So…the dream of putting a real, physical, if somewhat diminished, zeppelin in the air fizzled. (such is the stuff of dreams)…literally foundered under its own weight. Followed by the comic book itself. By the time I pulled the plug, I had drawn about 20 pages of a 32-pager. The problem was, by the time I got to page 20, my drawing ability had improved to sufficiently to make the earliest pages look crude by comparison. So I re-inked first one, then another. Sometimes, only part of a page would offend me, but nonetheless I was spending more time cleaning up after myself than moving the story forward. I put it on ‘pause’ and set my sights on a few of the shorter stories I had plotted out; four, and eight pages long.

‘Hotspur” languished until the mid-nineties. Until I got computer literate. One of the first 3D objects I built was a huge Zeppelin. This morphed into “The Heir Aloft”. Now the story involved the zeppelin as a Barge-Of-State which, when given a colorful crew and passenger list identical to the Victorian Hotspur, is tasked with delivering the heir to the throne to some vague, ill-defined place where he is expected to perform some useless, largely ceremonial duty. Useless to the world at large, mayhap, but deadly serious to the cast aboard the airship where careers, honor, and life itself, is staked on whether or not the zeppelin will reach its destination. Now, since the Age of Comix had passed, I thought to start an on-line kid’s site featuring a twice-weekly, serial, on-line adventure novel. But the applications we were using back then were ill-suited to modeling seamless, human figures; ‘bones’ with which to pose/animate these figures had not been invented. Once again, the zeppelin project went dormant.