Incomplete Notes on a Yoon-Suin Comic

Some years ago, I was invited to draw up a plan for a Yoon-Suin comic series. The elevator pitch I came up with: It's like Poirot, but in the Yellow City, and Poirot is a slug-man.

The main character was a slug-man (I tested a variety of names; Ui-Pa Wa was the clumsy one I'd settled on) who, perhaps uniquely in the Yellow City, was capable of feeling compassion for humans. He was insufferably arrogant, and a preening dandy, but he had a soft spot for the lower castes, and would turn up somewhat haphazardly to help them solve problems (most of which would involve solving mysteries). 

He had two helpers. One, Drita, was a whip-smart human orphan girl who Ui-Pa Wa had taken under his wing. The other, Tsuktsan, was a dwarf from the distant Mountains of the Moon who Ui-Pa Wa used as a dogsbody, manservant, and bodyguard. When he needed stealth and cunning, Ui-Pa Wa would deploy Drita. When he needed a bull to smash up a china shop, he would deploy Tsuktsan.

There would also be subplots involving Ui-Pa Wa's gradual ostracism from, and conflict with, slug-man high society, due to his distasteful habit of consorting with humans and treating them as near-equals. 

Ui-Pa Wa and his cronies would frequent a Seinfeld-esque tea shop, called The Quiet and Sorrowless Morning. I think I had it in my head that every 'episode' would begin with them sitting around a table there.

The first story involved solving the mystery of a stolen artefact - a hummingbird's tongue which, when uncoiled, would always point itself towards a distant mountain where Outsiders could be found. It was going to be called, 'The Hummingbird's Tongue That Points to a Mountain'.

This project will almost certainly never come to fruition. I put the notes here on my blog in the unlikely event that anybody will have a use for them, or find them amusing.