BUGSVILLE

I had this strange idea for a story involving a fantasy world where humans coexist alongside grotesquely large insects set in the 1940's. Many of them are human sized and seemingly as intelligent as people. There would be slums in cities where David Cronenberg esque insect creatures live like second class citizens, selling illegal substances made from bizarre secretions. I pictured an opium bar except instead of opium it's humans/insects coming to drink brownish liquid fed through long tubes connected to the walls, on the other side the tubes are attached to large insects. I was thinking how the cartoons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit lived in semi seclusion from humans and like that movie, there would be bugs of all sizes, trying to live like humans and adapting to their architectural environments. Distrct 9 would be a good visual example I suppose.

It's all a weird blur of scenes/ideas in my head but I think the story would be some sort of murder mystery/psychological thriller. There would be a human who has to go into the insect slums to find information on a murder, spy on the underground insect activities, drug makings, something like that. I'm thinking of insects that take humans into sewers and create hives filled with their corpses for their larvae to feed on. Could be a war between human mafia and insect gangs. I'm picturing flies the size of cars buzzing out of the slums in the middle of the night to break into the top story of a skyscraper where a human mafia boss lives to threaten him to leave their turf alone, stop taking cuts from their insect drug trade, stuff like that.

The first image in my head of this crazy fantasy world was a man dressed in 1940's attire walking down a street near the insect slums, he passes an insect meat market that has dozens of weird insects cut up, hanging on display, floating in jars. Then he steps onto a bus, except the bus is actually a giant hollowed out centipede that crawls along the street next to cars.

Anyway, I can see a lot of potential for it, guess I'll let it fester in my brains for awhile. If I didn't have a million other things going on right now this idea would be a lot of fun to turn into a graphic novel.