I met Kevin when I was 19, at a Second City workshop. We were paired up together in the first class I went to. By the end of the class we formed our improv group, and over the next three years we performed leading up to the formation of The Kids in the Hall.
As it happened, I had a friend who was a good person who liked to present himself as a dreadful one. Using him as a role model, I created the first Buck Godot strip.
My only requirement for that first story was that there had to be a fight or an explosion on every page. Naturally, no one wanted to publish it, but I liked the character, did a few stories to keep my hand in.
It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.
Government cannot do everything, so we need to first decide what government ought to be doing, then figure out what it's capable of doing, and then follow the jobs we choose to completion.
It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject; the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to enterprise, thought, and perception of an individual.
I don't know whether you have done your calculations but, about two or three years back, I did a first assessment of what the first successful device would be worth and it came out at about 300 trillion dollars.
Usually, if you have a new idea, you very rarely break through to anything like recognizable development or implementation of that idea the first time around - it takes two or three goes for the research community to return to the topic.
