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Where did the idea for Smack-dab and the Waste come from?

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“Smack-dab, in the Middle of Nowhere” is a large work of comedy fiction. While the story itself is small, certainly compared to most Blockbuster world-ending Hollywood titles these days, you really get a sense that the world is far, far bigger than its characters.

But where did the Waste come from? Today, we explore the origins of this silly, fictional place, and how it turned into a bar called Smack-dab.

Where did the idea for the Waste come from?

The original Waste was generally just referred to as the Wasteland back in October 2014, when I was working on a post-apocalyptic web series with Calum Beck (“Smack-dab’s” cover designer).

Five episodes were written, and I even bought some of the props for the set.

The idea for this comedy series was vlog-style, told from the perspective of some random guy (called Kidd) and his roommate trying to survive life in the Wasteland, and to teach others how to do the same. The roommate, Steve, never spoke or really ever did anything except sometimes walk in the background with blood all over him. He wasn’t meant to be a part of the story, just an interruption to it.

Five episodes were written, and I even bought some of the props for the set (which would be a wooden shed), but alas, it never got off the ground. There were too many obstacles in the way, most of which were “me sucking at getting it off the ground”.

I do have a rad rusty scythe now, so there’s that.

Did anything make it into “Smack-dab” from the original series?

Yep! Quite a few things made it all the way through.

  1. Trader Bill is still present. He was an elusive gun trader back in 2014, and now he’s an even more elusive everything Trader.
  2. The Overlords were and still are an important part of the world. Our main vlog character had an Overlord head as a camera, and it actually spoke during the show. It added some much-needed dry, dark humour to the otherwise silly production. We really wanted to make the robots scary-but-silly in the vlog, and that persisted.
  3. The general gist of the Wasteland is the same for the Waste. A horrible catastrophe happened generations ago, and what we see in “Smack-dab” is actually society rebuilding and moving on.

So where does Smack-dab come into this?

Smack-dab the bar was part two of my great big plan to turn the post-apocalypse into a piece of comedy fiction.

I wanted to turn Smack-dab into a webcomic. This is where Bert, Phoenix and Meatsack evolved.

In November 2014, I had the great idea to expand the Wasteland universe and incorporate more mediums than just a vlog. I really wanted to create something big, something that I could write a lot into.

Calum Beck was involved here, too. We had a lot of discussions on the vlog, writing together and brainstorming. We also had this idea for a bar – called Smack-dab, which I will happily give credit to him for naming – that was a sort of roadhouse for passing traders and whatnot.

I loved the idea of having a central place to build a story around, to help anchor the plot. I wanted to turn Smack-dab into a webcomic, and I wrote up a big pitch about the bar, and created all the characters that would inhabit it. This is where Bert, Phoenix and Meatsack evolved.

  1. Bert was inspired by a character that I created with a friend of mine – Cheyana Wilkinson – back in high school. We wanted to make a comic about a bar called Rocket Dogs at the time, and Bert was this bad-ass, robo-handed bar owner. When Calum and I started brainstorming Smack-dab, she came back to me and I just knew she had to be in it. She’s undergone lots of changes since the original character of course (in that now she is a character, and back then it was just concept art and a name).
  2. Phoenix was my interpretation of a video game main character, whose given up the ways of adventuring life and settled down. You can actually see a lot of this video game character inspiration in the Crumble Bulletin Issue #1, where I played with the concept more. He hasn’t changed much since the original webcomic.
  3. Meatsack … is Meatsack. I’m not sure where he came from. Visually, he’s inspired by the Charger from “Left4Dead 2”, but beyond that he just sort of evolved naturally. It just seemed right to have this innocent-minded big ol’ mutant. He hasn’t changed a whole lot from the comic to the novel, either.

Will the comic or vlog ever return?

Who knows?

No, seriously. Does anybody know? I’d love to find out.

I have no idea if it’ll ever come back. I’m still a big fan of expanding the Waste into more mediums than just fiction novels, but I also have to admit that I tried twice to get it off the ground before and it never really happened. There was something not quite right about the idea, and it always became a barrier.

So, maybe it’ll come back, maybe it won’t. I still have a bunch of props, but I think it’s more likely that Kidd is gone, and we’ll see something different in the future.

2014 is the past, and I’m all about evolving for the future.