Sometimes it just takes a really long time to get around to doing what you really want with an idea. Life gets in the way. There’s day jobs, and romances, and hobbies and so, so many other projects. For example, it happens that the seeds of the novel Time Travel is Taxing were planted three decades ago, when I was teenager photocopying my comic and selling it by mail order.
I made this, like, little anthology of short, 2000AD-esque stories. And two of those stories were about this Time Travelling Taxman that I invented. Anyway, I found a copy of the comic in my archives, scanned it in and dolled it up a bit, and I’ve chucked it up on my website, if you want to take a gleg here.
Yep, sure, it’s a little derivative. So, credit where it’s due, the major influences on my work at that time were Carlos Ezquerra, Douglas Adams, Pat Mills, Alan Moore, Moebius, Pratchett, Katsuhiro Otomo, and whoever’d written the last couple of seasons of Dr Who.
Nascent as it is, several elements made it through to the novel; Taxman’s hoplite helmet, the tendency to have a tax-everything ( tax scooter, tax watch, etc ), and the half-matronly, half-snarky ‘Celia’. I wish I could say that the ‘Tax Haven’ was in the original version, but I took a liberty with the lettering – it previously just referred to a ‘starship’. And alas no pinstripes – I was all out of typp-ex!