While Timeslip the comic has existed for a relatively short period of time as sporadic updates in an online graphic format, my personal history with the concept and characters actually goes back some 30 years. Timeslip really began as a rather blatant Calvin and Hobbes rip-off that I wrote for a 6th grade creative writing project, featuring myself (Josh) and an imagined anthropomorphized version of my pet Green Anole, Jaws. In the story, as in the particular Calvin and Hobbes run that inspired it, a fictionalized version of myself and my sarcastic lizard best friend would travel ahead in time a few hours in a time machine of my own invention to retrieve the finished version of the assignment to save myself the trouble of actually writing it. Misadventure, of course, ensued, and I ultimately ended up making more work for myself in the story while having to repair a fractured timeline. In the end, Jaws ended up writing the story from his perspective. It was all very meta, and I'm sure I thought I was quite clever for it. In retrospect, it's a miracle that nobody recognized a concept lifted almost in its entirely from arguably the most popular syndicated comic strip of the time.
What this bit of 10-year-old adolescent piracy did manage to do, though, was establish a couple of characters in my brain that I would go on to feature dozens of times over the next six years in any creative writing assignment that I could fit them into, creating original adventures and storylines for them. Over the span of those years, new characters were added, personalities, motivations and back-stories were refined, and the world which they inhabited was expanded upon. Having spent my formative years as a pretty hardcore dinosaur nut, the time travel conceit was also a great excuse to have these fantastic prehistoric beasts run rampant in the age of humans, or simply to marvel at them in their own time. And also have them eat Puritans. In a way, though, these stories were the closest I could ever come to interacting with the creatures of an age that we will never have the opportunity to experience, as well as speculate about the shape of life to come ages after Earth has shed itself of humanity.
After graduating high school, I set these characters aside for a time to focus on my academic career as an undergraduate at Cornell University. It wasn't long before I returned to them, however, and by the end of my senior year, Timeslip was born as a comic strip of its own and the characters found their way online. Now, after many fits and starts, I am attempting a third reboot of the webcomic with a new site and the motivation to hopefully do it justice. I have had dozens of stories, some old and some new, gestating in my imagination for many years, clamoring to be put to paper and pixels and shared with the world. Time will tell whether I find an audience that values and appreciates these characters as I do, but hopefully, if you're reading this, you will join them on their adventures and take as much joy from this creative venture as I will. Thanks!
