can't live like that. They've never seen a transporter, never held a phaser, never got their food from a replicator. And from that, the comic strip was born.
The "Enterprise" is portrayed as the flagship of the fleet. If there's a BEST ship, there must be a WORST ship. And so I created the U.S.S. Regis Philbin, and made as Captain a man pulled from the bottom rung of the Federation ladder. It's his first time in space, and all he knows about it is what he's seen in news reports. And reality, apparently, is far different from the glamourous life portrayed in the media...