SCC Comic Workshops - Day 1, Idea Machine Sketches

One of the unforseen stars of our Creating Comics workshops at Swansea Museum has been The Idea Machine. A miracle of modern science, The Idea Machine has been in development by the SCC for some months now, designed to aid comic writers and artists by automating the character generation process. It does this by computing the essential attributes of popular story figures and delivering a 'Streamlined Laser-generated Idea Process' or S. L. I. P. The user collects the paper S.L.I.P. out of the three compartments or boxes and by combining them in a particular order, a comic character idea is created.

It was a very proud moment for us on Wednesday morning when the Idea Machine was powered up for the first time , a series of loud clicks and a very worrying flushing noise later and it immediately switched itself off again. After some fine tuning and much head scratching our top boffins coaxed it into life again and it chugged through the day delivering amazing character ideas to visitors and SCC members alike.

A few of these and some random sketches are shown below: