Sky Stalwart and Messy History

I had something of an 'aha' moment. I was thinking about the 'world' of Shards of Tomorrow, and how much I like how I solved the world of Doc Stalwart / The Stalwart Age by creating a comic that never was. It scratched an itch for me to have a comic series I always wanted to have. I could create a full series of hundreds of comics of an extended storyline, or I could just pretend I did! I chose pretend, and am much the happier for it.

It occurred to me that I could do the exact same thing for the science fiction world I want to craft. I had two competing ideas in my head - a classic two-fisted hero named Sky Stalwart, or a modern, not-manic-pixie-dream-girl-but-also-kindof named Skye Stalwart. One was Doc Stalwart's dad, and the other was his daughter. I couldn't decide which story to pursue...

Then I realized that, thanks to the messy real history of comics, I didn't need to! I keep embracing the idea that the history of publishing is fraught with weird events, behind-the-scenes drama, and outright plagiarism and intellectual theft. Problem solved!

I present to you the science fiction comic strip that never was (except in my imagination)... Sky Stalwart: The Man Who Fell From Earth. My plan is to create the world around the comic strip, and maybe even some sample comic strips, but to not actually make 12,000+ strips. This gives me the chance to 'own' a comic strip that lasted several decades (which I've always wanted) without actually, you know, doing the work of MAKING a comic strip that takes decades to do.

It's called having your cake and devouring it as well. I highly recommend it.

More to come shortly. I'm excited to design his starship, the Cormorant. I'm excited to delve into some of his most notable storylines. Tolkien once talked about creativity as taking a leaf from the tree of ideas that have already been written and describing your leaf as well as you can. I feel like the leaves of this are already created, and now I just get to go and pull leaves as I will. Fun!