March 25th, 2001:
About three years ago now I had the idea of creating a science fiction/action/adventure series that would revolve around a young boy and girl. Earlier in my comics career I had worked on a science fiction/comedy series entitled Dressed for Success and quite liked the genre of sci-fi, seeing as you could make up your own rules and tell just about any kind of story you wanted.

I had come up with the name Rocket Girl first and the sketch above was done around the time that I was designing another young female character named Crusader Lass for a superhero/romance story I was working on then. Once I came up with the name Rocket Girl I wanted to find a suitable name for the young boy character, something where the two names would sound good together. Since I had used the word "girl" in the first name I wanted to stick with something similar for my male lead. The word "boy" didn't seem to work for me somehow. That and it sounded a bit too juvenile. I wanted the young boy character to come across as a daring/adventurer type. When I looked at things that way, the name Kid Danger came quite easily.

I envisioned Kid Danger as someone who would be on his own but when it came to Rocket Girl I thought she should have a sidekick. With the idea that she would pilot her own rocketship I figured that would be the perfect opportunity to introduce a co-pilot sidekick. And from that thought sprung the idea of it being a robot co-pilot. My vision was to create this robot out of simple shapes; I also wanted it to be shorter than Rocket Girl, giving it an innocent and cute appeal. To contrast the simple design of the character I wanted to come up with a name that would be unusual. I wanted to stay away from typical robot sounding names, things that usually consisted of a series of numbers and letters, but give it a more atypical human name.

From there I borrowed my roommate's book on baby names a made a short list of uncommonly used names as choices to work with. The one that stuck out the most for me was Artemus. I don't know what it was about it exactly but somehow it just seemed to be right. And from there I was off and running. I had the basic look and names for my lead characters and now all I had to do was flesh out the world that they lived in. Then I could set off on telling of their adventures in a series of self-contained mini - series which were to be commonly titled "Rocket Girl & Kid Danger in: ...". Although, as I was to find out later, that wouldn't be as easy as it sounds. That, and I kind of got ahead of myself in the development stage. But that will be a story for next time!