Personally, I've always portrayed both Scott and Josh as normal folks who had just one major traumatic incident that changed them forever. One of the stories I've been working on offline is the one incident that changed Scott's life, leading him through a couple of years of confusion before he finally ended up in the staircase room over at Addventure. As for Josh, if I remember correctly, it was a mysterious chain of events that started after a particularly wild high school party, coupled with the stress of having some kind of "higher power" commanding him to act the way he does.
When Horsehockey started in 1999, Josh was a fairly generic character...until Lots and I got ahold of him.
For the record, I gave him the last name "Burbank", since his predicament reminded me a bit of The Truman Show.
