I Shall Create As I Speak

A Blog Less Painful

2011-06-24T12:55:00.001-04:00

I strongly suspect that a lot of my problem with blogging is logging in and dealing with the UI. So I just grabbed a Firefox (Yes, I still use Firefox, Chrome is too minimalist for me. I like buttons like, everywhere) add-on called Scribefire Next (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scribefire-next/) As having Echofan has gotten me tweeting more often, I'm hoping this will get me to blog more often. Not to figure out why right clicking isn't working...

Thoughts on Descendants #52 (Scenes From a Changing World)

2011-05-23T21:45:00.001-04:00

Idon't normally do this, seeing as 'Scenes' is still ongoing, but I ammaking a good faith option to blog and for once I do have somethoughts that I'd really like to share on the subject.

ScenesFrom a Changing World is different from most issues of Descendantsbecause it's very explicitly broken into multiple short stories. Thisisn't exact;y new; the Annuals always worked as check-ins with thecharacters, Giant-sized became this way accidentally when I lost thethread of the frame story, and Some Day In May (Special #4), wassomething similar. But this time, I didn't just tell differentstores, but in different styles. I'm not sure how it worked for thereader, but jumping from 'Fanon' to the upcoming 'Snick-Snap' wasdefinitely an experience to me.

Beyondletting my stretch my writer's legs after the fairly heavy openingshots of Volume 5, Scenes also makes the point of Volume 5 very, veryclear: this is where things become Different (Note capital letter.That means I'm serious.). By the end of Volume 5, the status quo isgoing to be very different from what came before, but not in atypical 'big event kills folks and then people make our of characterdecisions' way.

Whathappens here is not a big event. There willbe a big event, but that isn't the thing that changes everything.What changes everything is life, time, the rest of the world. Thekids are growing up and heading to college, the Descendants and allthe other prelates are learning that they don't exist in a vacuum,problems go global, and politics, not cosmic events are going to bethe battleground for the DU's soul.

Notthat it's not going to be fun. I'm not the kind of writer who wantsto make everything meaningful or deep, I just want to entertain witha good story. So while the story grows organically, Ian is going tobe attacked by ninjas, there's going to be a dragon, and Cyn is stillgoing to play Elmer to the Sneak Thief's Bugs.

Speakingof which; college hijinks! No promises, but I'm imagining Warrickgoing to a frat party and getting wasted or Kay getting to realizeher rock star dreams. There's a ton of stories to explore here, notto mention Ian and Alexis's engagement, or what else goes on atFreeland House now that half the cast has moved into dorms (mostly).

Beforethis issue, I was on a clock; there were issues and events thatabsolutelyhad to happen before the younger cast graduated and issues thatabsolutely couldnothappen until after. Now the clock is gone and I have infinite time totell my stories, so don't be surprised if Freshman Year lasts two orthree volumes. Yes, Descendants has stories for years.

Butit's going to be different. Nothing I love, or you love about the DUis going away, I want to make sure that's clear. I'm not going allDark Age or Cerberus Syndrome here. Things are just getting bigger.New settings like Dayspring College and Emerald College. NewSupporting casts, like a certain young lady named Megan and gaspLily? How can this be? New plots, like something bigoff the coast of Georgia and something even bigger in England (hmm...haven't I be telegraphing sending a character to England?).

Oh,and a little something I'm calling the Beach House arc starting inDescendants #53 and continuing in #55 and #57.

Ihope you're looking forward to reading about this changing world asmuch as I'm looking forward to writing it. And you know what? I thinkit's going to be awesome.

Untilnext time, I shall create as I speak.

You Win Again, Internet.

2011-05-18T19:48:00.000-04:00

As my sporadic postings here suggests, I'm just not a blog person. When I write, I prefer it to be a story. This whole format where I just say things is foreign to me. I'm much more comfortable speaking through characters, or through forums.

But blogging is the best way to communicate with my readers and goddamnit, I really do want to do good by them. So the plan is to do this twice a week at least. I can't promise quality, or entertainment, or any sort of schedule, but I can promise to try.

Also, I'm deleting all the ugly update stuff that came before because jeez that was a terrible idea.

Introducing New Comic Wednesdays, a new feature at descendantsserial.com

2011-01-30T21:41:00.000-05:00

Dear readers,
As I've been saying hinting, the time has come for a change. The universe the Descendants inhabit is getting bigger and now it's simply too big for a weekly schedule.

For the past two years, each issue of The Descendants was separated by two weeks of stories from elsewhere in the setting; most recently the Liedecker Institute series and The Whitecoat and the Second String.

But when the current issue ends, a third miniseries will be forthcoming; The Spider's Seven. I feel that almost a month between issues of the main series is something that many of you, especially those who aren't interested in the other stories, are not willing to put up with.

The solution: I'm adding another day to the schedule. The Descendants will still update every Monday in the a.m. And on Wednesdays, the day you also pick up your actual paper, sequential art comics, you can also check out the newest issue of a Descendants-verse series on the following schedule starting this coming Wednesday, February 2nd:

First Wednesday - Liedecker Institute
Second Wednesday - The Whitecoat and the Second String (miniseries*)
Third Wednesday - The Spider's Seven (miniseries*)
Fourth Wednesday - Descendants Presents...**
Fifth Wednesday - TBA

*miniseries obviously run until they end. Upcoming minis include: Vorpal: Gyre and Gimble (working title)Liedecker: Life and Times Part 2 "The Apprentice"

** includes sneak peeks at works, especially scenes from in-universe entertainment including "Malady Place", "Imago", "Live Metal" and "Taskforce: Earth" as well as other projects such as the Descendants prequel "Descendants Prime" and the Descendant-verse vampire series "Whitepine Hollow".

I hope this change goes well and to the enjoyment of all. If you have questions, concerns or suggestions, feel free to comment on the blog or on the community (which I know looks dead, but if you post I will answer).

Aside from that, the new site continues to take shape and proofreading back issues continues. See everyone in February for the first update in this format: the Lidecker Institute Annual #1

Commentary: Descendants Giant-sized #1

2010-12-12T20:13:00.001-05:00

DescendantsGiant-sized #1 'Slices of Life'is sort of an odd duck in the series. Much like 'AMagitech Crisis: Epilogue'it exists in one of those strange places that's too big to be aoneshot and too small to be a full issue. It also comes chock full ofimportant events and little touches that didn't have much of a placein any of the other issues.

Discussionof the importance of this piece to the whole Confluence arc and why'Giant-sized' under the cut.

Thisissue started life as the Descendants #38. Because the Annual dealtlargely with where the villains were at the end of Volume 3, Iplanned an issue to show where the crew was at the moment andforeshadow the events of Confluence.

Unfortunately,the Annuals at seven to nine pages for a reason. I ended up with onlythree short chapters and I thought it fell short of being meatyenough to count as a full issue. When it was first being posted,however, I was billing and archiving it as #38 and had to throw up anapologetic newspost for the alteration later.

It was also one of thoseissues that got away from me. Originally, it was about an 'A' storyof the guys trying to get Adel to open up more to Juniper (andconsequently, convince me I wanted to not write him out of theseries, because I wanted to write some 'Jun dating' stories later.)and a different 'B' story every chapter. The B stories, howeverturned out to be far, far more interesting to me and also turned outto be much longer than intended.

Warrickand Kareem's scene is one of my favorite of the series. It feels very'teen superhero', with the casual power use and the discussion aboutthe effects of being a superhero on dating and morality. It's thekind of scene, much like the bench scene in 'Lifesavers,Inc'that I started this series to write.

Thatscene also marked the start my big, fake build-up for breakingWarrick and Tink up; a thread I would be following in 'Descendants2095'.I'm not sure how I well it worked, but I was trying to telegraph theidea that Tink would find out what Kareem did back in 'StrangeDays at Dayspring College'and not want anything to do with the whole Freeland House groupanymore.

Onceyou read Volume5,you'll definitely want to come back to this scene.

Cyn,Kay and Lisa's segment introduces Ollie Butler, Cyn's new loveinterest. Don't expect a lot of Ollie in Volume4,but I plan to develop him more in the future once the younger cast isin college. The same goes for Connie Delmonico, another early cameofrom the college years cast. Here, she existed only to introduce usto new corporate entity, Imaginative Illusions, which plays a part inthe very next issue.

Ian and Laurel's scenewas lifted straight out of real life with me in Ian's place. Itreally just existed because I like Ian and Laurel talking, and toshow that Laurel has been in contact with Voice and for her tomention that she can tell that he's in love with someone else.

And then we get to thebig one. Juniper's scene with Melissa and Alexis. At the time, I wastired of being subtle about Juniper's heritage and went about as faras I could without saying the names of her parents. I've alreadytouched on this elsewhere though, so let's devote the space to thingsI haven't like...

Vorpal and Voice. I haveto admit, I love their relationship: so close and yet permanentlyseparate. Something about the idea that he's never seen her face andthat they're both in the gray areas of opposite sides kind of touchesme. I have plans to explore their history in a mini at some point.

Until then, other thantheir relationship, this segment points out several important things.One, Liedecker put Vorpal in over her head at the school for areason. And Two, Voice doesn't actually know all about what's goingon at the school, but he's damn close. And on that point, he knowsmore than anyone else, knowing the truth about Liedecker and Duvall'sdaughters when no one else knows more than the identity of more thanone faction at the school.

Finally, we have afollow-up with the Gold siblings captured by Tome. Originally, theywere going to feature into a Vol 4 story in which Talbot deploys themto steal sensitive data from the ROCIC. In fact, there were going tobe a couple of Enhanced Agent stories in Volume 4, but I pushed themall back to volume 5 for when Tome makes its big move. Unfortunately,it makes this seem like an orphaned scene.

I'm actually very proudof both showing off Talbot's authority and general sadism here andthe subtle implication that there's someone they might both have toanswer to if he ruins this. Less proud of the Cadmus thing. Yes, Iknow it's a DC comics thing. In my defense, they really are dragonderived warriors in mine.

All in all, I'm happywith the content of this special, but it's indicative of a problemI'm having with issue size. I'm starting to have more and more storyto cram in, from subplots and side stories to totally unrelated itemsthat deserve a story, like the exchange between Vorpal and Voice.

To this end, I expectthat the actual page count of chapters is going to increase (italready is for Inexorable and George) and that there will be moreminis and one shots to allow me to unclutter my head.

Actually, I'd love tohear what kind of one shot stories the fans would like to hear fromthe Descendants Universe now that it's gotten so large. So drop acomment here, hit the forums, or even email me. I might just createthe thing you ask for.

Commentary: Descendants #36

2010-11-21T19:27:00.001-05:00

Descendants#37 'Of A Feather'revisited the character of Elizabeth von Stoker, AKA Freaque, andintroduced a new set of characters, the Outliers. It also served asthe first issue of DescendantsVolume 4: Confluenceand, as it happens, the issue least connected with the overallConfluence arc.

Sohow did these new characters come to be, and how did 'Of a Feather'become so divorced from Confluence? All that and Peter ParkerSyndrome under the cut.

The story for 'Of aFeather' was always based on the Outliers group beng manipulated byThunderhead. Originally though, it involved them chasing after theKin because Thunderhead was posing has her father trying to get hisdaughter back.

The problem I ran intowas that it was a follow-up to a One Shot called The Kin's SummerSpecial that defined the relationships of the members of the Kin moreafter what I see as my failure to do so during 'Standing withTitans'. That story never really came to pass because I couldn'tthink up a driving plot for it and because I had to 'hide' Tesser tokeep people from noticing that Vamanos had the same powerset. Vamanos was meant to get some build up as a character duringConfluence.

I still loved theOutliers though, and decided to tie them into the Warrick/Tink arc byincluding them in a planned Freaque story. Originally, Freaque wasgoing to take over out of jealousy of seeing the two together,forcing Warrick to protect Tink as Warrick instead of Alloy.

In retrospect, if I hadit all to do again, I'd leave these two stories separate. They're aresult of a more structured method of story design I dabbled in usingto make sure I stayed 'on schedule' in getting the series to where Iwanted by Volume 5. I've sense abandoned it, but I think this, andWar Machines weakened Confluence considerably.

But I stand by theOutliers and certainly want them to come back, even if they were allbased on gags:

Geiger,besides being an Alienreference, also exists because that franchise is my friend'sfavorites and I'm always pretending to confuse HR Geiger for HansGeiger (of counter fame).

Kronosis modeled physically after Dr. Manhattan of Watchmen,and personality-wise on the X-men:First Classcharacterization of Beast. He came to be after a riff on how youcan't be a successful physically mutated mutant with Marvel fanswithout being blue. Blink, Skin, Penance: who are they? Gimmie Beast,Nightcrawler and Mystique! Only applies to mutant though. Mutateslike Hulk or the Everlovin Blue-eyed Thing are coolio.

Anuraan homage to one of my favorite X-characters, Toad. Well, Toad asplayed by Ray Park of from X-men:Evolution.In fact, the whole group correlates rather nicely to theBrotherhood's incarnation on that show. She mostly exists to showcasehe 'tongue covers', which I think Toad should have eventually figuredout at some point, after tasting ever single X-man and the localarchitecture. I like supers who need gear to make their powers moreuseful: you see that all over the series, really.

I just want to also pointout, while I'm on the subject of Anura, that when she calls Kali'sis', she doesn't mean literally. Kali is the baby sister of thegroup and gets treated like it. In editing it, I came to realize thiswasn't clear, but wasn't worth adding a long sentence to explain.I'll make it more clear in their next appearance.

Finally, we have Kali,who isn't really based on the Goddess, but on the DnD monster, theMarilith (Mariposa/Marilith). In the game's mythos, the Mariliths arethe badass demonic generals that make every one of the infinitelayers of the Abyss the awesome live action metal albums they are. Soof course, Kali is an enthusiastic, by hilariously poor fighter thatis (as mentioned) the baby sis of her crew.

Aside from them, 'Of aFeather' was also about Freaque/Liz and there's not a lot to say herethat shouldn't wait until I go back and comment on 'Freaque', but Ido think that it's a good place to talk about Warrick's Peter ParkerSyndrome.

Peter Parker Syndrome(PPS) is the tendency of the people around a superhero to also becomesuper/badass normal at some point during the story. This could meanthey become villains or heroes, as long as they become part of thesuper 'world'. As per the name, the biggest sufferer of thiscondition is Peter Parker (Spider-man), who has, over his variousincarnations, seen classmates, teachers, mentors, co-workers, andemployers all gain powers, usually in ways that have absolutelynothing to do with him other than the fact that they appear in hisbook.

It'sso severe that even the parents of his associates can be affected,and hisown parentswere retroactively effected, becoming awesome super-spies.

Warrick isn't quite thatbad, but to date, he's got Freaque (love interest), Mad Mad Madigan(pseudo-employer), Vamanos (classmate), Spark (sister), Occult(friend), and in a future vision, Tink/Metal X II (love interest)under his belt. And he's not even in college yet!

Commentary: Issue #46 Post-Game

2010-11-14T21:10:00.001-05:00

Asmentioned before, I have a long and complicated history with thecharacter of Juniper Taylor (Zero). She was created to be a charactervastly different than what she eventually became and escaped aterrible fate purely because I developed a soft spot for her. This inturn led me to constructing one of the series's longest runningsubplot, namely: Who is Juniper Taylor.

Theclues were spread out over nearly three volumes and all led up to aresolution in Descendants#46 “The Juniper Chronicles”,which is impressive for a plot that was something else entirely formost of Volume 1

Sowhat wasgoing to happen, and how did things wind up the way they are now?Find out, under the cut. Warning:Spoilers for Descendants #46

Anyonewho follows this blog knows that originally, Juniper was going to bea sleeper agent designed to destroy the Descendants from within andwho would sacrifice herself in penance for this at the end of theSiege arc in Volume 1.

Itwas dark, t was cruel, it was everything I dislike, but I envisionedit was a deconstruction of that kind of plot. The problem was, notonly did I get wise to the fact that I wasn't really deconstructinganything, but I was starting to really like Juniper, who was based ona girl my mother worked with an Mutsumi Otohime from LoveHina.I didn't want to have to stop writing her, and though resurrection(or rebuilding, as she was supposed to be a cyborg) was clearly onthe table, I didn't want to kill her at all.

Soin Descendants#9came around, instead of kicking off the Judas story with Juniperstarting a relationship with Warrick in the guise of making him feelbetter, I punted. There's no other way to say it. I didn't reallyrejigger anything, I just ignored it. Even Cyn's speech to Warrick atthe end there was actually there to be used later is a reason Warrickwas dating Jun.

And so, during the Siegestoryline, I let slip that 'Zero' was a reference to Juniper'sfather. I followed this up by having Juniper's parents conspicuouslyunreachable during the subsequent 'family' arcs of Volume 2.

Majestrix and Zero Pointstarted life in my big file of character concepts as a namelesssuper-couple, one with psionic powers, the other with tech. The ideahad hit me when I was thinking about a time travel plot where we gotto see what old, married version of Warrick and Tink would be like.

Majestrix's name was bornof a conversation I had with a friend about how it seemed a shamethat the '-trix' suffix for indicating a female of a profession waslimited to aviatrix and dominatrix and that dentisttrix or acttrixwould be better words than what we have now. Instead of a kingtrix,though, I thought majestrix was better.

ZeroPoint was more difficult because I'd already dug my grave with theremark about Zero's choice of codename. Zero is a terribly trite andoverused name when it comes to heroes, like the non-Marvel version ofX. Luckily, over the course of a week, both TheIncrediblesand Stargate:SG-1reminded m of the concept of Zero Point Energy and the wonky ideathat it can magically do anything. It was like getting a name andconcept in a neat little package: a man who used psycho-kineticenergy to magically seem to do anything.

Which is where I punchedmyself in the face again, this time with my Universe Bible. See,according the the rules I've laid down for the Descendants Universe,a person can't gain powers that aren't at least tangentially relatedto their bloodline. Thus, Alloy and Spark have some sort of controlover the chemistry of metals, but no one in the family tree can readminds.

And while, of course, youcan mix and match bloodlines, or be adopted (one of these explainsLady Nightshade, whose father was an empath), but freezing andwhatever ZP's powers are? Problem. What I came up with was that ZeroPoint doesn't run of zero point energy at all, but heat energy heabsorbs from the environment.

Inhim, the heat absorption part of power is crude and only controlledin a general on/off manner (as illustrated in Descendants#29when he needed to be 'recharged' by vented steam). Juniper, however,has great control and potency to that part of her power to the pointthat she's able to use it almost exclusively.

I'm not sure how obviousit is, and I'll make it more specific later in the series, butJuniper was more or less groomed as a child to grow up to be asuperhero. That's why she has so much first aide knowledge and knifethrowing skills and such a casual attitude toward the possibility ofdying as a superhero (“I'm pretty shootable.”)

And now a word about theantagonists of this issue: Ethan Braylocke and his wife. They and theGreenview Ridge incident was originally going to be a backgroundevent to give a bit more bite to the anti-psi folks during Volume 5.Greenview Ridge was going to be the major rallying cry and excuse forhatemongers to use, but one the Descendants weren't involved in.

Ithink making it so that they were there and actually did savelives/end the threat and people are stillgoing to use it as a reason to spit in their faces only makes theatmosphere of misinformation and rabble rousing more potent. Expectto hear many distorted accounts of Greenview Ridge throughout Vol 5.

SomethingI'd like to point out though: while this might seem all too familiarnow (I quickly noticed parallels to the grievously misnomered 'GroundZero Mosque' (Which is actually a community center with multi-faithchapel completely out of eyesight of ground zero), the groundwork andshape of this was in my head since Descendants#18.The series was always going in this direction, and really, peoplewhip themselves into hate-rages all the time. That's how X-men hasbeen symbolic for civil rights, counter culture, and civil rights forgays without really changing the formula at all.

Descendants isn't tryingto make this a status quo though. I just felt it would be aninteresting subplot for a while.

The Tech Files

2010-10-24T21:19:00.001-04:00

It's recently been asked on this blog (and has been asked elsewhere) as to why the world of The Descendants isn't as technologically advanced as many other speculative series set in the future attempt.

Well, this post is all about the tech of The Descendants, both the what and the why behind it. All will be revealed, under the cut.

The short answer I gave to the original question was that technology has, in fact advanced in the 21^st century of The Descendants, only it has advanced in different directions than one might expect. Advances in material, fabrication, propulsion and energy comes immediately to mind.

For example, Mayfield features run of the mill apartment buildings that routinely top eighty stories, something that isn't all that common. These were made possible by new building tools and techniques as well as cheaper, stronger building materials that have made such large buildings more feasible for more and different purposes.

In turn, these buildings are serviced by state of the art energy concerns, mostly advanced solar and wind modules (experimental models of which are seen clustered together in Metal X) and solarized highways and parking lots.

Clearly, there hasn't been focus on these issues, but they are there. Plus some more obvious examples; hydration ovens, the flying cars, holographic displays, powered armor, and anything having to do with the interfacers.

Which brings me to a lot of people's biggest tech question: the phones. Why, I am asked, do we not see the characters texting? Why are phones and palmtops separate units when we have the iPhone today? And why aren't they smaller?

The texting issue, I will admit is my prejudice: I personally hope that the culture of constant texting actually won't last 60 years. With the rise of voice over IP, and the fact that we now have programs designed to write what we're saying into a text and to read our texts to us, I think it might not be too much to venture that the new cool thing will be Voice Instant Messaging in Real Time. That's not crotchety old man speak, I fully expect it to be called that without irony.

The separation of phone and computer thing is linked intrinsically with the size question. My vision here, which I've never really had need to go into detail with, is phone-as-peripheral. Assuming texting will be relegated in the future to quick messages instead of conversations, and assuming a palm-top is ubiquitous enough to be sold in cheapo versions at dollar stores, all a phone needs to be is a speaker, a bone conduction mic, and maybe a screen large enough to show the incoming call.

The unit can then be plugged into a computer for uploading info, programming in numbers, etc. The internet capable computer takes over all other duties with the phone being a 'dumb phone', i.e. a phone that needs the computer to think for it.

The computer, however, can't get much smaller. Why? The screen, for one. The iPhone's screen is okay for your smart phoning needs, but eventually, people are going to want to not squint forever, especially as you spend more and more time consulting it. Also, at some point, people are going to want to carry real computers with them and will want something more portable than a tablet (which is fine for the college student, not so fine for say, the jogger).

Of course, we currently live n the age were processor speed doubles every 18 months (give or take), but at least in the Descendants universe, quantum computing is still a laboratory science. Not because it's impossible, but because the costs make it unmarketable. Therefore, a palmtop will still fit in your palm.

To address the screen issue, yes, there are video glasses, we've even seem them in the series, but much like 3-d glasses, they're not comfortable for most people and pretty much right out for people who still have glasses.

The other big thing is that we've seen characters buying physical media where today there is more and more of a push toward cloud computing and digital delivery. The reason for this two pronged: One: it serves the plot better to have the characters actually going out and purchasing things instead of downloading them. Two, I don't think physical media will fully die.

Why? Ownership. Over the past few years, the concept of ownership of a movie of software has become the stuff that requires a witch doctor and chicken bones to figure out. The companies want you to license these things for a specific type of personal presentation or use, and conveniently, this removes the rights to fair use. I'm taking a gamble on this and saying that there is or has been a movement by 2070 toward protecting consumer rights of digital products and part of that is the continued availability of physical media.

Which, if you'll excuse a little cockiness, means I have given these issues some thought. The fact of the matter though is that I'm not really trying to offer a best guess at where we'll be by 2070. Rather, I'm writing a superhero story that takes place 'exactly as far in the future as it takes for me to be able to justify powered armor cops, standing field generators, and science discovering the astral plane. The only number I cared much about was 2076, because that's the tricentennial.

That isn't to say I'm not trying to build an exciting and coherent world. I do think about these things, and want the reader to enjoy what they learn about it. But they 'll only ever earn much attention when characters interact with them. And every issue, bit by bit, new things come out, are revealed, or I've just seen them in Popular Science and thought they were neat. Big things. For example, in plotting the newest Whitecoat mini, I realized that I've never mentioned the huge seawall protecting New York's boroughs from rising sea levels, or the carbon capture towers.

And for some childish points, I'd like to add that Batman Beyond is set sixty years in the future from the 'modern day' of the DCAU series, and has roughly the same tech level—right down to 'missing' texting. My tech is vastly different form theirs though, except for the flying car ;).

So rest assured that as I continue to write, more and more of the world will be revealed. And when 2070 comes around, I will be wrong, and that will be okay.

Teasing for Year 5

2010-07-25T23:06:00.007-04:00

Itwon't be long before Descendants Year 5 will be upon us, bringingwith it all new plots, characters and changes to the status quo inthe Descendants Universe. So as I did with Year 3, I'm going to giveyou, the readers a sneak peek at the stuff I've got on tap that willlikely (no promises) show up in Year 5.

Findout what I've got in store of you under the cut. POSSIBLESPOILERS!

Thelast three issues of Volume 4 are going to be a ride by themselves,blowing wide open two mysteries that have been with the series sincethe beginning. And bringing several of the seemingly unconnectedplotlines set up in late Volume 3/Volume 4 together, showing exactlywhy this volume was called Confluence.

Butwhat's in store for Volume 5? Well...

NewPlots!

TOMEReturns

Inthe two-parter that opens Volume 5, including milestone issueDescendants#50,the quiet machinations of Project TOME come to a head that no one inthe Descendants Universe will see coming. When it's all done, TOMEwill reclaim it's place as the primary threat to the Descendantsunder the new, sinister management of MorganFlintand the Boardof Trustees.

FaerieExpanded

What'sbeen seen of Faerie so far was just a taste of a world just as vastand diverse as our own. While the demon lord of Auckshuldand Colos of the Sai'n'shree attempt to return to Earth,a new threat grows in the part of that world that we're familiar withas an ancient power returns to the world from...

TheOrrery of Worlds

You'veheard of the Green world, I've hinted at the Yellow World, and Earthhas been called the Blue World, but that's just the tip of theiceberg. In Volume 5, we learn more about the Yellow World and meetthe denizens of the wintry land of Air and Darkness, the Black World.

Lifeat Home

Evenwith the scope of their foes growing, the Descendants remain humanand life does go home. Melissa's misuse of her powers comes to ahead, Kareem and Desiree's relationship heats up, Laurel startsdating, Cyn's private war with the Sneak Thief continues, and whathappens between Ian and Alexis has to be seen to be believed. Pluson-going plots for Juniper, Lisa, Kay and JC.

NewHeroes!

Meetand get to know Urban Amazon, The Prismatic Champion, Anansi, Coyote,The Sandwich Man, The Reluctant Wizard-Man, and Due Diligence. Andget reacquainted with the Kin, the Outliers, and an old favorite witha new name and look: Sola. Plus,meet the man you've only heard of and seen in publicity spots:Infinity.

NewVillains!

IntroducingMorgan Flint and the Board, the Aqua-Marine, Fourth of Julie, andDoctor Atmosphere.

NewMinis!

TheSecond String

Anew mini featuring the Whitecoat and some of New York's heroes.Following Networked, 'Coat, Stunner and Screech Owl along with UrbanRanger (now Urban Amazon) have started up a weekly poker game wherethey meet to share information, commiserate over their roles, andtell their best stories of crime fighting.

Vorpal:Gyre and Gimble

Astold by Mr. Voice and the woman herself, this mini recounts the storyof Zoe McNamara, a depressed young woman with no prospects in lifebecame forged in a war she never fought in into the one woman armythat tore a bloody swathe through Europe and how it came to be that aremorseless assassin came to befriend the sainted son of a wealthyFrench doctor with powers of his own.

TheSpider's Seven

Adark future is coming that the world's heroes will not be able tostop for if they try, they will perish. So it falls to the capriciousAnansi to gather a team of reluctants and ne'er-do-wells to save thesuperheroes. They have little information and even less trust amongthem as even their leader offers more questions than answers.

IsAnansi a man or is he a god? And who or what is Oblivion?

ANew Oneshot!

Red,Whitecoat and Blue

Brooklyn'sDefender only wanted to sit back and enjoy the tricentennial with hisbest girl, but of course, the world doesn't work that way for him.Instead, he finds himself mentoring a government superhero who'snever done the job before against a little woman out to make a bigstink out of her own jingoism.

Introducing:Sam Maxx: The Patriotic Man and Fourth of Julie.

MoreLiedecker Institute!

Thekids are alright and their limited series will continue with plentyof high school drama, character driven stories, and the occasionalevil plot. For example: who knew that Eddie would be so sought afterby bad dudes with syringes? Or that one of the teachers might be asupervillain?

Commentary: Issue #45 Post-Game

2010-07-18T20:57:00.006-04:00

It has been a loooong time since I made a post here and it's about time I got around to it. Luckily, I just finished Descendants #45 'The Gremlin and the Game', (link) so it does give me something to write about. And, as it turns out, there are a bunch of interesting things that came out of this seemingly standalone issue.

So let's get to it. The full lowdown under the cut.

The core idea behind this story has been around since around the time I did the arcade scene in 'The Beach Episode'. The idea, as it started out, was that it would be the first 'on screen' introduction of the villain, 'Jack'. He would ransom players in the immersion pods and the Descendants would have to link into the game to save the day.

What kept this from coming into being, was my lack of interest in Jack as a character. Plain and simple, he's just a technopath, much like the one shown in 'All Girls Want Bad Boys'. And while I contend that any power can be made interesting with proper characterization, Jack, who was created as a one-off joke about the low-grade villains Life Savers, Inc had been fighting off screen, just wasn't worth building up in my opinion.

So the idea was shelved, only to come back to me in year three, when the plan was for Duvall to hire a hacker to lock a specific target (one Tome wanted to kidnap and the Descendants wanted to recruit to the school) in the virtual world of Deathgate in order to observe their reactions.

This too fell by the wayside as I decided I preferred a slow burn on the Seven Daughters of Duvall plot, establishing Joy and Charity in particular as lasting characters before laying out their father's plans. Be ready for this to take the stage in Year 5!

Eventually though, there came a time in Year 4, where I looked back and noticed that a) the supporting cast that weren't Tink hadn't gotten any love lately, and b) the magical world had been similarly ignored as I focused on the whole Confluence arc.

Therefore, when it turned out that I needed an issue to fit between the marriage arc and 'The Juniper Chronicles', I linked this old plot to Faerie, which in turn brought Lisa into the story.

In doing so, I earned a reason to flesh out the popular culture of the Descendants Universe, creating thirty new companies, shows, comics, and characters on display at the convention. Some made it into the story (like Iron Woobie, a nod to the trope of the same name and to the first HARDAC episode of Batman: the Animated Series (woobie is Barbara Gordon's teddy bear).

I also got the chance to expand on Faerie. As said before, what was seen in Rise of Morganna was a setting only about the size of Europe, whereas Faerie is actually the size of a planet. The expansion here though was a bit more subtle; we establish that gremlins are not fairies, but a 'native' species, implying that the trolls, ogres and demons aren't native. Their origins will be dealt with likely in Year 6, which isn't to say that we won't see more of Faerie and soon.

The characters of Ron and Jaime were originally going to be just standard, scared innocents for the heroes to save. In writing them though, and the action at the convention, I couldn't help but think about how, in most stories, geeks are always shown freaking out when the 'game turns real', while the cool, jockish action hero just mans up and punches evil in the face.

I decided that I wanted to go in a different direction. For the convention goers, I decided that once people learned that they weren't in physical danger, this emergency would turn into a fun game. But for Ron and Jamie, after the initial shock is worn off, they would be capable of being inspired to heroism alongside Our Heroes. I'm not entirely sure how well that worked, but here's hoping it did.

Ron and Jamie's future isn't set in stone yet, but I would like to add them to the supporting cast in the future.

All in all, this issue was fun to write, especially getting to go geek with all of the convention trappings and the adorable fear on the gremlin's part. I hope that it was even half as much fun to read.

Until next time!

LOL Deaths

2010-05-09T20:49:00.000-04:00

If you're a comic reader, by now you're familiar with the concept of Women in Refrigerators.

For the uninitiated, this is a 'technique' used by some writers wherein they kill off a loved one (usually a woman) of the protagonist purely to get an emotional response out of them, usually to inspire them to go out and get revenge on the perpetrator and in the process move the plot along.

Gail Simone coined the term as the name of a website in response to a Green Lantern comic in which Major Force kills GL's girlfriend and leaves her body in the fridge for our hero to find―apparently because he wanted to catch a beating from someone whose power is to hit you with anything he can imagine.

The whole thing's been debated, pointed out, and overused for the past decade, so I won't dwell on it.

Besides, there is a new kind of lazy, disrespectful writing to bitch about. I call this phenomena 'LOL Deaths'. Find out what they are and why they need to be stopped under the cut.

SPOILER WARNING for Second Coming, Necrosha, and several older comics.

Where Women in Refrigerators is meant to manipulate characters, LOL Deaths are meant to manipulate the audience, usually into believing that a) a situation or villain is more dangerous than they actually are or b) that a crossover event was important.

Often, these deaths are characterized by the dying character being a D-lister or lower, usually a character who was only recently reintroduced in the franchise in that arc or the one before. Such characters are rarely if ever mourned for longer than the page on which they died, and if they even get a funeral, it will only serve as a backdrop for characters to discuss the ongoing event or aftermath of it, completely unrelated to the deceased.

LOL Death victims rarely get last words because they're usually killed instantly. If they do get last words, it's because they're boasting or doing something stupid so as to make the kill ironic to the point of near comedy and disrespect for them. Expect the killer to make a crack about it.

Reactions to these deaths, as noted, usually happen on the same page (or the page where the body is discovered) and nowhere else in the series if at all. These are usually limited to the character closest to them screaming their name and being restrained by another character who tells them that the plot is more important than comforting their dying friend/love. Inevitably, the character agrees and never mentions that person again.

There's a fifty percent chance that once the body drops, we the audience never sees them again, leading to the illusion that they're just left to rot there. If they're lucky, if there's enough of the body left (this is a super powered murder we're talking about here) someone will close their eyes or cover them with a sheet before forgetting about them forever.

The most lucky of these will get a memorial story, usually written by a different writer. Expect these to be back-up stories or parts of anthologies where they're used as filler. A true LOL Death will never get a memorial issue or one shot; that implies that editorial actually gives a crap about the character, which is the anti-thesis of a LOL Death.

Examples and Analysis

Here are a few examples of character deaths in the last three years and a breakdown of what makes them LOL Deaths or not. Once again, fair warning that spoilers abound.

1) Bill Foster (Goliath/Black Goliath) in Civil War. Among the many, many other sins against comics perpetrated by Mark Millar's Civil War event, it also manages to execute an almost pitch perfect LOL Death.

Black Goliath was a short lived replacement for Hank Pym who served an even shorter stint as his own hero before going into comic book limbo. So of course, he would be the man essentially sitting at Captain America's right hand when a big event came up. Honestly, he should have seen it coming.

In the only actually exciting battle of the main book of the crossover, Black Goliath tempts fate by pulling off an awesome move involving a tanker truck, spouting a one liner about it, and paying for it near instantly by way of having a van sized hole blown through him by an evil robot clone of Thor.

Bill lucked out though. He got a funeral in the main book itself! A humiliating funeral where he was stuffed into a tarp and buried in giant form while Tony Stark recaps the plot and foreshadows all over the place. We never heard from Bill Foster again.

Wikipedia says Bill's nephew took up the name, but have you heard of him? I thought not.

2) Diamond Lil, Onyxx, and Wither in Necrosha. Let's face it: Necrosha was made of this trope. It was advertised as being conceptualized by Chris Kyle and Craig Yost, two writers who used this device so much in New X-men that the tagline of Necrosha was “From the Murderers of Mutants”.

Seeing as the X-men franchise averages three of these a year, it almost seems natural to base an event around all those pointlessly murdered characters coming back and... dying needlessly. Seriously, Characters like Banshee and Pyro appear solely so we can see Cyclops blast them to dust again in an event where nothing important happened at all.

Not that nothing happened. Namely, people died. For no reason. First, we have Diamond Lil and Onyxx who died from bum-rushing a team of villains, all of whom (Except Blink) have the explicit power of 'kill people'. They die instantly, with Onyxx literally exploding (something we've never seen Wither's power do to someone). Both get the obligatory “First name!” shout and Madison Jefferies, a man who can animate machinery to kick people's asses, has to be restrained from running head long into Team Death over Lil.

Lil actually managed to get a touching send off in the Nation X anthology (because an important character loved her, you see), and both plus Meld (who died slow so we could have this scene in Second Coming) were then subjected to Bill Foster level humiliation as Cyclops shows their pictures and bemoans fate not because three people are dead, but because three more numbers ticked off the 'mutants left until end of franchise' ticker Joe Quesada seems to have mandated to be mentioned in every comic with an X in the title and now Plan B for reversing Decimation (apparently a massive, unprotected mutant orgy) won't work because it totally would have with 180 or whatever ridiculous number Marvel thinks is a minority.

Another death in Necrosha was former Hellion, Wither. His isn't a LOL Death, despite having all the earmarks: a d-lister returning for a big event, no funeral, not even mentioned when the mutant counter went down. For one, he manages to take a whole page to die, complete with dialogue detailing why he should die and a chance offered to him to stand down and not die. Even though he did nothing in the rest of the crossover besides kill Onyxx (who I didn't even know had a real name until I wrote this post) and bitching and whining at Blink and Eli Bard, he still managed to have an (off camera) effect on Elixir, thus making his death horribly pointless (especially since Kyle and Yost talked forever about having plans for him) but not a LOL Death.

3) Steve Rogers (Captain America) in Captain America #25. Unlike the other alums on this list, you'll notice that you didn't need to use Wikipedia to find out who this guy is. Which in and of itself should be enough to tell you that Cap's death was likely not a LOL Death. In fact, this event makes my list as an example of what might, in fact, be an anti-LOL Death.

The actual death, in Captain America #25 had all the earmarks: Coming off a big event, Cap is literally gunned down in the street while handcuffed. There is a small comfort in seeing that Cap was shielding the officer walking with him, but it didn't really make the death look more respectful of the character. Things got worse as we learn that Cap did not in fact die taking a bullet for the officer, but was shot by his brainwashed love interest.

But in the wake of Cap's death, things started to happen that do not happen with a LOL Death. First was the aftermath of his death: it was mentioned in other books, characters reacted to it franchise wide, and there was not just a funeral issue, but a funeral mini-series. His comic didn't even end, it continued telling the story of the aftermath and his immediate replacement.

In the end, the entire event turned out to be a two year Death and Rebirth storyline, culminating in Steve coming back and better than ever. While I'm still not exactly enamored with the storyline, the end result not only had meaning and weight in the world, but turned out to be respectful to Cap's character. It was definitely not a LOL Death.

Quick Examples

- New Warriors members Microbe, Namorita and Night Thrasher in Civil War. C-listers that show up to trigger an event with their deaths, no bodies, no burial, no funeral and universally reviled in universe to this day.

- 40+ students of the Xavier Institute in New X-men. Killed off by a rocket attack following Decimation as they were literally already leaving the series, got a funeral, most still don't have names. The aforementioned Kyle and Yost still joke about this scene and admit they did it because they didn't know what to do with the characters.

- Tattoo/Longstrike in New Warriors vol 4. Depowered mutant from Morrison's run with one story under her belt, killed in first arc of a new (and short lived) series.

- Banshee in Deadly Genesis. Killed to show off a new, overpowered villain while failing at an act of heroism. Only his daughter seems to remember or care, corpse bought back for some more humiliation in Necrosha.

- Ariel in Second Coming. This might be premature as it happened very recently, but this is what the X-verse does to characters. Killed by missile attack while in a jeep with effective immortals Wolverine and X-23. It's not clear that she's dead or if she used her power to escape, but Wolverine doesn't even care enough to check. No one even screamed her name.

Why it's a Problem

Cut to bare bones, it's just lazy writing, plain and simple. It's very easy to show that something's dangerous by having it kills someone, it takes actual skill to make it clearly dangerous without.

But the use of red shirts is also lazy writing, but not so egregious because no one is attached to a red shirt with no name. I can guarantee you that every character made by Marvel or DC has a fan. When you toss that character out for a LOL Death, it's disrespectful to the character and unwelcome by those fans.

What's more, the entire point of having the death is to emotionally manipulate the reader. But to people with no connection to that character, it's just another redshirt. So you're either making a reader mad, or failing at the whole point of the exercise in the first place!

Beyond that, you face another problem: someday another writer is going to want to use the character you killed. Everyone has a random D-lister that holds a place in their heart (NXM's Hellion, Loa and Mercury for me) and because of your shock death, they will have to resurrect that character instead of just pulling them out of comicbook limbo. Resurrections are notoriously never clean or pretty storywise and fans hate the convoluted plots that spin from them.

So just lay off, guys. Think up a new method of getting some emotional torque and drive that into the ground for a while.

Post-Game: Descendants #43 and #44

2010-04-20T19:12:00.000-04:00

As I often point out, some arcs and storyline take longer to come to fruition than others. The Ian/Alexis relationship arc is one of my biggest examples of this besides George (more on him later) and it's far and away the longest running non-core plot thread in the series.

Starting all the way back in Descendants #2 and getting at least two issues devoted to it each volume, the relationship has had it's ups and downs and hopefully meant something special to the readers. Descendants #43 “Love You Madly” and its follow-up, #44 “It's Official!” mark a sort of half time in their arc. Those familiar with comic book relationships may think you know where it's going. Don't count me out just yet.

In this post, I explore the history of The Descendants' alpha couple, from preconception to print. All that, under the cut.

In the beginning, there were Chaos and Darkness; but not as you know them. As detailed in another post, the original Chaos and Darkness were just self insert characters for myself and whatever girl I was crushing on in High School at the moment in high school. Not my proudest moment, but luckily, C&D were less 'us with superpowers' and more life embellished characters.

Chaos had my name, but he was fearless and kind of a deadpan snarker (while I am and will always be more of a pungeon master with plenty of fear). Darkness was likewise only like my erstwhile lady loves in name and appearance. In action, she was a mix between Gargoyles' Elisa Maza and Spider-man's Black Cat. Still, they went to our high school, had our families, and shared hobbies, favorite foods and CD collections with us.

Eventually, I grew out of that phase, but Chaos and Darkness had made a place for themselves in my heart. Keeping their power sets and big chunks of their personalities, I moved them to a new setting; the far flung future of the year 2990 where a secret war with dimensional aliens (later the inspiration for Faerie) landed Issac Smith, the grandson of a famous war propagandist became the Chosen one to wield the Chaos Band, the source of the Chaotic Energy.

In an odd couple style twist, he was forced to learn the functions of the Bands as partner to the by the book and straitlaced former Airforce Major, Alexandra Keyes. It was a buddy cop movie except they fall in love in the end. Also lasers and aliens.

But it didn't stick. Mostly because I continued to insist on the mystical backstory of the Bands in the tech-only 2990 setting, bogging the whole thing down. Further, I remained distracted by the Digimon-esque mega-forming concept. Eventually I forgot the whole thing and played Dungeons and Dragons.

When I came back, before attempting Elementals, which eventually became Descendants, I wrote the first chapter of Impactor. Impactor was the story of a world where certain people were born with gifts. These gifts had terrible names, one and all, but the one belonging to Ian Smythe (name changed to make reference to Ian Malcolm and Alistair Smythe) was called Impactor, and was basically, the same density control Ian has in Descendants. In this story, he was recruited as part of Alexandra “Alex” Keyes's superhuman law enforcement division.

I lost interest in that one pretty quickly. So quickly in fact that I don't even have enough interest to keep blogging about it. So let's move on. Elementals did not include Chaos and Darkness at all, but did include an old, married couple as mentors. When I de-aged the mentors to use in Descendants, that couple was de-aged into Ian and Alexis.

At this point, allow me a tangent:

There has been some complaining and criticism of my decision to make Descendants #0 start after the fight at the Academy and Ian's house being burned down.

Let me say this: Descendants #-1 exists. And it is not good. I wrote everything from when Alexis knocks on Ian's door after two years of being MIA to the explosion that destroyed Ian's house. It is on my computer right now. Perhaps one day I'll rewrite it, but the version that I did write will never, ever see the light of day. I will explain this in another post, but I put it here because #-1 features a moment in Ian/Alexis history that I consciously omitted.

You see, in conceptualization, I knew they had a history together, but I hadn't solidified it by the time I started writing. This led to one version where Alexis had disconnected herself from her friends because Ian declared his unrequited love for her at her college graduation.

I'm going to say that again so you can see how freaking brutal this idea was: Alexis broke off contact with Ian because he said he loved her. Not only that, but she broke off contact with her other best friend, Laurel to make it a clean break.

Thank god I didn't make that canon.

The idea was to start things off as a bad day for Ian and make it worse, but the idea that Alexis would bring down doom on the guy whose heart she crushed made her pretty irredeemable. The canon fact that she bought doom down on two friends she abandoned just gives her something extra to atone for.

I also toyed with the idea of there being absolutely no tension between them. The idea there was that they had been like brother and sister before and now they were just noticing one another. Some of this lingered in the writing of Descendants #2, but it was one of those 'characters act on their own' type things. The fact that Ian remembered, after years apart, what Alexis's favorite road trip foods were was, to me too sweet to ignore.

Commentary: Rise of Morganna Mini-series

2010-03-09T22:31:00.000-05:00

I wrote Rise of Morganna more than three years ago and until I went back to edit it, I hadn't read it since the day I completed it. In fact, when it came time to read it for my editing project, I dreaded it more than anything. Why? Well in a nutshell, I wasn't sure it was very good.

In this post, I talk about what I was trying to do with Rise, my misgivings, and mostly about the setting I sketched out in that series. All that under the cut.

At the end of the arc that introduced her, Mystic Spiral, I 'got rid' of Morganna by having Sky Tyrant blow her up while she was trying to teleport away from the West Truman Bridge. The issue and the arc ended with an ominous green portal the side of a pinprick appearing in the river below.

From that point all, Morganna's return in “A Magictech Crisis” with a group of monsters from Faerie was in the cards, but I hadn't really thought of actually chronicling Morganna's time in Comic Book Limbo. It wasn't until my friends (at the time my only readers) expressed their love for the character that I decided to give Morganna her own mini.

At the time, I was already writing the Whitecoat one-shot and the idea of The Descendants as a comic book universe with minis, one-shots and giant sized issues was already an idea I was pitching to my friends. It wasn't really that original, many fan-fiction sites like House of Ideas lay themselves out in much the same way. Even Star Harbor Nights includes one-off stories. So writing a mini, essentially a separate issue written over a longer period, wasn't an alien concept to me.

What was an alien concept to me was Faerie. The original plan was for Morganna to come back with a full villain team of non-human supers. In fact, throughout the mini, you see this forming with the motes, the spriggans and the troll being brought together. There was also going to be a daoine who later became Aenix from “Demonology”. I never intended to actually go to another world.

But my friends loved the idea of seeing Morganna so much, I was under considerable pressure to do the mini. So I started writing with no world in mind whatsoever, making it up as I went along.

There was another factor in this as well; I already have a fantasy setting I write in; Ere, and I poured most of my deeper ideas on metaphysics and magic into it; I didn't want to have Faerie steal from Ere. Not only was I writing blind, but I was writing with one hand behind my back. The memory of this is largely the reason I dreaded re-reading the mini.

In the end, I think I managed fairly well to tell the story I was telling (except that one shameful riddle about the 'e'. (I'm not good at riddles), but that I did a serious disservice to the world, which I've now given real thought to. So I'd like to use this post as to explain and retcon a few things before they're done in the Descendants Universe concerning Faerie:

First of all, Faerie is a separate dimension, also called the Green World. It has it's own physics that is highly malleable by belief and willpower. It's because of this that humans can survive in Faerie: they think they can, so they do. This also makes spellcasters, people who both possess a powerful will and are capable of more flexible belief, incredibly powerful there.

Thousands of years ago, mages traveled freely to and from faerie and visa-versa. Then an unspecified event (yes, I know what it was, no I won't tell you) caused them to leave, abandoning powerful magic in the process. It was then that a colossal, magical plant called the Thorn was planted in the Vault of the sky to strip the powers of invading humans. (I admit it. I'm a tease).

In the present day, it's even difficult for Faeries to come to our dimension (the Blue World) except in freak accidents.

Second, and this links up with the point about belief based physics: The Laws all the Faeries are so adamant about literally are physical laws in Faerie—but only because the faeries think they are. They literally can't die by violence from another faerie because neither faerie believes they can.

Morganna turns out to be exempt from the laws because she just as strongly believes that she can kill faeries and can stop trolls from regenerating. In a world like faerie, delusion can a god make.

Finally, I'd like to point out that the area Morganna landed and traveled in wasn't the whole of Faerie. It was an island roughly the size of Europe and comparable in terms of what percentage of Faerie it encompasses. The Realms are largely wild, open frontier where different groups are trying to carve out their own existence. By extension, the trolls and ogres aren't indigenous to the island. Further stories will reveal other places in the world of Faerie and the cultures therein.

These are all points that, if I was writing Rise today, would have been included, but weren't simply because when I was writing, they didn't exist. What came of this is Through the Looking Glass style randomness that now that I've reread it makes sense for Morganna.

One last note; astute readers will notice that Morganna was trained by two women who ultimately died in witch trials. Witch trials which, in the Descendants Universe, were caused by Morganna herself. Just a little tidbit I thought people would enjoy.

Until next time.

Post-Game: Descendants #42: Metal X

2010-01-27T15:37:00.001-05:00

This week, I concluded what is likely the story I've sat on for the longest time from inception to publishing. The story of the Metal X Saga spans all the way back to the early days of the Tink and Warrick relationship and is likely the most 'mutated' story that actually saw the light of day.

In this post, I'll talk a bit about the creation of Christina Carlyle and how it related to the development of the Metal X storyline. It all begins under the cut.

Descendants #15: Never Simple was a cheap-shot at Valentine's Day issues where I teased a dating storyline and then blindsided the readers with a story about cyborgs nerds. It was also to be the second act of a three part romance storyline for Warrick and Cyn.

Yes, at the time, my intention was still to get Warrick and Cyn together again romantically. The first step in this was the Elizabeth Von Stoker storyline where Warrick dated and lost a girl because of both his and her personal ideas about heroism. Back at the end of Ladies of Ragnarok (Descendants #9), I had a very sweet moment of Cyn comforting Warrick over this.

The love interest in Never Simple was going to be a greater 'threat' to that relationship, namely the fact that the new love interest would actually have a good relationship with Warrick, at least for a while. TVTropes readers will recognize this trope as The Paolo. The original plan was for Warrick to fall for Tink, Tink to fall for Warrick and then in the Metal X Saga, a few issues later, Tink would be hurt, learn who Warrick was, and they would break up, leaving Tink a grave security risk for the Descendants.

Essentially, the trick was making the audience and Cyn believe that Tink could really be the one. So I designed her in grand superhero girlfriend fashion (Heroes Want Redheads) and introduced her in the tradition of superhero loved ones; the non-romantic date. She was also very geeky to get along well with Warrick and her techno-wizard tendencies made Cyn's line in Ladies of Ragnarok (about Warrick needing to find a girl with powers) seem like foreshadowing.

The thing is though, that I did a great job selling myself on the relationship too. The weird, geeky dates cooked up by two teens that didn't really know how to date were adorable and hit kind of close to home for me, and it wasn't long before I was thinking about more ways to develop Tink and possibly use her on her own in the same way I do Whitecoat.

In short, I sort of fell in love with their being in love, which in turn spurred me to develop Cyn in a different direction, making her issue not so much that she had a crush on Warrick, but that she was very possessive of all the people close to her. Given her past and personality, I feel this actually makes more sense for the character and made for good stories.

But what to do with the Metal X story? Originally, it was turning the 'evil guy with identical powers' trope in a slightly different direction where the powers weren't so similar as it first appeared. Metal X was going to be a brutal and relentless Enforcer from Tome, trying to capture Warrick.

The featured fight wouldn't' have been so much of a fight as a cross-city chase with an implacable enemy dogging Warrick and destroying everything in his path to do so. Tink and Warrick wouldn't have separated during the chase and instead, Tink would have been subjected to an utter horror show of villainous strength.

In the end, she would have been so frightened that she couldn't bear to even be near Warrick for fear of something like that happening again and their break up and the subsequent issue of her knowing his secret would have weighed heavily in the future. (A twisted version of this, with Warrick being the one afraid, readers might recognize as being part of Warrick's vision in Descendants #39: 2095)

But by the time I was writing the junior prom, I no longer wanted to pull the trigger and no long felt that I even could, thematically. By then, Tink had already proven to be brave and resourceful enough to stand up against Alloy in a building made of nothing but exposed metal and having her be afraid or Metal after that was against character. Besides that, I was leading into A Magitech Crisis and Metal X would certainly be overshadowed by that. The entire story went on the shelf, but I continued to think hard on it.

Somewhere along the way, and I don't recall when, I hit upon the idea of Metal X as a Whitecoat villain instead of a Descendants rogue. I had a very complicated rhyme and reason why the Type VII nanites were so dangerous that Alan Roschard felt he needed to risk his life to destroy them, but no plans at the time to write his origin story in anything but flashback, so having Metal X's metal control being nanite based instead of psionic allowed me to have Type VII come back to haunt him.

From there it got a big hairier. I had a villain with great visuals (When he sends out those tendrils think about it in terms of a silvery Macross Missile Massacre), but I had just finished The Whitecoat: Networked and didn't feel like doing another involved miniseries to introduce Metal X.

The idea got shelved again and in that time, I just kept flashing back to my original idea and a particular sequence that I really loved: the scene where Warrick and Tink are knocked from the roof and Warrick must reveal his identity to Tink or else let them both die.

To me, that moment was so perfect and felt so iconic that I couldn't let it go. Finally, I found my back to the wall with several game changing plots coming up around Descendants #50 and I felt I really had to move on this plot if I wanted to do it at all in the next few years.

The reworking is exactly what you read in Descendants #42, with the attack and reveal now serving to cement the bond between Warrick and Tink instead of breaking them apart. Metal X also managed to be 'handed off' as a rogue from Whitecoat to Warrick (and as I've already shown in Descendants #39, he becomes a nemesis for Warrick in much the same way Shine is to Cyn.). The entire story now also ties into the Game of Kings with Talbot being revealed to have recruited Metal X shortly after the Siege storyline.

And that should just about do it for this post. Until next time, I will continue to create as I speak.

Commentary: Descendants Annual #3

2010-01-14T15:12:00.000-05:00

I use all the annuals to basically touch base with the characters and remind the readers where all the pieces are on the board. It also lets me set up teasers for later plot points. Annual #3 also had the added duty of doing all this while getting the reader ready for a volume that looked like it had no general direction.

Discussion on the hows and whys under the cut.

To understand what was going on, you have to know what came before and what's coming up.

Volume 1 was a single story: the heroes meet, get to know each other, face their first major villain, then defeat Tome and the Academy. It was really just setting the table, establishing the rules, and getting to know the characters.

Volume 2 was about the team becoming a real team, establishing the world outside of Mayfield, and returning magic to the world. It also helped usher in and shape some of the more important relationships.

In Volume 3, the driving force was the school; finding the kids on the Tome list and getting the school up and running. Aces High got it's feet under it, and Tome tried to make some moves but failed. The theme was one of the team trying new things and getting moments on their own.

And then I came up with the Game of Kings. The idea here was that most of Volume 4 would be standard comic book fare with the major villains working on consolidating their power in the background. It would all lead up to... well that would be telling; but the point was that Volume 4 wouldn't have a driving plot or a mega-arc (Mystic Spiral, Devil Came down to Mayfield) in it.

To counter this, I knew I had to keep up the promise that something big and plot shaking was coming. Thus, Annual #3 teases no less than three (four if you look fast!) major villains. If you've read ahead, you notice that I've advanced both the plot with the Gold siblings, and the Morganna plot. I am ignoring Warpstar on purpose and for very good reasons.

The Gold plot reminds me of something I didn't add to the commentary on #36: Tome has been shown to be recruiting a lot lately and a lot more in the near future. Originally, this was going to be Thunderhead recruiting these people and not Colt, implying that Brother Wright was bringing in all these new people.

I scrapped that because I like the Aces as they are (I might need to do something about Fellgaze though) and didn't want to screw up their chemistry with new characters. This ended up dove tailing nicely with what I was doing with Tome.

What is it that I'm doing with Tome? Well you'll have to wait and find out.

Until then, I shall continue to create as I speak.

Commentary: Descendants #36: Let's Go!

2010-01-09T15:34:00.001-05:00

As mentioned in the commentary for Descendants #35, I realized that I had room for two more stories at the end of Year 3 than I originally thought. One of these became the Magical World story, “Demonology”, the other became “Let's Go!”, a comedic issue based on a joke a friend and I shared while talking about The Descendants.

The story of how this quirky tale came to be, under the cut.

“Let's Go!” got its start from a conversation I was having with a friend about how no mainstream comic today could ever get away with naming the villain “Magneto” in this day and age. Let's face it, it's such a wonderfully goofy silver age name that no writer trying to be taken seriously would think “Well, his power is magnetics, so let's see... magnet-o? Magneto! Of course!”

We agreed that it's a shame that so many people involved in comics have abandoned the parts that made them the most fun and memorable. In homage, I jokingly suggested a villain that absconds (We both love using older, less used words), with things with the perfectly sensible name of Abscondro.

The moment I said the name, we were both delighted. Ideas and pitches started flying as we fell into our usual spit balling sessions. Abscondro would be an all business, totally unironic character who would be something like a male Carmen Sandiego.

Very wisely, my friend pointed out that making Abscondro so serious sort of defeated the purpose of trying to tell a more fun oriented story. She suggested I give him a sidekick. I took this a step further by giving him a fan-girl seeking to become his sidekick instead.

Originally, the whole story was going to be Abscondro trying to do his thing with Vamanos showing up and ruining everything until he actually got fed up and tried to kill her. Besides the obvious issue of this just being a stock plot that, while funny, is pretty unexciting, it made Vamanos too annoying in my opinion. That and the fact that knowing a lot of fan-girls and being a reader of a lot of fan-fic, I don't think a modern fan-girl would be so passive about the whole thing.

So I went that extra step and actually made the plot about her getting him to act out one of her fan-fics for real with Abscondro being forced to play along if he wanted to get the big payday at the end.

Vamanos of course is the same Callie Krieger from Descendants #34 who we saw as part of Lily's girl posse. At the time, I did intend for her to become part of the supporting cast in a Liz Allan kind of way, but I had no intention of making her into a psionic, let alone Vamanos. That decision came very late in my decisions about “Let's Go!”.

I realized when I was designing Vamanos, that it would be sort of disingenuous for a series that sympathizes with nerds and fan-boys to present this rather shallow fan-girl gone nuts. But inspiration hit me that I actually did have a character in my cast who had ready-made motivations for this kind of desperate cry for attention and who I already intended to make sympathetic. So Callie became Vamanos and will be recurring despite so far only showing up in cameo at the party in “Descendants 2095”.

I have to admit there is on, subtle 'dumb blond' joke in here that some people may have missed: Callie took the name 'Vamanos' for her villainous persona, yet even with a perfect set up, she still says 'let's go' at least three times. Why? Because she doesn't know what Vamanos means, only that it sounds vaguely Spanish like the (not Spanish) Abscondro.

Speaking of Abscondro, he has no real name, race or description in the story, just a history, personality and motivation. This is entirely on purpose and no, I don't know who's under that mask. He's just Abscondro.

Look for both Callie and Abscondro to return in later issues. Until then, I shall continue to create as I speak.

Commentary: Descendants #35: Demonology

2010-01-06T18:22:00.001-05:00

As I'm in the process of editing back issues at the moment, I've decided to start my blog commentaries with the most recently edited issue; Descendants #35 “Demonology”.

Near the end of Year 3, I came to the horrified conclusion that I had miscalculated the number of issues left and now had 2 more issues to fill before the Annual. These situations where padding is needed is often a godsend when I don't feel constrained by my plants to move the plot and it lets me touch on concepts and characters that aren't immediately integral to the current story and character arcs.

Thus, I used the first of the 'extra' issues to address the magical world and on the often overlooked character of Laurel. More under the cut.

“Demonology” was originally going to be “A Study In Demonology”, a full title reference to the Hole song Celebrity Skin. While clunky, it referred to the Darlene/Rehenimaru relationship which I wanted to follow further, but lost as I got caught up in the characters of Aenix and Ecksion, who I used to tease some Faerie ecology.

Aenix is a daoine, which is a Celtic word for elf. The daoine of the Descendants universe are a cross between the very old 'fair folk' mythology when elves were scary, dangerous creatures of the night and the high elves popularized by Tolkien.

While they are graceful yet vicious creatures who appearance are just this side of the uncanny valley (With the big, black, reflective eyes and sharp teeth), they lack much in the way of magic powers or talents. Instead, they rely on skills and tool use above and beyond most other lesser faeries. In this capacity, they act as trackers, servants and bounty hunters for more powerful fey like demons.

Meanwhile, Ecksion is a flowbeast, a mollusk-like creature with limited shape changing ability. They don't use tools and are opportunity hunters. They breed by budding and their offspring as little more than non-sentient animals. Flowbeasts that dine on creatures with high magical capacity gain intelligence, becoming more powerful and intelligent with each such meal. It takes decades for a flowbeast to grow to humanoid intelligence and become capable of language.

Some intelligent faeries cultivate flowbeasts by feeding captives to them, neatly avoiding the Faerie rule preventing faerie races from killing one another. This practice is understandably unsettling to long lived fey.

The story also touched on the fate of Augustus Roe, who I left doomed to be the chosen one of the Book of Passions at the end of 4. His involvement was due largely to me knowing that Morganna and the Magical World would be absent for a while in Year 4, so I wanted to remind everyone he existed one last time.

Finally, there was one more major reason for this story: People wanted to see Laurel fight.

Ever since she talked about going out on her own to do some heroics back in “A Magitech Crisis”, people have been asking me when Laurel would get her time to shine. I only hope this was a debut worth the wait.

One more note on this issue: just like the issues before and probably after it; it was a huge mess when I went back to edit it. This time though, I didn't feel as bad about it though as I got to make a rewrite I've wanted to make here for quite a while. It's a line I hope becomes some sort of horribly tedious memetic mutation should The Descendants take off:

“This isn't conjuring. This is science!”

Until next time, I shall continue creating.

Origin of the Series: The Descendants

2010-01-02T14:08:00.008-05:00

This is a continuation of a previous post on my reflections of how I became a writer, stopped being a writer, and then came back to being one. That was a story about me. In some ways, so is this, but more accurately, it's a story about the events and ideas that gave birth to The Descendants.

If you'd like to read more, look under the cut.

College found me discovering a lot of new things I liked. I joined the anime club, started roleplaying, and with my shiny new high speed internet, I discovered webcomics. Not just discovered, but created one. With the artistic talents of my best friend, I created Ledgermain Comics, a misspelled fantasy romp that drew inspiration from RPGWorld, but usually gets compared (unfavorably) to Order of the Stick for it's highly meta treatment of the game world.

Ledgermain was a great part of my life. It allowed me to work with a dear friend on something that gave me my first taste of incredibly minor celebrity. We got to speak on a panel at a convention and made a lot of great friends and fans.

We've said this for years now, but we'd really love to continue it someday. Someday.

In any event, Ledgermain went on hiatus and I returned to my habit of writing and destroying short stories as I got to certain points and then petered out. There are probably a dozen ten to twenty page items on a disc somewhere where I tried and failed with new stories, mostly in the Ere setting, but a few that were set in space.

Around this time, my friends were starting a new roleplaying game in a new gaming system: HERO. It was set in the Xavier Institute with the cast of New X-men: Academy X. I held my nose and said 'yes' because I wanted to try the new system, quickly dashing off a basic concept of a character who was Magneto if he were a teen geek. Some of you, I sense, can see where this is going.

Just to get a feel for the setting, I went out and bought some of the comics where our 'classmates' had been lifted: New Mutants vol. 4. And I fell in love. It was a thoughtful teen drama with superpowers. I couldn't ask for anything better. And looking around the shop, I found another great teen book: Runaways, and another: Blue Beetle (Jamie Reyes). I wasn't really a comic book guy yet, but I was making a start.

I spent a few weeks sampling books, finding the ongoing House of M storyline odd, but interesting in the same way Age of Apocalypse was (I'm a sucker for AUs). And then it happened. I really should have seen it coming, because I was too happy with what was going on. House of M ended in an event called Decimation, which took out the corner of the Marvel Universe I cared about most. Not only that, but a pair of writers who acted like unruly frat boys on internet forums took over my favorite book (Academy X) and started killing off characters, many of whom the original creators had plans for, and cutting short storylines I'd been looking forward to.

This was done in order to clear the whole 'racism' angle off of superhuman registration so Marvel could make it a major 'ambiguous' issue in their Civil War storyline. I'm not going to go into the whole thing now, but the entire concept of Civil War annoyed me to no end. The fact that the government wanted to create a superhero army and this wasn't considered and evil plot just floored me.

I decided to vent this constructively and use the concept of how bad a plan a superhero army would be as the basis for my first ever National Novel Writing Month novel.

If you subscribe to the many worlds theory, that's exactly what I did too. I probably got five thousand words in, got bored and walked away from it and this blog is about genealogy.

But in this world? My internet cut out. For a month. Without it, I was left with only sporadic calls to my friends and a creeping sense of isolation. I started writing and came up with the first draft of my massive excoriation of Civil War. It was called Elementals.

It's no secret that The Descendants has a few jabs against Marvel in it. I've had Laurel talk about how stupid making a deal with the devil is, and the entire character of Wartorn is me lashing out at Mark Millar for being Mark Millar, but rest assured, Elementals was far, far more vitriolic and blatant.

Elementals was set fifty years after America built a super soldier army, which triggered a biological arms race, the cascade effect of which was pretty much Armageddon. Halfway through, a group of soldiers tried to rebel and convince their super-brothers to stop working for the government and work for the people. They were slaughtered. When the war ended, the nations exterminated their elementals.

See? Subtle.

Flash forward fifty years and we learn that the super soldier treatment ended up being hereditary. No one had thought to check this and suddenly, we had super soldier teens running around.

It also turns out that some of the ‘good’ elementals we thought were destroyed are still around and they take in some of the younger generation to teach them how to use their powers for the benefit of mankind and prevent attempts by the still-in-turmoil government from instituting super slavery again.

Again, Subtle.

Elementals was a screaming internet post with a narrative. After writing up the plot, I realized that that wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t a comic world or a story I loved, it was just an emotional lashing out at something I didn’t like and in that way, it wasn’t any better than the deconstructionism I’m annoyed by.

So I went to re-writes. This time, I started with what I wanted to do; a love letter to what I love about comics. Somewhere between the silly Silver Age, the Character driven Bronze Age, and the dramatic elements of the Post Modern I saw what I wanted: A central set of characters who would eventually function as a family (though many of its members would have real family). They would have pure motivation and while they weren’t drama/character growth immune, they wouldn’t wallow in it and drag down the comic. The relationships between the characters would be showcased just as much as their awesome powers and fight scenes.

Teen drama was a big part of it, in the vein of Kim Possible or early Buffy. Showing that the kids weren’t little soldiers, but people that wanted to do good in the world for whatever reason.

The mentors would also be able to relate to the younger generation; to guide them, clash with them and complement each other. Eventually, Chaos and Darkness (resurrected from my old high school stories with actual characteristics instead of being me and my ex-girlfriend) landed here and I resolved to make the mentors just as much main characters as the younger generation.

For the setting, I decided to bridge the real world with the fantastic. I had read about Project Montauk, carried out at the appropriately named Camp Hero, where urban legends say psionic powers were tested and other otherworldly things happened. I picked up the ball and ran like hell. In the Descendants-verse, those legends aren’t only real, but happened all over the world during and after WWII.

Not only that, but I exploited one odd flaw in sci-fi and old school genetics thinking: people expect the alterations they make to people to take effect instantly. Genetics do not work that way. It would take many, many generations before the results bore fruit.

Genetics don’t work the way they do in Descendants either, but bear with me.

This put the setting in the range of the fifth and sixth generations after The Greatest Generation (2070+) where a population explosion of powered people would take place. Conveniently, it also set the whole thing twenty minutes into the future and nicely around the time of America’s tricentennial.

Tome was created as the new enemy (more on this in another article) to take advantage of the ’secret testing’ conspiracy I’d created. I haven’t fully revealed their goals, but sharp eyed readers can guess.

And there you have it; Descendants from concept to birth. Where will it go in the future? What will influence it next?

Very worthy questions. Ones I hope to answer as I create as I speak.

A Little Something 'bout History

2010-01-01T22:48:00.006-05:00

What we're gonna do right here is go back, way back, back into time.

Why? Besides taking the opportunity to both paraphrase Sam Cooke and steal a much stolen sample from Jimmy Castor (and really, why should I need a reason for that?), this post is meant to give a brief look at my history as a writer/storyteller and the things that influenced it.

Fair warning, it's not for the faint of heart or classically trained. Or really anyone who feels writers should be fed on a steady diet of critically acclaimed entertainment. You have been warned. All others, look under the cut.

Stories have been a part of my life since I can remember. My mother used to tell me stories about a heroic bear named Bilbo (cribbed, obviously from The Hobbit, but his adventures were more sci-fi than anything). She encouraged me to suggest things about the next story and introduce my own characters and by the time I was five, I was telling stories to her.

Thanks to my utter ignorance of Middle Earth and the existence of a delicious brand of glazed donuts with a bear mascot called Beebo, Bilbo became Beebo under my first attempts at storytelling. It was during Beebo's time that I came into contact with the first of many cartoons I would become obsessed with. That cartoon was Dino-Riders.

I'll spare the reader the details about the series, but it combined the two best things in the world to a six year old: space ships and dinosaurs. It was the childhood equivalent of turning a corner and finding a room full of beautiful, naked women, each holding a pitcher of beer, a pizza or a plate of hot-wings just for you. It entered my consciousness and stayed they for damn near the next decade. The amazing part was that I only watched the first episode and bought the toys. It wasn't until college that I found out it was a series.

It wasn't long before Beebo was meeting the dino-riders and fighting the evil Rulons while gaining powers from a magical amulet. God bless my mother, even with me was a prepubescent geek reenacting the fruits of my imagination in the living room, she reminded me that I shouldn't take other people's characters as my own.

Like a born and bred future comic book writer, I quickly changed the names and imagined costumes of the characters and left everything the same. I still like to think six year old me would still call bullshit on SMASH!, though.

Beebo eventually parted with the other characters, but for years, my family still refereed to them as Beebo stories in much the same way that the venerable newspaper strip is still called Barney Google and Snuffy Smith even though Barney's been gone for a while.

Then I met my new fandom.

While I watched and enjoyed the early superhero cartoon offerings on FoxKids (Batman: TAS and X-men), they had yet to capture their imagination. A year after their debut, however, something new did: Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.

Again, it was the perfect storm. Like Dino-Riders, there were aliens and dinosaurs. But this time, the alien grew really giant and the dinosaurs were also giant robots that combined into an even more giant robot. Also, karate. I was entranced by every part of the show: the mentor figure, the signature weapons, the secret identities, the transformation sequences. God help me, I even loved the(incredibly thin on the ground at times) teenage drama.

Overnight, the Beebo stories sprouted sentai, giant robo and kaiju themes. They also picked up stunningly stupid team names based on my favorite animals at the moment including, I shit you not, The Kit Foxes, and The Diving Dolphins. If I was naming things that way today, I suppose my serial would have the inexplicable name of The Waddling Penguins. God, kids are weird.

Then 1994 happened. Fox put out Spider-man, the 90's animated series. Unlike X-men before it, Spider-man was actually aired in production order with its season long story arcs intact. While Batman: TAS now stands out as the objectively better show, Spider-man offered me the most complex storytelling I'd ever been exposed to on television. Conveniently, Marvel has comics out at the time that acted as companions to both the Spider-man and X-men series. My introduction into comics had begun.

But comics still didn't capture my imagination. They were an interesting read, but I wasn't really inspired. What was inspiring me was fantasy. I had just entered middle school and there was a program called Accelerated Readers where you could read books to earn points toward prizes provided you could answer reading comprehension questions about them on a computer.

I already loved reading, being the kid that begged for and then spent around thirty dollars at every book fair, so I went right for the high point values: The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings. Combined, they alone were worth a hundred points and an automatic free ice cream for a week pass in the cafeteria. Hell. Yes.

I tore through them in less than a two months. And I learned something important: dragons are cooler than dinosaurs. A dinosaur was cool in a 'big, cool looking lizard' way, but dragons were everything dinosaurs were, plus they could fly, breath fire and talk. I don't know why, but talking was important. In search of everything there was to know about dragons, I scoured the library of mythology and fantasy books and learned about monsters that made Power Rangers fare look like muppets (which they essentially were).

The stories in my head changed again. The team now called on the power of dragons in the service of Athena from their base at Ayer's Rock (I had a thing for Australia).

Then, the next year, the best thing in the world happened to me. An event that will rival only meeting my wife and the birth of my children when those come to pass. I sprained my ankle.

Yes, that was a good thing. It was mind destroyingly painful, of course, but the school I went to was the opposite of handi-accessible. I couldn't carry my backpack with me and my crutches were deemed 'possibly disruptive', so I was put into a wheelchair and sequestered in the library instead, where my friends would pass through to hand me my assignments.

The reason this was great is that I learned that without my teachers trying to teach, I could learn from the book and get my work done in about twenty minutes rather than the forty-five minutes of class time. By the time lunch rolled around, I would be done for the day with plenty of free time and privacy.

So what did I do with my week and a half in the library? I started writing. It started as an assignment for English; 'write an original story', and became The Angel Awakens. I didn't want to 'waste' my favorite story on school so Angel was an original story about vaguely mythological beings sealed in jewelery. One escapes and possessed the girlfriend of the protagonist and he was forced to use the others to go after her.

It was a clumsy effort, but it was a start. In the lull of classes, I would work on committing another story to paper, this one called True Human Race where the precursors of mankind, the creatures we thought were Neanderthals, returned to earth from space and were upset to find it crawling with Cro-magnon offshoots. It was written over two years on looseleaf. It was stolen as a 'joke' twice and now exists on a tightly sealed manila envelope as a monument to said-bookisms and poor descriptive skills.

It's important to note that both Angel and THR were inspired by the 90's X-men cartoon (The Phoenix Saga and Brood story arcs respectively), but on an almost unconscious level.

Meanwhile, a blatant and dare I say insane cash grab was hypnotizing me with its siren song. I speak of course of Big, Bad, BeetleBorgs and Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. Make no mistake, these shows were Power Rangers with extra weird (And that's the series that gave us the Pudgy Pig monster, so you know this is crazy) and fantasy elements respectively, but they each bought their own special touches that utterly captivated me.

The BeetleBorgs were kids that got their powers from comic books. Not only that, but they upgraded their powers by asking the creator of those comics to do it for them. Talk about meta. Mystic Knights (which I've actually done a nod to in The Descendants) added the twist of the heroes having elemental powers.

From these two came the character Chaos. And I don't mean Ian Smythe. Chaos was me. Or at least a cooler me that lived in a world where transformation trinkets that gave you power were available.

Wielder of the Chaos Band, a mystical artifact that was basically a Power Morpher you wore on your wrist, Chaos could summon the Chaotic Armor and the Chaos Claw (A weapon named for the Green Hunter Claw from BeetleBorgs, but which was more like a giant, singular version of Wolverine's claws) as well as having power over fire and probability. He was also super cool and everyone thought he was awesome. Because I was thirteen. Shades of Stephanie Meyer though, I almost got a story with this character published.

By the time I entered high school, I was writing in every square inch of my spare time. I have no less than ten composition books completely full of stories, mostly the Chaos stories, but also a story set in a world called The Realm called Honor Among Thieves, which I would later pillage to create my World of Ere campaign setting.

In high school, I made a discovery that made 'dragons are awesome' pale in comparison. That discovery: girls like creative guys.

Now, I've like girls since the age where liking girls got you called a sissy and required a cootie shot. I've always had more female friends than male and my driving force for wanting to go to school in second grade was getting a girlfriend.

So when I discovered something that got girls to notice me instead of the other way around, it was like discovering a superpower. I became famous for being 'the guy writing the book' and by my sophomore year, girls were stopping me in the hall to ask about how it was going. So I did what any self respecting guy would do in my situation: I started putting girls in my stories.

I also put some of my close friends in the stories too, but mainly, you could tell how much I liked a girl by how much screen time she got and how cool her character's powers were.

Speaking of cool powers, therein lay my downfall. Up until high school, my stories weren't just a showcase for cool powers and visuals; they had stories. There were villains with motives like the betrayed and abandoned roboticist, Robin Atan (who has appeared in The Descendants) and the purpose seeking, yet genocidal machine, Viral.

That was until Digimon: Digital Monsters came on the scene. Don't get me wrong, I still think it was an excellent show. I also know for a fact that it stunted my writing chops for two damn years. Why? What could a TV show about adorable critters and their human friends possibly do to me?

One word: Digivolution.

A casual reader might notice that some of my strongest early influences weren't great literature, but imported, Japanese entertainment or rip-offs thereof. And if there's one thing Japanese entertainment loves, it's mid-season upgrades. The power rangers got new giant robots and new costumes a few times, sure. The BeetleBorgs eventually upgraded to Metallix, and the Mystic Knights got better armor and wepaons.

Well here's the thing: Digimon did this every third episode. I am not kidding. A cute little creature would turn into a big creature and kick ass before turning back. A few episodes later, that wouldn't be enough, so they become even bigger and cooler and kick more ass. And if that's not enough, they warp-digivolve or DNA-digivolve, or armor-digivolve. In later seasons, they even merged with humans to get cooler.

And I looked upon it. And it was good.

Actually, no it wasn't. Chaos and Darkness, following a publisher's rejection where I decided to retool, became little more than flimsier and flimsier excuses to justify new 'mega-forms' as I called them. I think now that this may have been a form of creator breakdown. I stopped writing stories and started writing just blocks of transformation sequences. I went as Warlord Chaos for Halloween.

Then summer came and it's as if everything disappeared; my friends, my girlfriend, my comfort zone. And my will to write. I tried to write in my first few months of college, but there was always Something Happening, and I filled all of three pages.

Somewhere in here, I also lost comic books. The local stores stopped carrying anything but Archie Digests (which I admit I still buy. Shut up, they're charming) and I could only pick new ones up on trips out of town. The limited runs I had started with were over and I dropped into normal Marvel continuity.

That is to say that I went from comics based on the animated after school versions of Batman, Spider-man and the X-men to the height of the Dark Age of Superheroes. I had the distinct misfortune of having my introduction to the mainstream continuities of these venerable titles be Knightfall, the Clone Saga, and Onslaught respectively.

By the time the rather cool Operation: Zero Tolerance storyline came out, I was about done with the bleak, tedious, and soul sucking experience that was comics in the mid 1990's. A relative, however gave me some old New Mutants and Avengers comics, so I knew how comics used to be and I was in love with those. Still, knowing that time was over meant I stopped reading and figured comics would play no more role in my life ever again. Yeah.

College happened next and without writing and the will to write, I was pretty aimless for a few months. I had made it to college and now had no idea what I wanted to be. Luckily, something came along even more nerdy than cartoons and comics that rekindled my creative fires: Dungeons and Dragons.

Creating and fleshing out my characters was like a religious experience for my inner writer and once I took over the DM chair, world building became a new joy all it's own, something I considered very little in my early endeavors. I started reading the Wheel of Time and the original Dragonlance Saga, not to mention rereading Lord of the Rings. A new story started to take form: a fantasy set in the World of Ere with the hero in the person of Vaalingrade Ashland (oh he of my internet handle).

I had abandoned the story I'd been forming and telling for almost twenty years for something new and strange. How did that lead to The Descendants? Well I'll leave that for the next entry on this blog; a history of the stories and events that lead up to The Descendants.

Until then, I will continue creating.

Abracadabra: I Shall Create As I Speak

2010-01-01T21:49:00.001-05:00

When I first learned of the interpretation of 'abracadabra' as meaning 'I create' and 'as I am speaking', I couldn't help but think that it was an amazingly apt mantra for fiction writers. After all, we weave new people, new concepts and even entirely new worlds simply by telling a story.

Of course, as we work to create the stories that form in our minds and demand to be let out onto the page, or these days, the computer screen, we also take part in our own stores; the stuff of commentary tracks and behind the scenes documentaries—the story of the process.

Sadly not all of us have a film crew at our disposal and since most of the work is solitary and mental, it wouldn't make good film anyway. Thus, the creator blog: a place for fans to come to see what's going on in the head of the talent and creators go to get all their 'DVD extra' worthy material out of their brain.

A:ISCAIS, in case you haven't guessed, is my creator blog, where I will come from time to time in order to talk about my works, offer a bit of commentary and back story, and hopefully shed some light on the place where my work comes from. I invite anyone who is reading this to share the ride and hope they enjoy it.