This project has been shelved, retooled, and shelved again, and I don’t know when this will be finished.
In all of its iterations, it’s gone by the project name Catalyst.
In the oldest iteration, the story followed a teenage girl named Kaitlin. She thought she was a human being but it turns out she’s an android developed by a tech company as part of a larger, more sinister plot. So she escaped the company and went out into the world to hide from them.
In the second iteration, she was joined by a larger man named Striker, who had a similar back-story.
I wrote an eight-page mini-comic as a prologue to this, which you can read here.
In the third iteration, the story was retooled completely, became a short story, and got set a couple hundred years into the future. In this story, a society evolved in which androids were all created to be gladiators who fought for human entertainment. Kaitlin is one of these androids.
The reason I changed it was because when I told a few people the first iteration, I got mixed reviews. A friend of mine went, “I LOVE IT,” but my sister was like, “This sounds absolutely stupid and cliche. Did you rip off an anime for this?”
So I shelved it, until within the last few months there was a call for short-story submissions for a comics anthology.
I tried REALLY hard to rewrite this into a short story, but no matter how many times I wrote the thing, I felt like it wasn’t working. I still can’t really place why.
In the end, I shelved Catalyst again and just made a new comic for the anthology. It worked out in the end. (Well, not for Catalyst, it didn’t.)
I think Catalyst is just going to stay on the shelf until I decide what to do with it (or anybody out there wants to help me edit it into submission).