Ken Plume at Quick Stop Entertainment chats with Bone creator Jeff Smith in a very lengthy Q&A on Shazam!, Bone and RASL:
QS: And speaking of that something else, where did the initial conceptualization of RASL originate? How far back does that go?
SMITH: Around 2000 I started thinking up a science fiction story. And it was originally what I wanted to do right after Bone. My original idea was this guy who could move forward and backwards in time just a little bit, but between parallel worlds, and he would somehow end up in our world, and warn us that - this is in 2000, mind you - he was gonna meet someone, a woman, and they would fall in love and he was gonna say, “I know what happens in your future. There’s religious fanatics are going to blow up buildings in downtown Manhattan.” And then 9/11 happened, and suddenly I was like, that story was… I couldn’t do that story, obviously, and that kind of threw me off. However, since then, I’ve taken the same character, and sort of the same sci-fi premise, but I’ve completely changed it. It’s no longer about that. About religious fanatics and bombs, or anything like that. But it’s a new scenario that has developed, where he’s an art thief, and for enough money - I’m talking, like, stupid money… like Bill Gates money… you can pay him to go to another parallel world, steal the Mona Lisa, bring it back, and you can hang your own Mona Lisa up in the living room. But it’s expensive because it hurts a lot to go between the worlds. It tears him up to the point where it takes him days to recover. Days of drinking and smoking and womanizing and gambling. Then he can go about his business, make his grab. He can steal whatever he’s after. But then to get back, he has to completely clean his mind and his body and become almost Zen centered in order to come back. And, of course, coming back hurts like hell and he has to start the whole process over again of womanizing and pleasures of the flesh and all that.
