Behind the Scenes with V: The Mars Hab

Home is where the heart is, and my heart is on Mars!

There are a lot of designs out there for a utilitarian Martian habitat. NASA, The Mars Society, Mars One, and even Elon Musk have proposed ideas for what the perfect Mars Hab would contain. Even Science Fiction writers like Kim Stanley Robinson have come up with essentially wonderful ideas of what many Martian habitats could feasibly be like (my personal favorite is Zygote, from Robinson’s Mars Trilogy). However, in Jaws and V–on MARS!, V imagines a home for Jaws and herself that is essentially a recreation of Mary Blair’s Little House, inside a snow globe. It’s odd, it stands out from the landscape, and it barely contains anything besides the inviting essence of home, and here is why I chose to create this kind of habitat for the two Mars-exploring buddies.

When tossing around ideas for where Jaws and V would live on Mars, I sketched out a lot of different concepts. At first I thought that I would try to create a realistic hybrid of the most popular artistic renderings of a Mars Hab, one with all the bells and whistles, from a greenhouse to a research facility. I also created a Mars hab in the shape of a giant mouse, because, well, cats. Yet when looking at these sketches I made, I just wasn’t satisfied with them.

If Jaws and V–on MARS! wants to communicate a sense of comfort and joy, a super technical habitat–with all of its scientific accuracy–didn’t really make me, as the creator of this little story, feel at home. Could I walk around a totally tricked out Martian hab in starry PJs and feel like I lived there? I dunno, I didn’t think so and I still don’t think so. When it comes to the giant mouse habitat, I have no idea why I created that other than it was cat related and a better idea than “The Cat Box” concept, which was a giant litter box. Don’t poop where you sleep.

So because I hit a creative wall with where Jaws and V would sleep at night, I turned to some of my favorite cartoons for inspiration, and I remembered Mary Blair’s “The Little House”. This was one of my favorite Walt Disney shorts from when I was a child. It’s a little story about a “little house, on a little hill, out in the country”. The little house is purchased by a family, who eventually moves away.

As time passed, however, a more modern city was built up around the little house, a city that had a faster pace of life, and the little house eventually went into disrepair. It wasn’t until another family saw it that the house was moved into another peaceful environment, where it was fixed up and appreciated for its simplicity, comfort, and homeliness. I thought this kind of home, with a few modifications, would be perfect for Jaws and V.

Since Jaws and V–on MARS! nourishes the idea of simplicity and comfort, the girl and cat should have a cozy little house, a house in which they can walk around in their starry pajamas, cuddle, and think about their next adventure. It would be a sanctuary, a place they could call “home”. From my point of view as the creator of this ongoing tale, I came to the conclusion that Jaws and V didn’t need all the bells and whistles of the latest tech for this aspect of their Martian existence. Although the house pretty much emulates that of Mary Blair, it also mimics the houses that all little kids draw when they think about an archetypal “house”.

Yet, I also think that universally we all conjure this type of home in our minds when we think of the place we want to retreat to when we are looking for calm and peace from the outside world. And since Jaws and V–on MARS! is all about backing away from the chaos of modern existence to start anew on a planet that can provide all the potential one’s imagination can create, I figured a little house is the best type of house for my beloved characters. No greenhouse or fancy tech needed.

But then there is the snowglobe. Why the snowglobe?

I collect snowglobes. I have one for every place I’ve ever been to. I love them. Within their enclosed domes lives a memory of an adventure, sprinkled by the ethereal ubiquity of snow. Everything about a snowglobe represents, for me at least, nostalgia, longing, and the peacefulness of a past youth that slipped away before you even realized it was going. Additionally, getting back to the tech part of it, a lot of those techy ideas regarding Mars habs include dome enclosures. So I found myself with the great opportunity to mix two types of representations together–one of childhood, and one of science.

So the snowglobe that surrounds Jaws and V’s little house is a play on these two ideas. They run to their snowglobe home as though they are retreating to the peaceful and carefree youth I myself always find myself longing for. They can take their helmets off inside the snowglobe, jump into their jammies, and not have to worry about surviving in a Martian habitat. In their little house in the dome of the snowglobe, Jaws and V can just think about being.

So that’s why they live in a little house in a snowglobe.