>CV:How much backstory have you come up with for the world?

>K:Quite a bit. Something must have triggered the apocalypse. It’s like everything bad happened at once: Penelope’s island and much of the world’s coastlines have been consumed by tsunamis, massive earthquakes have ripped cities apart, there are mutant plagues and flesh eating nanites and giant shambling monstrosities. And nukes. Lots of nukes got launched. That stuff doesn’t happen all at once for no reason.

>CV:In the first issue, we see all eleven racers (or group of racers) from the series. Have you come up with the backstory for each character?

>K:Oh, yeah. Each character has an elaborate backstory, many of which go back to their childhoods. I’ve tried to keep the flavor of the original Hanna-Barbara characters while still making sense in this more realistic, post-apocalyptic world. The original characters were just a bunch of white guys and a damsel-in-distress. Now they’re multi-cultural, straight, gay… Sergeant Blast is now a transgender woman. I even ran some of Blast’s lines past a few of my friends in the LGBTQ community and they kept me straight (so to speak). The Ant Hill Mob are a bunch of identical Uruguayan clones that share a hive mind (too much telepathy and they’ll get a stroke, though), Lazy Luke’s an alcoholic (although he might have been one in the Hanna-Barbara series as well), Rufus is a big gay lumberjack and Sawtooth’s his androgynous street urchin sidekick who really likes knives. Stuff like that. Oh, and Dick was a concert pianist before things went to hell. But he was always a bastard.

>CV:I don't recall the cars being sentient before. Where did this idea come from and how will it play into the series?

>K:There was a spinoff from the original Wacky Racers cartoon called The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, in which the Ant Hill Mob had a talking car named Chuggaboom. I don’t remember watching it as a kid, but maybe that information was churning around in my brain when I came up with the idea. I just figured that in the crazy world I postulated talking cars would be no weirder than anything else. They were all regular cars before the Announcer woke them up, and they’re a little like Pinocchio at first. The cars all have different personalities, and some have complicated relationships with their drivers. The Mean Machine spends a lot of time complaining about Muttley, who he hates. The Compact Pussycat and Penelope are a tight team, while the Turbo Terrific kind of knows that Peter is a doofus and calls him out on his ass-hattery.

>CV:Will future issues continue to flip back and forth between the present and past?

>K:Absolutely. There’s a lot of information that occurred before the end of the world that informs the characters and the choices they make. The Announcer picks the Racers at their lowest moment and offers them a chance at Utopia. I want to make it clear that competing in this endless, hellish race is the best option that our heroes have at that pivotal point of their extremely difficult lives.

>CV:Will we find out more about the mysterious Announcer?

>K:Yes… eventually.

More jumping back and forth, ugh. I hope the storytimers would take the time and arrange the race chronologically again.

>CV:Do you have a certain number of races in mind?

>K:As many as they let me write!

>CV:Which character(s) are you having the most fun writing?


>K:Villains are always fun, so Dick is a natural. He and Penelope get to know each other better in issue #3, Poseidon’s Toilet. There’s even a kiss, sort of. I really like the relationship between Lazy Luke and the Arkansas Chuggabug. At one point the Chuggabug chides, “We’d get there faster if you hadn’t siphoned half my fuel into your jug, you rummy!” Sergeant Blast has gotten off a few good zingers as well.

>CV:Are there any characters whose personalities took a surprising turn while writing or have they all remained as originally envisioned in this version?

>K:A good character will always surprise you. There are moments when one of the Racers will say something and I’ll laugh out loud, going, “I wish I’d thought of that!” Then I laugh again, because, of course, I did. But the characters always take a life of their own and often say things that surprise me. I recently discovered something about Professor Pending that kind of blew my mind, and shifted the direction of the series.

>CV:Will Muttley have his trademark laugh or is there just not a lot to laugh about in this world?

>K:No, but he certainly snarls a lot! He’s the only animal sidekick from the original cartoon that’s still an actual animal, and real animals don’t snicker the way the animated version did. Blubber Bear and the other original animal sidekicks are all human now. I show how Blubber Bear got his bearskin in issue #1, and it’s not pretty! You can thank the artist Leonardo Manco for that. Leo is the master of making ugly pretty. Dan DiDio told me he’s calling the book “dementedly beautiful.” ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!

>All those comments

Well that's sad, apparently some people still think that one book somehow sets the tone of the entire line. Scooby Apocalypse isn't even a quarter or an eight as gory/bloody/dark as Wacky Raceland.

>>83659619
That would mean later story times, but I guess it's doable.
Although really Pontac seems to think the question was about the backups.

>>83659543
Bump