Multiple Birds

Well I've had a productive morning! I finally got the inspiration for something that was going to go into the core rules, but I never solved it (and which was suggested by Tony L. originally - who also suggested the letters page)... I wanted to include a 'classic advertisement' somewhere in the book from the early 80s, but never really figured out how to make the page work. However, my Facebook feed in the last week or so has included a bunch of Hostess ads from the early 80s, and I realized that was the sweet spot, and the perfect ad to include. So, I went ahead and created that page... but, I also solved a few problems. I haven't actually drawn many pages of comics in a long time (I did a page for the Core Rules, but I drew that over a year ago now I think)... I didn't have a process in place to create a page. I didn't have any sort of routine. So, I went ahead and created a blank page in paint that was 2000 pixels wide and 3000 pixels tall. Working at 50% size, I did a rough layout/thumbnail. Then I moved to 100% and blocked in some 'pencils'. Then I put in the dialogue. Then working between 200% and 300%, I did the black and white for the whole page. Then I did colors for the whole page. 

And I am very happy with how it turned out. So, here it is... the black and white and color versions. And, I now have a process in place to create the pages for Cataclysm (or any other comic pages I do going forward). The proportions ended up being just right for the various tools I use in Paint. FYI, the whole process took a little over three hours.  

An Introductory Page...

So, I'm going to very shortly play out a battle between the Young Wardens and Battle Master, but as I was walking to get a cup of coffee, I thought of what the first page of this comic would look like. So, rather than describe it, I thought I would just draw it... here's the splash page to the backup story in Skye Stalwart: The Girl Who Fell to Earth #2... I've thought about giving a sample interior page or two over time, but never actually did it until now. I expect I'll do a few of these for moments in Doc Stalwart history...

 

Retconning My Retconning

I'm trying to get a LOT of ducks in a LOT of rows with the history of Doc Stalwart and his comic series. I keep moving things around and revising (even editing things I wrote three years ago), to get all of the various pieces to line up. For example, I changed the release dates (by about a year) for the Bronze Beacon storyline... because I realized the title of the series, "Raider of the Lost Art(ifacts)" would be a year before Raiders of the Lost Ark was released... so it wouldn't make sense that the creators would have created a pun for a movie that they didn't even know was going to be coming out...

I also moved the "Death of Doc Stalwart" storyline back three years as well (I originally had it around issue 200.. now it's in the 240s), because it didn't make as much sense where I had it. I also had two 'death' storylines in relatively close proximity, and decided to merge them into one. In its place at issue 200, I added the wedding of Doc Stalwart and Augury, since this would have been a big event (and I've never even mentioned who she was or when they got married - and that would be a big event in the comic). I also realized (after paging through my collection of Fantasic Four 21-40 in glorious black and white) that there was a LOT of melodrama and romance in those issues, so having a love story is an important element of borrowing from the source material.

There are a lot of moving parts here... but it's coming together.

The OTHER thing that I really, really like is that I'm linking events together - so when Doc's Secret Lab goes rogue (remote controlled by Simian Prime) and starts flying towards Simian City, Doc has to crash it into the ocean to keep it from falling into Prime's hands... and then it later is found by Lord Lamprey, and Doc has to go fight him in the ruins of his old HQ that is now a submerged wreck. The events in the story influence later events, which I saw as one of the things that gave Byrne's run on FF (my model for all of this really) such a great internal consistency. You never knew when something that happened 20 or 30 issues ago was going to suddenly come up again and matter in a new way.

Now THIS is what I call research!

It's Friday night, so what better to do than pull a bunch of old Official Handbooks of the Marvel Universe and Who's Who for DC, and browse some entries. Here's part of my collection...

Right away, I flip to Superman, and it says he could lift one of the Great Pyramids... and that is about 600 million tons. So... a little stronger than Hulk (100 tons)... um. yeah. The entries in the Marvel books are so much richer and more specific (and lean towards trying to sound scientific). The Who's Who books are, on the whole, more hand-wavey. I'm not sure, but I have a 40-year-old memory of reading something where the DC editors and writers wanted more freedom to re-imagine powers as needed, whereas once something was in print for Marvel, fans could immediately start challenging the comic stories vs. the 'facts' of the Handbook - it says Thing can lift 75 tons, but he lifted something that should be over 100 tons, and that's more than he can lift... yaddah yaddah yaddah. Superman can be as weak or strong as the story needs him to be. He can lift a Pyramid one month, and struggle to lift a tank the next, and the writers don't have to justify these against hard numbers that are in print. As a reader, I always wanted the numbers, but now as a sometime writer, I like having a little more wiggle room so that I can challenge heroes within the context of the stories I write. 

And about Stalwart:

- I've added a few more gifts and some minor tweaks to the Companion. It's at 12 pages, and I don't think there's too much more I can add... I want to go through it with a fine-tooth comb, but I might lock it down, add some art, and 'release' it this weekend.

- I hit 50 copies sold today of the core rules for Stalwart! That's a big milestone for me - in less than two weeks, I've sold 50 books, which is a really great number for me. Another very positive review was posted this week as well, so the momentum is there... I hope it keeps building. I think that the potential audience for this is in the low thousands... we'll see. 

- I'm working on some actual play that blurs the lines - it would be an adaptation of a backup story that appeared in Doc's comics... so I'd be playing through the plot of the backup stories, and then my actual play will become 'canon' for what happened in those issues. It's kind of meta, but everything about this is kind of meta, so I guess it fits right in.

Hashtag Blessed

No lie, I am one of the luckiest dudes in the world. As I've been working on Stalwart, I've been going through my drawings and notes and older materials, and I realize that the superhero world that 12-year-old me wished I had is here. It's the setting and the characters and the stories - and the game - I was always hoping to find. And, while it is not entirely original, it is still its own unique thing; I think of it like the Incredibles - it's all familiar and based in stuff you already know a lot about, but it's also entirely its own thing. 

I cannot believe how lucky I am to have this fully realized world that I just get to play around in and make stories for and generate cool stuff to go with. And, now, I have (almost) a game that fully aligns with it. I LOVE Stalwart Age - but Stalwart is better. It's more playable. It's more intuitive. It's cleaner and faster and more internally consistent. 

And as I was doing dishes, I realized that, while Stalwart Age was about Doc, this game is really about his daughter. Yes, he's a character in this world still, and probably its most famous one, but the character whose story seems more salient at the moment is his daughter Skye. She belongs on the cover, so I'm putting her there.

I also had this cool comic script pop to mind. I'll just describe it here, but I'll write the issue soon enough. It is after Doc goes on a mission to save his daughter from the Null Zone (I still haven't written these issues - I am waiting for the big piece I'm missing that pulls it all together to emerge. I'm getting closer...).

Anyway, this story takes place six weeks after she is successfully brought home. One of the long-term consquences is that both she and Mikah age dramatically due to exposure to the unstable energies of the Null Zone. So, Doc has just learned he has a daughter and rescued her - and now she is leaving for college.

The whole issue would be the letter she writes to her father about how, even though he needs time with her, she needs time to figure out who she is in this world. It's this somber meditation on fatherhood (because I'm a sucker for that - my daughter is turning 16 in a few weeks, and I'm starting to feel the pull of fate inexorably drawing her into her adult life). So the whole thing is Doc going around, doing maintenance on the Beetle, sewing his costume, and getting his boots ready for the next mission. Meanwhile, Mikah hangs up his costume for the last time and moves into Mr. Silver's old office, which is his now. Meanwhile, the text of the letter underscores everything. The last images are the three setting off into their new roles - Mikah starting a new file, Doc going on his first solo mission in a long time, and Skye hovering over the skyline of the new city she will be living in - San Helios, on the west coast of the Americas. 

  

Mimsby Page 2

I got page 2 done... this is a pretty good example of the direction I'm thinking with this overall.

Parenthetically, I had the first three panels done, forgot to save it, and the Paint crashed and I lost it. I was glad, because I ended up changing the perspective for the image, and it ended up much stronger as a result.

I probably spent about two hours on this page... so that's not a bad time /workflow relationship.

 

E is for Elements

In the POEM organizer, E stands for literary elements. I don't mean to flex, but my plan is to basically use as many as possible as often as possible. I know that this is going to be chock-full of irony, symbolism, metaphor, alliteration... conflict... characterization... and foreshadowing. Lots and lots of foreshadowing. Oh my goodness the foreshadowing. 

It's going to be a bit much.

I also know that one of the things I'm going to do a lot of is repeated images and copy/paste of drawings. I'm not doing this to be lazy - I'm doing this for pacing. I am not charging per page, so I get to do whatever I want. I want a lot of quiet moments - and that works best when I make the reader look at the same image a few times (with some minor changes) before shifting. You can already see that in play at the top of the page below.

Here is the work in progress of page 2...

 

  

Remastering Pages

As I go through the process of re-mastering the pages, I have the benefit of three things:

1) I know where the story is going! I've already got the whole thing done, so when I make edits, I know how these are going to affect other things. One of the biggest edits is that I'm changing the setting from the back yard to the larger area around Warwick Pond. This is necessitating some edits, and will require a little bit of re-drawing later on, but it's a relatively small edit that (to me) has significant implications. It makes the world of the ants, and the forces they are dealing with, much larger. It doesn't change the story per se, but it changes the context of the story.

2) I'm just a better writer than I was 30 years ago. I would HOPE so. It means that I can layer in more subtle things that help frame the ants, their worldview, and some of the larger themes more consistently. 

3) The font I'm using is how I wish my lettering looked. The lettering, to me, has always been the weak point in my comics, and being able to use a font cleans the pages us SO much. 

Also, time and space has given me an appreciation for my work as an artist. It's a good comic. I'm proud of it. I'm going to be very happy to have a definitive edition that is clean and tightened up that I can add to my shelf and share with people. 

On the Craft of Storytelling

I don't know about the whole 10,000 hours to master a craft, but I do know that between teaching English for 23 years, directing dozens of plays and musicals, publishing hundreds of pages of comics, thousands of pages of RPGs, and a few dozen prose narratives (along with a few hundred poems), I've learned a bit about storytelling. I think I know how to tell a story at this point.

However, I've also spent the same amount of time refining my drawing. Through RPGs, I've made myself strip down and rebuild my art style a few dozen times. For each game I've done over the last decade, I've gone from drawing 'my way' to developing a new style or vibe or approach or whatever that best fits that game. As a result, I've tried on a few different artistic philosophies. 

I'm working on page 8 of my Cupcake Scouts comic, and I can tell you - this is the moment where everything came together. I am stopping to pause for a moment to appreciate what's happening as it's happening. I am a bit blessed, I suppose, at understanding moments as they happen to me. I remember that when I directed my first Shakespeare production, Romeo and Juliet, I stopped the rehearsal during the balcony scene and told everyone to look around and take a mental picture of this moment. We were staging the most famous moment in all of theater history. I just wanted my young actors to appreciate what they were doing - they were in the midst of staging a sequence that the greatest actors of all time have taken part in. We were standing in the flow of theater history.

This is my moment as a cartoonist. I can see in these three panels everything I want to do. I have a variety of visuals. I communicate character through body language (look at the silhouettes of the girls in that bottom panel - I cannot BELIEVE how much a few lines communicate there). I set up the primary themes of the comic - do we control fate, or is fate pre-determined? I set up each of the characters in significant ways that will have later payoffs. I establish several rules for how the world works, and how some of their adventures are going to transpire. I move the story forward one giant step. I have some foreshadowing that you don't see yet, but you will (and some more foreshadowing that you will see even later on). I use a variety of drawing approaches.

Thanks for pausing with me. Now, back to work. This comic isn't going to create itself.

And I wouldn't want it to.

Anatomy of a Cupcake Scouts Comic Page

It's sort of remarkable to me. I have spent SO much time thinking about and planning webcomics. I've spent so much time trying to figure out the best fonts, and line weights, and image sizes, and pacing. I've spent so much time thinking about how I would frame a page, and how I might sequence action, and how I could maximize the tools at my disposal to create a manageable workflow that allows me to produce high-quality pages relatively quickly, so that I can get and keep some momentum.

And then, when I finally sat down to DO it, I just started drawing and it all just came together. I decided very quickly to go with 2000 x 3000 pixel master images for the comic, which then gets reduced to 45% (so it's 900 pixels wide and 1350 tall when published online). It ends up looking great on my phone, even though I didn't plan it that way (although I probably did years ago, and just somehow remembered that I had). Early in my development as a cartoonist, I was heavily influenced by things I read about Carl Barks and his workflow. Thirty years later, I still tend to conceptualize a page as either two (as he did) or three tiers. The page above is three. He also created a lot of 8-page comics where the pacing is very quick - that has stuck with me, too.

I no longer have a step-by-step method in place. I don't do full pencils and then inks and then colors. I adjust the layout and re-arrange elements of the page as I'm going. I don't do a lot of pulling back and looking at the whole page as I'm working (even though I probably should get in the habit of doing that more). At this point, I think I do a decent job of intuitively 'feeling' where I am on the page, and have a general awareness of how what element I'm working on right now will flow with what's around it. 

I've also got a few key things I'm doing...

1. Focus on the story. That's the only thing that matters. Everything is secondary to the story. And the story is about the characters, more than anything. The plot and setting and symbolism and irony and dialogue are all there in service to the characters and the story they are on. On the page above, I move the story along nicely at a pace I like.

2. Once I have drawn something, I can use it again. You will see that I cut and paste and repeat images a bit. Sometimes, I'll make minor changes to things - other times I'll use the foundation and move pieces around. I drew it, so if I want to use it again. I drew two drawings above that I re-used a few times. I don't need to create dramatic angles of every talking head. If they are having a conversation, I can go back and forth with the same 'camera shot', maybe changing eyes or mouths as they go. Work smarter, not harder.

3. Each page should have one 'quality' drawing. I don't particularly like drawing scenery or backgrounds... I like characters and action. However, I want each page to have one image that I spend some time on the design or background or lighting or something. On the page above, I spent more time creating the bookshelves in the first panel than I did on the rest of the page. I also put background images with a dark gray outline rather than the black linework of characters and foreground, so that the characters pop against it. I also used much more muted colors in backgrounds, again to set the characters apart.

4. End each page with some kind of hook. I want each page to stand alone as a chunk of story, but each to logically lead into the next page. Because of the way this is being released, it has to feel like you've moved through a part of the story each page, because it might be a week or two (or more at some point - musical season, I'm looking at you!), so I want there to be some sense of completion to each page. 

Decisions and Revisions That A Minute Will Reverse

I LOVE the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It is about a middle-aged guy who is paralyzed by his fear of what others are thinking, or of making the wrong choice, or of going in the wrong direction. He'd rather stay where he is than take a risk, because what if it fails? What if things get worse? I will stay right here, thank you very much.

Do I dare disturb the universe? Do I dare, indeed.

It's such a great poem. I don't know that the 15- and 16-year-olds that I read it with can truly understand what it means to have a lifetime of plans that didn't quite work out how you planned. I do. That's why I love it.

That said, decisions need be made or no progress can happen. I've already spoken about my art flow and layout issues, and I'm happy with how that series of choices has panned out. I'm happy to keep working in Microsoft Paint. I've learned how to maximize it, and I think that the limited options force my hand with creativity a little bit; I have to push it to see what I can get out of it. There's something artistically... noble(?) about that. I don't know. But I like it. I like the limited palette I've decided on (black and white linework with grayscale backgrounds). I like that I'm thinking in half-page increments, 2100 pixels wide and 1500 pixels tall. I like that I'm thinking of varying between short character-centered stories and longer narratives that move some sort of story forward.

I hate a grind. I cannot do a grind. I've tried grind. I cannot do it. But I like a regular schedule. I want to keep a regular schedule. I think that a regular schedule is a good thing for everyone.

Plus, my childhood. Everything comes back to my childhood. I knew when the new issue of GI Joe was coming out, and I knew when I could expect it in the mail; it often appeared at the grocery store a day or two ahead of making its way to my mailbox, so I sometimes ended up with two copies of an issue because I couldn't wait the extra day. I finally canceled my subscription when I realized that the guy at the flea market sometimes sold new issues as much as a week ahead of the newsstand. 

I like the idea of a monthly publication. So, I'm not sure what it looks like yet (okay, I know that it's not print but will be some sort of either pdf or web site or comic forum or something that is available online). I want to release something on the first of every month; it might be a chapter from the longer narrative I'm working on, or a shorter complete story. It might be a greatest hits collection or the complete handbook of the Army Ant Universe or I don't know what. But, it will be something that is somewhat COMPLETE. It will be a satisfying read on its own. It will move the needle 'forward' in some meaninful way. It will be a 'complete issue' of 'comic book'. 

I'm thinking that, minimally, this will be 8 pages (4 full pages in print) with a very short story on the order of one of my earliest stories, 'Food Fight'. More likely, it will be on the order of 'Slab Smash', which is 16 pages (8 full pages in print), that tells a longer story. Sometimes, it might be as long as one of my original comics (which were 16 full pages, so that would be upwards of 32 half pages). I doubt that I can be that productive, but I also know that I have sudden bursts of creativity sometimes that allow me to pound out 30-ish pages in a week or two. So, it could happen.

This commits me to SOMETHING. It commits me to telling a story of some size once a month, but that's it. My stories don't lend themselves to the drip-drip-drip of regular one-page updates, and I'm not going to try to force them into a format they don't feel like they belong it. 

If this is going to work, I need a few quick victories. I need a handful of short stories 'in the can'. I don't necessarily want to release these right away, but if I have a tough month or need a few extra days to get together the story I really want to release, I'll have a few 8-pagers in my folders that I can draw from to publish that month. I need at least two or three of those at the ready so that I don't fall behind in the first six months of this endeavor. I would like this to build some momentum, but I'll have to build in some security to ensure it will. 

One more decision before I go: The new "Army Ants" should launch on September 1. That gives me thirty days to get all of my ducks in a row and get some work done. I think if I can end the month with a plan, a place to publish, and at least three stories ready to go on September 1, I'll be in good shape.

Before And After: The Storm Page 1

I have twice started a story called "The Storm", but I'm going with the whole "third time's the charm" thing. I cannot find the second version which I started about five years ago, but I did find the original page from 2001. I figured I'd put it here along with the new page 1 I just did today... you can see how different my style is, even though some of the basic things in my drawing are unchanged. I'm pleased with how clean and crisp my drawing is now, even though it may not have as much energy as it did. That is one of my goals - to get some of the kinetic energy back into my style that I've lost since I've been working digitally. However, the modern work is (to my mind) vastly superior in almost every way, so I'll take the temporary setback with dynamism on the page. 

The original page is a picture I took; I didn't feel like dragging out the scanner and then re-formatting the page. It's a bit blurry, but you get the idea...

F is for Fonts and Formatting

I went back and took the top half of my previous page one, re-formatted it into the new half-page orientation, and played with some layout and font options. Here are variations one through four...

In variation one, I just moved the existing elements around; I changed the frame on the second image from a square to a circle for variety's sake. 

In variation two, I mirrored the image and moved the dialogue around. I think that this is overall better; I like the second panel being to the right, but then the dialogue gets clunky. It is more important that you know how to 'read' the page. Option one is not quite as clear about what order to read the balloons (do you start at the far left, or at the top? the answer is at the top, and then reset to the lower left corner; but it could cause confusion); option two makes it quite clear, going left to right and top to bottom.

In variation three, I swapped out the Anime Ace font for the Creative Block font. Anime Ace is cleaner; Creative Block is closer to my original lettering, and is the one I've been using for the 50+ pages of remastered pages I've done. 

In variation four, I went back to the original layout, but moved the circle panel to the middle, widened the first panel, started the dialogue in the first panel, and then allowed the remaining dialogue to flow left to right. I think I like Creative Block better (it's 14 point here), and this is probably the strongest layout of the four...

Comic Formatting Thoughts

First things first: this is post #133 for 2022, which ties my all-time annual record (133 posts in 2013). One more post, and I'll have set an annual record for myself... with five months remaining. I like my odds. However, this also marks all-time post #989, putting me eleven posts away from lifetime post #1,000. I want to do something special for that post once it gets here... I know what post #999 is about (the past, duh), but I'd like post 1,000 to be about the future in some way. I suppose I'll know when I get there...

That said, I'm trying to plan for my future by learning from my past. I am pretty sure I want to work on Army Ants comics and game support (duh again), but what the looks like is still a debatable topic. I'm going to focus on the dilemma about comics for now... I'll get to the RPG stuff soon enough.

In terms of design, I go back and forth between planning full pages and half pages. There is a fundamental difference in how I visually design when I'm working in one or the other. With the full page, I tend to think more vertically, while with the half page I tend to think more horizontally. Full pages are more traditional, but half pages have their own traditions; these are more akin to classic comic strips, and also to the way that Carl Barks and his ilk have worked - they publish full pages, but work in half-page increments.

I also like half pages for reading on screens; I know that most people are reading on a phone now, so it doesn't matter, but I still spend a lot of time on my Surface Pro, and horizontal alignment is the default for me. Also, we read from left to right, not top to bottom, which suggests to me that there is an inherent benefit to approaching things that way.

Most importantly, the evidence I've got is that I've done my best work in half-page increments. My favorite Ants stories used that approach. In some instances, even when I was drawing full pages, I was thinking of the page as a top and bottom with a break across the middle of the page. I run into layout problems sometimes when I have a full page to work with; I end up with moments where it's not clear what 'direction' to move in visually as you cross the page. The half page design puts up some guard rails from my own weaknesses as a page designer. Here's a revised image from my remastering of Slab Smash that shows what I mean... I love this particular layout.

This means that the two pages I've done for New Frontier will have to be re-configured, but that's no great shakes. 

The other issue is dimensions...

My ant pages have used the traditional 2x3 comics orientation. Traditionally, artists worked in 10" x 15" original pages. I did all of my original ant pages on 11x14 bristol board, with original art that was 8" x 12". This is still that 2:3 ratio (66.6%).

However, more modern approaches (specifically manga) are over 70% as the default. I've run into trouble printing my books, because my original art is too 'square' for most publishing formats, meaning that my pages have a lot of white space at the top and/or bottom when printed. 70% is better for a more modern look and for modern print options.

This means that, if a print image is going to be 7 increments wide and 10 increments tall, then half pages should be 7 wide and 5 tall. The gutter between the two when published would put it to the nearly 71% of manga, which is just about right. If I'm converting this to pixels, let's go with a x300 multiplier; this gives me original art that is 2100 pixels wide and 1500 pixels tall. If the plan is to print these at maybe 4.5" wide (the widest you could really get into a 6x9 trade paperback), then I'm looking at print versions that have over 460 pixels per inch, which is solid and should look good.

Whew. Okay, some decisions are made. Next time, we'll talk fonts! Hooray for that.  

Re-mastering the Ants

Two years ago, I started a project that I never finished - the idea was to re-master the original pages. I was going through a page at a time: tougching up art, re-doing the lettering, cleaning up dialogue where I could. The pages were coming out well, and I got through almost three issues before I ran out of gas on the project. However, I see now that it is worth continuing and finishing; I was actually through the most difficult pages in terms of art (these were the weakest pages I was going to deal with), and the lettering work was pretty fun to do, since it's all digital. It gave me warm fuzzies to fix some of the clunky dialogue of those earlier issues... and it gave me hope to have a complete, good looking omnibus of 300+ pages of army ants comics that I was proud of.

My dive back into that work started with this image - I re-drew what is to me the 'classic' cover to MTDAA #1, including Slab and Honeydew, who to me became as much a part of the team as the core five. I can see both how far my drawing has come, and how much it retains of work I was doing 25 years ago. Ultimately, this is definitely the cover to whatever omnibus sort of collection I do. I really like it.

MTDAA New Frontier: Chapter One, Page One

 

MTDAA: New Frontier?

So I have a set of notes and the beginnings of a comic script for "Michael T. Desing's Army Ants: The New Frontier", which I guess is a comic but maybe is a play test character, or maybe it's both. Or neither. I am not sure yet.

For a long time, I've had the idea of a prototype helicopter and a solo character or small team going on a series of missions... based largely on my memories of Airwolf, which I will admit are limited to 'cool helicopter doing cool stuff'. I really couldn't tell you the first thing about the series - and I'm scared to find an episode and see how bad it probably was. That said, here's my first stab at a design for the prototype helicopter that would be the center of this storyline/play test... full disclosure: I have always hesitated to include vehicles heavily in my comics, because I was always bad at drawing them. Then, during the design of Shards of Tomorrow's most recent edition, I somehow 'figured out' how to draw vehicles, and started to like drawing them once I could see them in my mind's eye correctly. This is definitely a first draft, but it gives an idea of what I'm thinking. I think that the trick was I stopped trying to picture them as geometric shapes and allowed them to be more organic with rounded corners and less strict linework; that opened up a world of possibilty for me. 

Army Ants: The Untold Story (Part 3 of 3)

More ideas I never got to...

Return to Dinosaur Island

No idea how or why this would have happened, but the ants go back to Dinosaur Island one more time. Issue seven was probably my personal favorite of all the original run, and I had plans to go back one day and send the ants on a mission there. It seems that recovering a rare plant that can cure diseases would have been cool. It makes sense to layer this into the next story (the Plague below), and that is probably where it would have fit. It makes the most sense to send the ants on a daring raid to recover a jungle plant as part of establishing a cure for the plague. That would justify this mission. I had an idea that in the interim some other insects had created a secret base here, but not sure how that would have worked.

The Plague

Recently, I started (and again never finished) a story set some time later (probably ending up as issues 44 to 50) - the ants have relative peace, but a sickness breaks out that has been bioengineered by insane termites. The sickness creates a kind of zombie plague. While several ants become infected, they all are ultimately saved, the termites are defeated, and peace is restored. I never got too far in the planning stages of this one, but that is the broad strokes of it. Issue fifty would therefore have been a big assault on the termite mound. I wasn’t all that interested in this one ultimately because a lot of the same beats (fighting against a big enemy army - huge battle) had already been done better elsewhere. This was going to face a challenge not to tread ground I had already done (probably better) previously. I suppose that this storyline would have opened up possibilities of exploring some of the mysticism and religion of the ants, since there is this whole thing with Fate and the termites that I have already alluded to… this would have been the opportunity to maybe lock down some of those pieces in greater detail. It ran the risk of going all midichlorians, but I think it would have kept back from the precipice well enough.

Iron Ant

This one never got past the basic idea stage, but I wanted to have a prototype suit that Phil wears where he goes on a mission to test it, and he ends up doing battle with a bat. I had a few sketches for this, and not much else. Iron ant could have been a one-off, or a short story at the back of another issue that ran short. I did this a few times in the early issues (issue seven had both Dinosaur Island and Ladybug’s Picnic stories - more reasons it’s my favorite), so Iron Ant would have worked as an 8-page short to plug in somewhere else.

What To Do With This?

I’m a little tempted to create an archive that merges real and unfinished comics into one big thing - I could release this like I did the Doc Stalwart archive, or put together a ‘book’ (PDF) that I could put up on DriveThruComics just to have it there as an established ‘bible’ of the first fifty issues of the Army Ants (since that’s how I think of this whole storyline - I published 24 comics, had pages for another 3 issues or so published on the now-defunct mtdaa website, and had random pages done for a few others). I could draw covers for the graphic novels and put these in with more detailed plot summaries than those above. It would take a week or two to put together, but that’s not a bad way to pull this whole thing together and ‘finish’ work I spent several years on a few decades ago.

Ultimately, this included all of the stories I wanted to tell with these particular characters. I think they would have run their course at that point, and if the series continued after issue fifty, it would have to include a significant change in time or place for it to work. I love the idea of a series of Batman and Robin type stories with Zak and Malichi, but there’s no real reason to do them. I don’t have a meaningful story to tell with them, I just want to spend time with these characters again. That’s not a great reason to spend a few hours on each page.

By the way, it is strangely cathartic to finally ‘reveal’ things that only I have known for 20+ years. I assume nobody cares, but I still like it that the full story is ‘out there’ in some form now.

Going Forward

Man, this ended up as a long set of posts. I’ve got a set of notes (done in the last few days) for the next phase of the story, but it’s set a generation later, with an entirely different sort of vibe. One of the things that always interested me about the ants (but I never really explored in a meaningful way) is this inherent tension between the ideal and reality. It’s the same tension in America. The ants are, at their core, a tyrannical military state that presents as a noble kingdom that embraces individuality. It’s kind of like the US that way… we value individuality and peace while outspending the rest of the world by many times over to build the biggest military. Some of our loudest voices of individual rights are also openly supporting fascism. It’s the same conflict the ants face. I want to explore this idea more deeply, and I think I’ve found a way to do it. Basically, the next phase of the ants, if it happens, would be tonally and thematically far removed from what I’ve done before, but it would still logically follow the previous storylines. We all think we’re the good guys. Maybe the ants never really were…

Army Ants: The Untold Story (Part 2 of 3)

While the Fall of Valhalla was a story that I started, and that I would have considered a satisfying end to the overall comic if it ended there, I could also see the following stories having taken place. Theoretically, this would have been in 2003 and 2004 maybe.

Raiders of the Lost Egg 

The next story would have been Raiders of the Lost Egg, my homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark. This would probably have run in issues 37 to 40, as a 4-issue storyline.

The Ant Queen learns that of a cache of royal eggs that were stolen last season, one remains. Intelligence reports that the egg has been preserved, passed around the black markets of the towns in the Sandbox. This is the hope for the future; if this egg can be recovered and the child born, she would be the next ant queen. A small team is sent on a secret mission to recover it. I presume this would have included the core team of Gunner, Zak, Phil, Vince, and Slab.

After a series of small skirmishes with locals, they learn that the egg was taken to a hidden temple deep in the sandbox where a cult holds it in great value. There, they explore the temple, getting through a series of traps and obstacles to finally be captured by the cultists, a random group of insects.

It turns out the leader of these is the ant who hatched from the egg eighteen weeks ago - the princess has already been born (plot twist), and believes that she was sent by Fate to lead these insects out of destitution. When she meets the rest of the ants, her true lineage becomes clear, and together they bring this rag-tag group of insects into the fold of the new ant kingdom.

It turns out that the prophecy Sarge had seen previously (in work I published on the online Army Ants webpage when I started the Fall of Valhalla storyline in like 2014) was that Phil would be the next king of the ants, and would marry the Queen’s daughter - Fate had revealed that Sarge’s duty was to protect Phil. He had spent the rest of his professional career watching over Phil and trying to prepare him for this incredible honor and duty.

At the end, Sarge has married the Ant Queen and they consider retirement and the handing over of duties, while the young Crown Princess marries Phil, and they begin to plan for a new ant hill, and a new future for the red ants of the Backyard. 

I like it that the nerdiest character becomes the eventual leader. That was something I decided really early in my work, probably as far back as issue five or so.

Other Unfinished Works...

The Storm

In a side story, I started a narrative called ‘the Storm’ which was a bit of a Frankenstein story. This would have maybe run for two issues, comprising issues 41-42. There’s a mad scientist living in a stump. Phil, Vince and Slab get stuck there during a patrol where a horrible storm comes in. The mad scientist brings a dead insect back to life, and it goes on a rampage within the stump, ultimately killing the mad scientist and nearly killing them all, but it ends up making friends with Slab, because they both have the intellect of a peanut, and the same sense of humor. It was a one-off, silly story that I started as well but never finished. They leave the Franken-bug there to lord over the stump and live out its existence in relative peace. Maybe I would have plugged this one in before the Raiders of the Lost Egg story. Not sure. It makes more sense there; once Phil is with the princess, he probably retires from active military life altogether. I see this one as a ‘flashback’ story either way, set between issues 6 and 7.

I did one page for this decades ago, and then went back and created the first ten pages or so on the webcomic page a few years back, but never got much further. It's a story that exists in some form...

One-off Ladybug Story

I had a few sketches done for a one-off ladybug solo mission with Honeydew where she raids a bee hive. I suppose this would have ended up as issue 43 in the hierarchy.

Army Ants: The Untold Story (Part 1 of 3)

I left my story unfinished some years ago. I had a plan for a final showdown between the Wasp Empire and the Army of Ants, which would have been basically my version of Return of the Jedi. The largely unpublished sequence, called the Fall of Valhalla, is as follows…

The Fall of Valhalla

This would have started in issue 25, and run through issue 36, as a 12-issue storyline and ultimately the third ‘graphic novel’ of the series. Let's pretend a bi-monthly schedule, so ideally these would have appeared in 2000 and 2001, since the previous run ended in 1998, and I needed at least a year to recharge after that. I was earning my teaching certification at the time, so I probably wouldn't have had time even if I had the motivation and inspiration, but since we're revising history, let's go for it.

The Wasp Empress is on her deathbed, having been poisoned by General Groth (leader of the fly army, and ally of the wasps). General Groth  and Colonel Irons (a traitorous ant who is now a cyborg) had assumed control of the Wasp Hive. 

They frame Baron Sh’Ak (leader of the hornets and right hand to the Empress) with the crime. He manages to escape the Hive before his staged court martial and execution, rendezvousing with the ants. Some of his elite hornet soldiers realize Sh’Ak had been framed, and know that the primary culprit is General Groth.

When last we left our ants, most (including the Ant Queen) were imprisoned by the Wasp Empire deep within the bowels of Valhalla Complex, the Imperial Wasp Hive. They had been taken captive when the Ant Hill fell during the Year of the Ant storyline. Led by Sarge, these prisoners stage a breakout, and begin a riot within the deepest parts of the hive. They are aided by the general chaos within the hive, as some rank and file doubt who they should be following, and the chain of command starts to break down.

Concurrently, a strike team of remaining ants who had not been imprisoned when the Ant Hill fell (Gunner, Vince, Phil, Zak, Honeydew… and Baron Sh’Ak who had joined them as his only remaining option) launch a raid. They intentionally crash a stealth jet of ladybug design into the tether that attached the hive to the tree. They set bombs within to explode.

Entering the hive, they fight their way to the rioting prisoners led by Sarge. Together, they fight their way to the hangar bay. There, all don gliders and parachutes, fleeing the hive. At the last, the team detonates the explosives within the stealth jet, severing the tether that had connected the hive to the tree. It falls twenty meters (in a story called Terror at Twenty Meters), collapsing when it hits the ground. It is left unknown who within survived the fall, and who perished, but the ants presume that the bulk of the Wasp Empire is wiped out in the fall, and the bulk of its military might - its vast weapons of war - could not have survived the devastation of the hive.

For all intents and purposes the war is over. Baron Sh’Ak remains to rebuild the Wasp nation, although he declares that he seeks no further enmity with the ants, and that he may lead his people to start again elsewhere. This is left as an unresolved thread, and I had no plan for what, if anything, to do with this.

In an epilogue, the ants establish a new temporary hill, while the Queen reveals that Sarge had been the love of her life; she could not marry him because of his common caste, but in this new world, she is casting off old rules and she will marry him. They wed in a small ceremony and together they begin to oversee the restoration of the ant nation.