As an up-and-coming crazy cabbie living out of his car in Japanifornia, Otto Bahn navigates a digitally inspired world where characters of different genres alike live and work in a world where the lines between reality and fantasy blur. The city is populated by local "celebrities": faces that look almost familiar, like they've stepped out of adjacent, knock-off versions of everyone's favorite video-game franchises.
Otto's calm persona stands in stark contrast to the crazy cabbie drivers tearing through the city: doing stunts, diving down alleyways, even driving off cliffs doing everything and anything just to get you to the park. They do it for the love of the game… literally.
Each ride becomes its own chaotic episode, and Otto always has the front-row seat.
As I've gotten started with this series, I've realized that I have always been and continue to be picky with the media I consume. There are really only a handful of video game characters I feel like I know well enough to spend time with. This was a bit of a challenge during the creation of this series, but it's also kept me focused on the characters and stories I really care about.
From the beginning, I was drawn to the idea of crossovers. Moreso, how characters from different worlds can meet, collide, and interact in ways that reveal new facets of their personalities. I'm fascinated by the narrative possibilities that emerge when familiar characters encounter unfamiliar contexts, or when genres blend in unexpected ways. The series became an exploration of these intersections, where continuity, homage, and improvisation all live in the same space. I've taken inspiration from works that play with these ideas, from Alan Moore's In Pictopia, which seamlessly blends genre and crossover, to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which reimagines beloved characters in new and surprising contexts. Space Cabbie and Odd Taxi also showed me how a central, guiding perspective, a taxi driver, for instance, can serve as a vehicle (haha) to connect a constellation of characters while maintaining narrative cohesion and playful engagement.
In crafting these crossovers, I wanted interactions that felt meaningful and fun, not just gimmicky. The narrative unfolds in a digitally inspired, interactive world, where readers can notice the ripple effects of encounters across space and time. Each meeting, visual choice, or narrative twist is an opportunity to explore character dynamics, genre conventions, and the materiality of the story itself. The series aims to reflect some of the transmedia sensibilities described in media scholarship, where narratives are nodes in a broader network, and stories can migrate across different contexts, play with structure, and encourage active engagement (Chute and Jagoda).
Even though the series exists primarily as a comic, I thought carefully about how it could evoke the sense of interactivity and engagement found in video games or alternate reality games. Crossovers themselves function like miniature transmedia experiments, letting characters from different backgrounds interact in ways that highlight both their histories and the new worlds they inhabit (Chute and Jagoda). The process was playful but deliberate; each crossover serves the story, enriches the world, and opens up spaces for experimentation in character, form, and narrative logic.
Ultimately, this series is about the thrill of crossover, the joy of discovering connections, and the creative possibilities that emerge when characters, genres, and media intersect. It reflects my curiosity about stories, my fascination with continuity and interaction, and my desire to experiment with form. By focusing on characters I care about and imagining the worlds they might encounter, I've tried to create a narrative that is at once familiar and surprising, playful yet grounded, and deeply rooted in the pleasures of storytelling across media.
This project is about exploration and experimentation, about seeing how different characters can coexist and transform each other. It's about finding those unexpected intersections that spark new ideas, new interactions, and new ways to play with narrative. And yes, my pickiness sometimes made it harder to start, but it also helped me create a story that is selective, intentional, and full of the connections that truly excite me as a reader and creator.
Chute, Hillary, and Patrick Jagoda. "Special Issue: Comics & Media." Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1086/677316.