Thursday, December 6, 2007 by Vaal.

Okay gang, executive decision time. I planned to make Issue 21 the Alexis/Vorpal story I’ve been thinking about for a while. But the truth is that a) I’d rather dive right into A Magitech Crisis and b) I’m seriously thinking of abandoning the 12 issues = 1 volume = 1 meta arc thing I’ve been doing. I’ve got two meta arcs going one right now: The Ace High/Thunderhead/Shine plot and the Magitech plot.The thing is, I’m at a good place dramatically to start A Magitech Crisis and I’m going to take it. Unfortunately, that’s going to mean that there will be no ‘mega event’ at the end of this 12 issue cycle because Crisis is this ‘year’s’ mega event.

So here’s the plan for the last few issues of Year (I’m no longer doing Volumes, per se) 2: Descendants Special #2 (TITLE PENDING), Issues #21 & #22: A Magitech Crisis Parts 1 & 2, Issue #23: Post Modern Promethean, Issue #24: Return to Deep 19, and finally, Descendants Annual #2.

Along the way, I still plan to do SI Unit 2, the Before the Fall mini and possibly another Whitecoat oneshot or a oneshot from one of the prelates we haven’t met yet. And keep any eye on the Universe section because I’m going to be posting a lot of stuff there too.

Finally, you can direct any questions or comments on the series to the forum and I’ll be glad to chat with you.

Right now, I’m going to go agonize over the title for the special for an inordinate amount of time. Hasta.

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Thursday, December 6, 2007 by Vaal.

Sorry it took me like a month to get back to this, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t like blogging. I have no idea why, but I just don’t and really can’t keep a blog going any more than sporadically. I hope to change that with this one as it gives me a chance to talk about my projects the way I ramble about them to my friends.

But anyway, back to the story I was telling.

By the time high school rolled around, I was exploring a return to my ‘roots’ as it were with the character of Chaos. I also had two new inspirations; Digimon and teenage hormones.

The hormones explain themselves really; I discovered girls like guys that do creative shit and played it to full advantage. I included all my female friends as characters in my new work, Chaos and Darkness with the girl a fawned over taking the role of Darkness.

The Digimon thing is harder to explain. For those that haven’t seen the show, Digimon is about kids and teens from the Real World traveling to the ‘Digital World’ and fighting baddies with the help of pokemon ripoffs called, you guessed it, digimon.

Pretty standard fare, really. But what set digimon apart for me was ‘digivolution’. Basically, when stressed or trying to protect someone, a digimon would ‘digivolve’ into a tougher, more awesome form. I was enamored with the idea instantly and the new Chaos and Darkness reflected this.

In that work, the main characters (each with base powers of Chaos, Darkness, Water, Wind, etc) had he ability to ‘megaform’ in the same way Digimon did. It was even a key plot point, as some characters could do it at will and others were jealous because they couldn’t at all.

I fairly quickly became obsessed with my mega-form concept, the same way the makers of Digimon did as the base megaforms (Warlord Chaos, Fallen Angel Darkness, etc) soon branched out into Corrupt megaforms (Black Magic Chaos), Hyperforms (War God Chaos), Trip Megaforms (Deamon Darkness) and eventually Fusion Megaforms (Dreadlord [a Chaos, Darkness combo])

It got really bad, as the new baddie I’d created, Viral (oh, we’ll be seeing him again, I’m sure) got in on the act, both creating corrupt megaforms and becoming Ultra-Viral. Eventually, I wound up spending more time coming up with megaforms and their concepts than actually writing the damn books.

By that time, I was starting college and with a wealth of new things to do and people to know, I almost gave up writing completely.

Then I was saved by DnD.

My new friends knew I liked fantasy video games and invited me to try the granddaddy of them all; tabletop DnD. Now, I may be a sci-fi writer primarily, but my first lady love is sword and sorcery. And sword and sorcery that I had a stake in making the story in was like a religious experience for my inner writer.

Sure, my first character, a sorcerer named Magik (I didn’t pick the name. Seriously.) didn’t last very long, but my gaming continues to this day. Along the way, I used techniques I learned form RPing characters to flesh them out in a written setting. Gage Infernus, Hechubhan Soturai and the ubiquitous Coulmni Agni (who pops up in everything I write and at this point, games I don’t even play in) all spawned form this, as did the source of my internet persona, Vaalingrade Ashland. You may have seenpart of one of his adventures in my nanowrimo.

And so, Chaos and Darkness returned to the depth, replaced by the Ere Series, which I someday wish to finish. It seemed that the may have been gone forever. But this wasn’t the first time they were lost. All it would take would be a little nudge int he right direction.

That nudge was a Marvel Superheroes game using the HERO system (seriously it’s a great system and you should by the fuck out of it). At the time, I was off X-men comics, having quit Marvel altogether in disgust at Heroes Reborn. Proving that I don’t learn, I went back to Marvel to research the game’s setting (New X-men: Academy X) I became enamored all over again with a tale of high school with super powers.

So I built a character who personality I felt was missing from NXM: a metal controlled at the time called Miles Cain. I had no idea how the system worked at the time, so I just came up with cool things to do with metal control (including metal sense, the ‘armoring up’ by destroying nearby objects and a pair of tentacles ala Omega Red.).

But when I got the book and saw the options, I got giddy. In Hero, things like extra limbs can be built with ‘extra limbs’ but if they’re going to diverge a lot from your character, you can buy them as Duplicates and as it turns out, there is no penalty for making them sapient. Isp and Osp were born, named both in and out of character in homage to the webcomic Sluggy Freelance.

After the first game, with my reservations at playing in a comic style game ebbed, Mile Cain became the more four color friendly Warrick Kaine (K’s are inherently cooler than C’s).

By this time, I was back deep into comics and Marvel was about to take a deep wallow into the twin blowful events: Decimation and Civil War. Decimation screwed Mutants royal 90% of them lost their powers deus ex machina style and the rest went all mopey and emo. Over in the New X-men title, the new writer rubbed it in readers faces by killing off 45 student characters including a number of those who still had powers.

The light and fun school book was no more and Civil War arrived to ensure this happened to all characters in Marvel. I was horrified. It was like I’d come back to the circus after five years and now all the clowns had cancer.

Sure, some of the titles were still decent, but what little four color flavor had survived the terrible 90’s was dead and gone. And all the ‘new’ fans mockingly suggested that if I didn’t like it, maybe I should do my own.

Well fuck them, I did. Originally called Elementals, I resurrected the Chaos and Darkness characters in name and spirit to become the backbone of a new kind of classic superhero and created a world for them to populate. After several permutations (which I’ll discuss later), the Descendants Universe was born and the rest, as they say, was history.

Next Meta post will be about the first steps into the DU, specifically the original plot for Elementals.

Until then, hasta.

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