I saw the stormy sky and felt like doodling today, and doodle I did. This doodle. Nothing more, nothing less. Naturally, the doodle involved an alien and an alien sky, and as often as I draw this little scene, I still have no name for this guy. A screenwriter I know is in the midst of writing a romantic comedy sci-fi thriller, where the aliens look like us on the day the earth stood still, but when Mr. Sandman delivers the dreams at night, the human-like alien characters haunt this screenwriter’s dreams, and they suddenly lose their human mouths, turn wonderful shades of pink and sprout weird-looking tubes on their heads. Of course I’m to blame. Me, with my aliens, my nameless aliens, or what the screenwriter likes to call “stomach people.”

But if you ever see a romantic comedy sci-fi thriller in the theaters within the next few years, and you hear in the dialogue anything about a planet named Gastro, you’ll know where the inspiration came from. Me, of course.

In addition to doodling (good gawd, I almost typed “drooling”), I went to see Casablanca at a theater today, and I couldn’t help but wonder how different the movie would have been if Michael Curtiz had known anything about my stomach people. The poor little alien guy would be seeing a spaceship fly off with the love of his life and her husband, some leader of the underground starfighters. It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little aliens don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but hey… try the next planet in the system.

This little alien guy and I, we think this is the start of a beautiful friendship… if only I can think of a name for him!

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