My first script

As soon as Andy, Jason and I decided to produce Hatman & Indigo on 3Twins.net we started to crank out scripts. Actually, I should say that Andy and Jason started to crank out scripts. For some reason I hesitated to write any because I didn't feel like I had a good feel for the characters. Eventually, though, things began to click.

At the time I was working in a small art gallery and we were never very busy so I had lots of time to sit and think. I was going through some of the Hatman & Indigo scripts that Jason and Andy had already written and was thinking about possible story ideas.

If you watch our first few stories you'll notice that we often played off the idea that Hatman would accidentally wish for something by saying "I wish" as a figure of speech, only to have to beg Leppy to give him his second wish back. With this in mind I wondered what would happen if Hatman were to flippantly say, "I wish I'd never been born?"

And so this became the basis for my first Hatman & Indigo script, issues 15-17, It's NOT Such a Wonderful Life. The plot was obviously a loose parody of the Jimmy Stewart film It's a Wonderful Life - in fact, we parodied the movie's box-cover for the second part of the comic.

In my first draft of the issue, Hatman wished himself out of existence and then the rest of the story followed Indigo's adventure to find a way to get him back. Indigo quickly realized his only chance was to find another leprechaun so he could make a wish and restore his friend. Fortunately at the ideal moment, a wadded up flyer for a leprechaun convention flew by, letting Indigo know where he could find a leprechaun. He kidnapped an elderly leprechaun, forced him to grant him a wish, and soon brought our hero Hatman back safe and sound.

The story was too short, though, so I beefed it up a bit by adding the scenes about Hatman's adventure as a phantom, witnessing what life was like without him ever having been born. This provided a chance to flesh out Leppy's character a bit since he was assigned to keep an eye on Hatman. What I think is interesting about this story is that it was our first, and so far only, Hatman & Indigo story with a purely situational villain.

It also gave us the character Scotty. Originally Scotty was supposed to be an elderly, Irish Leprechaun. But Andy and Jason were doing a read-through of the script and when Andy read these lines, he ended up using a Scottish accent. The voice sounded so hilarious that we decided to make the the character a Scottish Leprechaun. From there we couldn't resist the urge to bring him back as a recurring character.

The story also was the first appearance of the Fairy Queen, Hatman's mom and dad, and one more character that we haven't seen again just yet, but I promise, we will soon!

-Steve