I came up with the name “Tina Infantino” while thinking about the DC Comics multiverse. If you didn’t already know, Carmine Infantino illustrated the classic “Flash of Two Worlds!” story that introduced the concept to comic books kids. I thought it was interesting his last name ended in “o”, but if you swap it to the feminine “a”, you’d get “infant Tina.” I didn’t really care about the “infant” part, but I loved the idea of a meaningful paronomasia-inspired name… Tina Infantino. I started thinking about what that name could mean, in a story sense. Eventually, I planned out and wrote a few (unpublished) books about Tina that were mostly about gender identity, the expectations society puts on us based on our gender, and the masks we wear to work around those limitations. Kind of What A Good Boy, the sci-fi book series.
I shelved the books when I got a new job and had less time to write, but I found I couldn’t stop Tina-tinkering. I even wrote a TV pilot in 2016 and brought a group of podcast listeners/buddies together to do a table read live on YouTube for our Universe Box podcast. But then, life again. Tina sat in a folder on my W: drive, wasting away…
But then, a couple years ago, in the midst of working on Everly Heights, I decided to “reboot” Infinite Tina as an Everly Heights story. Tina Infantino was already there, since I’d used the name in my original TV pilot Zoo of Zero Tolerance (published last week as a full audio drama). So, I took the end of Zoo as a writing prompt and wrote a whole new origin for Tina, one that I think works much better than my first and second ideas.
Originally, Tina embraced the multiverse due to a romantic relationship souring. She wanted to escape. I upgraded the romance to a lifelong friendship with Ken Sako, made Ken the one who wanted to run away from their faltering friendship, and folded in the team of secret government agents protecting the multiverse from their bunker below Everly Heights known as W.E.I.R.D.E. (pronounced WEIRD-EY) we introduced earlier this season.
I published the Infinite Tina: Worlds Apart book a couple years ago, with an audiobook by the fantastic Mandy McCullough (aka voiceovermandy). It didn’t do gangbusters, sadly. I blame the fact the opening AIM chatlog chapter felt static, since it was mostly summing up the events of Zoo of Zero Tolerance. I also published it with a bad cover for the first four months or so, which I’m sure didn’t help.
Last year, when I was planning out Everly Heights Tales, I knew Tina deserved another swing at stardom. Worlds Apart is one of the stronger stories I’ve written, probably because it is exactly the kind of multiverse-as-metaphor-for-emotional-development kind of story I love to read. So, with Mandy’s approval, I took the audiobook and revamped it into these three episodes. The result is a snappy “cinematic audio drama” trilogy. Here’s the first part of the story:
INFINITE TINA: WORLDS APART
In the fallout of a digital betrayal that’s made her a middle school pariah, Tina meets Ken Sako at the Dixon Park swingset for a big talk, and maybe a fresh start. But something they find in the sand has been waiting for a lonely kid just like Ken, and the friendship that was holding him in Everly Heights is on life support. After a world-weary waitress at Gaston’s points them toward a mysterious man named Jim Colvin, the two friends discover that the Ometahedron can offer Ken something Everly Heights can’t: a clean slate. Ken finally has an option better than computer club, and he’s ready to take it. But can Tina stop him before their friendship disappears?
After the story, creator Bill Meeks brings in voice actress Mandy McCullough for a Saturday morning aftershow that’s part craft talk, part 90s nostalgia therapy session. They dig into the era’s design DNA, weird Prince jokes on Animaniacs, and how Mandy became a voice actor. She also shares what it’s like returning to Bill’s Everly Heights universe across multiple characters and productions.
NEXT TIME: Tina gets a part time job and learns to love the multiverse in INFINITE TINA PART 2: WELCOME TO W.E.I.R.D.E.
LINKS
Web
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube (with video aftershow featuring Mandy)
Fans of Everly Heights Tales will want to keep an eye out for Everly Heights Connections. You’ll see familiar places like The Koffee Shop, characters from previous/upcoming episodes like Mr. Matheson and Jeremy Hahn, and the story even sets up sequels for The W.E.I.R.D.E. World of Jim Colvin and Mr. Matheson’s Long Division. If that sounds like too much to keep track of, don’t worry about it. As always, this is a self-contained story, but you might notice a few familiar faces.
NOSTALGIA AS THEME, A DEFENSE
A couple weeks ago, somebody who has been close to the Everly Heights project since I started it said something that kinda bummed me out. They accused me of being obsessed with the past, using the nostalgic themes of Everly Heights as their primary evidence. Somehow, they got the impression that I worship nostalgia, or that I wrote these stories as “LOL REMEMBER THE 90s?”-level clickbait content.
That isn’t the case.
I play coy in the aftershows, since my audience is smart enough to come to their own conclusions about what I’m trying to say. I don’t feel I should have to come out and say what I really think: “Nostalgia keeps you stuck in the past by making it seem more important than it was, but if we don’t reflect on our past, we’ll keep making the same mistakes.” Too preachy, right? Too on-the-nose.
But that criticism makes me worried that I’m not coming across how I’d like. For the record, my college playwriting professor encouraged me to embrace nostalgia as a theme in my work twenty years ago after reading my final assignment “Death of the Pop Culture King,” a one-act play about a guy deciding if he should stay in his hometown to party with his friends or move on to something new. My professor thought that the self-aware criticism of “geek/nerd culture” made my work approachable to the exact people who my stories would resonate with. So, that’s what I’ve done in all my writing for the past twenty years.
If you’ve followed my work for any length of time, you’ll see that approach in everything from fan podcasts to novels to audio drama sketch comedy shows to incredibly long marketing e-mails. I’m not trying to hop on a 90s nostalgia trend here, which kinda fizzled out last year. I picked the 90s because that’s when I grew up so it saves me research, but these stories could just as easily be set in the 50s, the 1800s, or the far-away year of 2620. Danny Chance loving “Biker Mice From Mars” could just as easily be “Beany and Cecil” or “One Piece” if the time period changed. The point is that Danny Chance loves a crappy old show, and what does that say about him as a human, you know?
If this comes off as defensive, it is only it is defensive. I’d hate to be misunderstood here. The stories I’ve written for Everly Heights are silly, serious, intentional, personal, and not me trying to cash in on 90s hype that stopped existing two years ago. If this was a cash grab project, I’d have a lot more cash. These are literally the stories and lessons of my life, with smiley faces along the margins written in blood and regret. Some of them are pretty funny too!
I’ll leave off today with two relevant quotes from one of my favorite authors, Stephen King:
“Stories are different from memories. Stories are things that we make… we take a few facts and a few feelings and we use them like a builder uses a few bricks and a few boards.” – Bag of Bones
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie. I’ve always felt that if you’re going to tell a story, you should tell the truth, even if the truth is that a man can fly or a ghost can haunt a house.” – On Writing
See you next week for Infinite Tina: Welcome to W.E.I.R.D.E.!