ART AND TECHNOLOGY

Don't let me hear you say you can't get ideas when ideas are all around you all the time.  Sometimes they're even sitting right in your hand.  Case in point:  Since the lead characters in The Adventures of Lucky Vega don't have super-powers (this is pre-Environauts, remember), I wanted them to have some clever weaponry.  One idea that I came up with was the Vega Shield, the reveal of which we saw last week.  But energy shields are a very familiar idea; I wanted Lucky and his posse to have something that was distinctly theirs.  It then occurred to me that a very clever idea was right at hand--right there in the very materials that I work with as an artist!

Some of you fellow artistic types are probably familiar with the way some inking and coloring pens are made these days.  Some of them are actually two pens in one, with a different kind of point at each end.  Typically, one end will be a marker-type point and the other will be a brush-like point.  In a flash of inspiration I imagined a weapon that would be kind of like one of those pen combinations.  At one end it would be a light sabre, typical of the weapons used as the Jedis and Siths in Star Wars.  But at the other it would be a particle beam weapon, comparable to Star Trek's phasers and any of the myriad other such beam weapons in popular fiction.  This was the birth of the Vega Duoblade!  Problem solved, unique weapon created!  See, you just have to look in the right place for the right idea.