After waiting months to hear back from the publisher, I finally accepted that whatever happened, that deal was dead.
But the old dream was revived and the juices were flowing. I decided to try getting the sci-fi graphic novel produced myself.
(Looking back, if I had to do it over again, I would, but still: I did not understand what frustration would overtake me in the next step of the journey.)
If I could find an artist I could afford, I’d foot the bill myself, run it as a series on Arktoons, then get it bound in paperback and release it that way. Maybe I should finally try crowdfunding, sez I. The story’s based, seasoned with some red pills, but it’s set in a world that is not a metaphorical stand-in for the geopolitics of 2022 Earth, so IndieGoGo or whoever might not cancel it mid-campaign. And there was a new gunfighter in town, I heard, called FundMyComic which specializes in comic book crowdfunding, and respects the First Amendment.
I’m really glad now that I waited on that crowdfunding idea, rather than put backers in the position of waiting years (at least two-and-counting, now) for me to deliver a finished project.
Thank God my financial situation has improved significantly since the period I went through from 2005 to 2017. But I still don’t have money to burn, now or two years ago. This project requires a big sacrifice in precious resources that are needed for other aspects of life. I had to get the best bang-for-the-buck I could scrounge, and even then I would have to do a lot of scraping just to afford the artwork. I’m not a known creator in comics, so it’s not like I could just start a Patreon account and expect backers to appear and start contributing to an artwork fund. I’ve got 11K followers on Amazon, but you’d never know it from the number of reviews my books get. And how many of them read or care about sequential art?
I already had a Fiverr account; so I began searching…I decided to submit Page 3 this time, because it would give me a chance to see how the artist would do with some of the vehicles and other tech.
The artist who I contracted with repeatedly asked for time extensions, and I allowed them. After waiting 9 days, he finally submitted a rough sketch that he had obviously just thrown together in a matter of minutes. Here I was thinking 9 days should be enough time to draw and color 6 spectacular panels. What I initially got was no better than what I could doodle myself.
Alt Hero Q is one of the first Arkhaven projects, which preceeded the Arktoons website.
What it’s About:
It is a globe-trotting action spy thriller featuring a former Treasury agent recruited into an open source intelligence operation. He was one of the few honest agents left in the Federal Alphabets, who was nearly snuffed for noticing what should not be noticed. Now Roland Dane is tasked with investigating the blackmail of a scumbag politician, foiling the assassination attempt on a unicorn honest politician, and thwarting a plot to start a war between Russia and Ukraine.
That last plot thread was devised before the war in Ukraine began IRL. It shows you just how current and savvy the storyline can be at times.
How About that Title?
You have to be pretty sheltered to not have at least heard of Q by now.
If you still believe the Swamp Media and Uniparty scumbags, then “Qanon” is a dangerous domestic terror network which might do something horrible at any moment, meaning American citizens need to surrender more liberty and give the traitors in Washington even more power. To keep us safe, of course.
If you bypassed the Swamp Media, researched it for yourself, and share the beliefs of the anons who followed Q, you think it is a rogue element within the Federal Leviathan which organized a counter-conspiracy to take down the traitors. They have a plan you’re supposed to trust in, which will result in mass arrests of the traitors who have hijacked our government with no, or minimal, bloodshed.
Many who once were in the latter camp are now convinced it was all just another psyop to keep us compliant. To keep us docile. To demoralize us yet again. To get us to self-identify as thoughtcriminals so we are easily targeted for the purges to come during the Great Reset.
Production Values:
Whatever the truth is behind the Q phenomenon, it is a great backdrop for an ambitious espionage/conspiracy thriller. But rather than some ludicrous formula about a unicorn honest MSM journalist chasing the story down to present the truth to the masses (who totally care about freedom, the Constitution, and our long-term future more than porn, social media and getting high), this is a story of a cellular network of patriots and just decent folks sacrificing their own time and resources trying to expose and bring down the Cabal. That’s pretty unique in the conspiracy genres.
Chuck Dixon scripted this tale (based on Vox Day’s general outline, I would guess) with a structure reminiscent of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, but without the vulgarity. The characters and dialog are believable. I’m not exactly sure what the page count would be at this point, but it looks like the plot is nowhere near resolution, yet. Were this an Akira Kurosawa film, I would be confident that after this methodical buildup of tension and conflict, there will be a satisfying, gratifying, rip-snorting denouement to resolve the story arc and tie off all the loose ends. If I were a betting man, I’d say Chuck Dixon is a Kurosawa fan and this is exactly what he intends to do.
The artwork is good and compliments the story well. Sometimes it looks a little rushed, but even at that, I would still say the quality is high. Notice, in the panel above, how you know at just a quick glance that this is a night time scene–and you would know that even without the black sky at the upper left corner. The artist got the shadows from multiple light sources, and everything else, just right. I’ve looked at a lot of comic panels over the years and can’t remember a night scene done this well.
As with much of the Arktoons artwork, the artist sometimes “cheated”/saved time by using mostly empty panels, or zoomed in/out on a preceding panel to form a “new” one. It doesn’t detract from the experience and I would probably do the same, in their place.
You can read everything I’ve read for free on Arkhaven, and I recommend you do–all at one sitting so you don’t lose track of all the setting jumps. If I remember correctly, there will also be a crowdfunding campaign soon for a print version of Alt-Hero Q. Which means, hopefully, that the aforementioned climax has been scripted, drawn, inked, colored, and is ready for showtime.
I’ve never seen a project quite like this. It’s written by an actress and has a sequential art section and artist’s sketches interrupting a prose narrative. The main characters (even in the prose section) are based on people involved–who are credited as such. Sounds like this would be a fun collaboration.
Back in the ’90s I had friends who were fans of Babylon 5, which is where I think Claudia Christian made a name for herself. So an actor in a sci-fi TV series is now the co-writer of a sci-fi fiction publication–with the main character based on her. That character is Adjudicator Steele.
The Prose Section:
And Hell Followed Him is a western set on a Mars colony. Instead of a shady Indian Agent selling rifles to the Apache, there is a shady outlaw who has been selling people to the mutants. For dinner.
Agent Steele teams up with tough-as-nails Marshall Jake Reeves to rescue a kidnapped teenager before she, too, is eaten by the mutants. There seems to be more going on around Devil’s Ridge than meets the eye, and there’s definitely more to Steele’s mission than what we are told, for now. She hides her true agenda from the Marshall, and from the reader, but if this is just the first installment in a series, I’m sure all will eventually be revealed.
The plotting seems fine, so far. Avid western readers should feel right at home in this opening act. The text could have used some proofreading/editing, though. My guess is Chris MCauley wrote it, based on Christian’s ideas, but there was no other pair of eyes on it before it went to press.
The Sequential Art Section:
Steele is the star of this story as well. Here she investigates a string of murders on a Jupiter “mining platform.” Damage to the victims, plus footage of the murders, suggest the murderer has superhuman strength and wears a “morphic” suit of armor which is more advanced than the most state-of-the-art military combat armor.
It’s a simple mystery, easily solved, but also sets up a longer story arc involving Steele and her homicidal sister, who murdered their parents and now commands a space fleet and works out dirty deals with at least one planetary government.
I’m a little confused about the setting here. What is the mining platform, exactly? I think most of this story takes place indoors–in ships, maybe a biodome or airtight buildings, but some of it is outdoors where it rains. I wouldn’t think the climate on Jupiter would be very human-friendly, yet humans are evidently fine there with just a rain poncho and no oxygen mask or rebreathing system.
Nevertheless, the artwork is very nice. Penciller Staz Johnson seems very comfortable with comic panel work, and his cover art is even more impressive.
My Take:
I watched a few episodes of Babylon 5 back in the day, but never really got into it. I saw it as sort of The Love Boat in Space. But this series looks to be more like Trek Classic: more adventure, with some mystery (and western!) mixed in. It has the potential to be fun. I would like to see what happens in the prose story next, but would like it even more if they transform it into comic form, as well.
(This post was originally scheduled for a couple weeks ago, but stuff happened and it had to get shuffled around. Apologies if you were expecting it earlier.)
Why do we consistently lose, politically? (And even when we supposedly win, we still lose.)
You’ve probably already figured it out. If not, you likely will soon: the GOP always sells us out. They are controlled opposition. Or the “good cop” LARPing as our champion while the Uniparty they belong to commands them to continually betray us.
Lucy: the GOP Establishment. Charlie Brown: Republican voters.
Nobody truly committed to liberty, national sovereignty, or even sanity will ever be allowed to rise to prominence in the Uniparty Machine. Real change (change for the better, I mean) is what the MSM and Establishment gatekeepers exist to prevent.
This post applies to the Dissident Right writ large, but I intend to specifically address the creative/artistic “community” within this faction.
There are plenty of squabbles on the Left: Should we commit infanticide only before birth, or is any time hunky-dory? Should we incessantly ram sodomy down people’s throats, or Islam? Who deserves our support more–macho chicks who think they’re as good or better than dudes, or dudes who pretend to be chicks and shatter those fantasies?
But whenever there’s a significant battle to be fought, the leftards put aside their differences, present a united front, and dogpile on anyone with the audacity to question their Big Tent Agenda.
On the Right, we are too busy backbiting each other to even entertain the idea of unity. Chances are (if you’re not a well-known influencer of some kind), you’ve been wounded more and deeper by potential allies than the enemy.
When I dusted off my Twatter account and began spending time there again, I couldn’t help but notice all the bickering about some “conservative calendar” with photos of attractive women in it. Most of the mudslinging and name-calling was between right-of-center folks. And that was just a blip compared to an ongoing feud between the respective supporters of Eric July and Ethan Van Sciver.
People supposedly on our end of the political spectrum will sabotage others’ marketing efforts, assassinate their character with flimsy or no evidence, copy stuff others have written and use it for their own purposes without giving credit…and that only scratches the surface.
A lot of you just won’t quit feeding the Beast, even when there are alternatives. You keep using Google, Wikipedia, Facebook; drinking Coke/Pepsi, eating at McDonalds/Burger King and buying Hersheys/Kellogs, etc. Same with Marvel/DC, Disney, Netflix, etc.
Unity comes natural to collectivists. They fear independent thought, so naturally fit the role of obedient drones in the Hive Mind. Their largest demographic is Millennial–one of the most cooperative and conformist generations alive today.
By our nature, liberty enthusiasts are independent thinkers. Getting us to unify for any cause is like herding cats. And the dominant demographic in the creative “community” on our side is Generation X. We don’t play well together. We are the most competitive of the living generations.
So, spoiler alert: extreme individualism and a hyper-competitive instinct don’t naturally gravitate toward unity, or even solidarity.
What is needed for us to build a parallel economy/culture that succeeds? I probably can’t provide a comprehensive list, but I know we’re gonna need an online bookstore. Arkhaven is already on its way to scooping up the audience that the pozzed comic sites are chasing away. We may see an online drop-shipper rise up out of the Gab Marketplace to compete with Amazon in the realm of all the other stuff they peddle, but we are gonna need a bookstore that will sell the books they ban, and design algorithms that allow readers to decide what succeeds, instead of woketard gatekeepers.
But no matter what platforms are built on our side, and how good the quality of the products, they can’t and won’t succeed if you keep using your voting dollars to enrich the businesses that hate you. Those woke, pozzed businesses have the deck stacked in their favor. While small (and non-woke) businesses have been targeted for destruction, anointed favorites like Amazon get special deals that make them immune to most of our totalitarian overlords’ poison.
This is one battlefield of many where we need solidarity to have any chance of success.
Back when I first published Hell and Gone (paid link), it got a good review. I say good because the reviewer was a combat veteran who appreciated what I had injected into the men’s fiction/action-adventure/military thriller genre(s). I spent a lot of time on a forum for Kindle authors in those days, and evidently he did, too. He sent me a DM there identifying himself as the reviewer, and went on to say he bought/read my book to check out the competition. This was Jack Murphy, a Mack Bolan fan and former Army Ranger, who was, at the time, writing his own first novel–also a paramilitary adventure.
I don’t have any copies of our first correspondence (or even remember the name of that forum), but my response was along these lines: “Nobody is writing this kind of stuff anymore, so there’s plenty of room for competition. In fact, it could use some good solid competition.”
We became online buddies after that, helping readers discover each others’ work, commenting on each others’ blogs, and giving signal boosts whenever possible. We gave each other crossover business, intentionally and unintentionally. He was one of the guys who convinced me to write a sequel (paid link) to what I had not myself considered more than a stand-alone novel. As it turned out, Jack made better choices than I did and had me beat on the right time/right place dynamic as well. His novels got hundreds of reviews. He was a founding member of SOFREP, became an investigative reporter, and went on to write some non-fiction, including a New York Times Bestseller.
Jack was a stand-up guy, but is not a member of the Dissident Right. He chose a different path than I did. And he is far more successful as an author than I am. But I don’t regret helping him out in those early days. I don’t resent his success. Not at all. Even if he goes back to writing men’s fiction, I still want him to succeed (continue succeeding, that is). There is room enough for both of us, and plenty more.
Like all the arts, literature is not a zero-sum game. When somebody buys Reflexive Fire or Target Deck, (paid links) odds are, they’re not going to stop reading books for the rest of their lives after reading those. Plenty of readers bought both my books and his.
I personally think it’s economically crazy for CVS to build a store at every single intersection where a Walgreens sits, as they seem to in every Florida city. Yet I’ve never seen one of them capture 100% of the customers and force the other one out of business by doing so. Both are doing fine, so far as I can tell.
I was a huge Batman fan as a boy, and bought his titles whenever I had money. But that didn’t stop me from buying Spiderman, too. Neither of them decreased in popularity just because the other was also popular.
It is not going to hurt you if somebody buys a book written by somebody else you consider competition. It is not going to hurt your blog or review site if an Internet user (or two, or 10, or 10,000) also visit a different blog. Same deal with comic buyers, social media followers, whatever. You should want them to succeed, if they are also in favor of liberty, Christianity, and the nuclear family–or even just not trying to help Globohomo destroy all of the above.
Will this turn out to become the Iron Age, or will it remain the Pozzed Age? Without a little bit of solidarity throughout the Right, and not-so-common sense, the enemy will win this battle, too.
Share your thoughts in the comments. And if you like what we’re doing at Virtual Pulp, share our posts on social media (those convenient buttons on the right sidebar are one way to do it).
UPDATE: I’m backing up the site now, will update the PHP afterwards, then see if I can get the subscription widget working. Thanks for your patience!
You would have to be Boss Level oblivious right now to not be aware of the struggle taking place for the fate of our country, and our culture. Sane, decent people have not put up much of a fight in the former, but they finally are making their presence known in the latter.
In both struggles, the Establishment is fully on board with the other side’s agenda.
In the culture war, the Establishment is controlled by Homowood; the New York Publishing Cartel (“tradpub”); the Big Diseased Two (in comics); similar Globohomo tools in the music business; and of course all the MSM propagandists who publicize all the fake news about all the above.
The Dissident Right has been waging a guerrilla campaign on the culture front. Now, maybe-just-maybe, the guerrillas are ready to join forces and engage the enemy in decisive battle. Force-on-force action has begun to demonstrate that (at least to some extent) Globohomo is being outfought by the Resistance, whether it be Gab in social media, Infogalactic in web research, FundMyComic or GiveSendGo in crowdfunding, or Arkhaven in webcomics. Gabpay might soon be a match for Paypal. Let’s hope so.
However, two weapons we are sorely lacking is a non-woke search engine (some come along, but never stay non-woke for long), and a non-converged online bookstore.
Comicsgate and other phenomena are evidence that our side might be capable of concentrating force on the cultural battlefield. I recently shared some of my thoughts on this topic in a group on Gab. One of the commenters opined that the cultural epoch we’ve been stuck in so far could best be titled “the Pozzed Age.”
And right there in that comment is a simple, rhetorical indicator of what we are fighting for: Will this be the Iron Age, or the Pozzed Age?
Drop a comment to let us know what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe so you won’t miss any new content.
First of all, what is “Iron Age,” besides a hashtag and keyword?
Since (I think) it began after one of Razorfist’s rants, primarily among independent comics creators, let’s look at it through the lens of comics for a moment.
Action Comics #1, introducing the very first comic book superhero, is where I place the start of the Golden Age. I think all agree that it ended before 1956. I would place it more toward 1949, when all but a handful of superheroes disappeared from circulation. Because of the crude (sometimes downright childish) art and writing, few are as fascinated with it as I am. Still, that period is universally recognized as “The Golden Age.”
Experts identify the “reimagining” of the Flash, in 1956, as the beginning of the Silver Age. And though the Flash is a DC character, it was Marvel that made the biggest splash during this era.
The first comic book I ever laid my hands on. I think it’s from the Bronze Age.
Near as I can figure, the Bronze Age was when I first discovered comic books. It was the ’70s-80s, when comics could still be found on spinner racks in drug stores and gas stations, kids still read them, and the politics weren’t nearly as unbearable as they would become later. There were no cultural Marxist screeds yet–the writers usually conducted a Gene Roddenberry charade of balance, where those accursed right-wingers also had a right to their opinions.
Below is the Razorfist rant in which I believe the term “Iron Age” (as it applies to entertainment) may have been coined (as with all Razorfist rants, I apologize for the profanity but accept your gratitude for the humor):
Usually, “ages” of this, that, or the other are determined retroactively. If nothing else, The Iron Age is unique in that it has been named while it is ongoing.
In this video, Katie Roome gives an educational introduction to the Iron Age:
Even though there is a website called “Iron Age Media,” the Iron Age isn’t a publisher or an organization. It’s the age of entertainment we’re living through. More than that, according to many: it’s a movement by independent creators. The nature of the creations is outlined by Katie Roome fairly well.
Some of my readers might ask if I’m a part of this movement. Well, I started blogging, and published my first novel (independently) approximately a decade before the Wu Flu lockdowns. That alone might disqualify my work, depending on how rigidly one wants to define the Iron Age. My primary goal has always been to tell good stories and entertain, but I have offended many a leftist snowflake by pushing back against the woketard agendas and narratives that dominate pop culture so far. I do this increasingly in my bestselling Retreads series, for instance.
Along with the Detective Comics title above, this represents my very first comic book purchase–with change given me by whatever adult I lived with at the time. I can’t remember if there was added tax, so let’s say 50 cents for both.
However, my fantasy shorts and retro-pulpy boxing novella are exclusively entertainment, devoid of any contemporary politics.
So am I part of the movement? I am still publishing work, in the post-lockdown era, so maybe. In any case, I certainly sympathize with it (as I understand it) and applaud the intentions of the creators who are part of it. There is no single authority on, leader of, or governing body over Iron Age (setting it apart from “Comicsgate,” perhaps) so it’s academic, if not moot.
When I am finished with my current time travel series, I plan to shift my efforts from prose over to sequential art. My first graphic novel, a sort of pulpy space opera, will resume once I find a dependable artist with integrity. For now, a black & white “false start” (not intentionally such) is available for free on Arkhaven.
If the Iron Age is a movement, I’m looking forward to what is produced from within it.
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
