THE ONLY SURVIVING MATERIAL FROM THE GRAPHIC NOVEL THAT BECAME SNOW CRASH
The concept for what eventually became Snow Crash was born on New Year’s Eve, 1988, when Neal Stephenson and artist Tony Sheeder first discussed working together on a graphic novel. Neal drafted a story involving a skateboard courier living in a hyper-capitalist, post-national version of the near future. Featuring the “Kourier” Yours Truly, or Y.T., this story became the source material for the Dioxin Posse graphic novel, the first six pages of which are depicted on these slides. Although Dioxin Posse’s environmental angle was minimized in Snow Crash, the environmentally catastrophic “sacrifice zones” made the transition from graphic novel to book manuscript, as did Y.T., Kouriers, Ng’s truck, and Smartwheels, all of which appear on these slides.
Details of the Digitized Slides Included in the Dioxin Posse NFT
Neal Stephenson and Tony Sheeder’s original goal was to publish a computer-generated graphic novel using Neal’s new Macintosh II computer. They shot photo footage of an actor playing Y.T. and using various props and costumes, and then used the computer to turn photographic images into something resembling comic book art. Indeed, Stephenson wrote in the acknowledgments of the 1993 paperback edition of Snow Crash that, “it became clear that the only way to make the Mac do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing software. I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept.”
Because of both exorbitant costs and lack of interest from publishers, the Dioxin Posse graphic novel concept was scrapped after shopping these first several pages to a number of publishing houses. However, Neal decided to transform the story into what became Snow Crash, keeping some of the elements but also adding new ones such as the katana-wielding main character Hiro Protagonist, as well as the metaverse concept for which the book has become deservedly famous.