3. UnComix Tales: The Dark Child Saga: The Fall Of F.I.S.H.: Part Three "The End Of Life As We Know It" (Un-Iverse #71)
Rating: Looking over it, R. The violence is bloody and brutal. Also watch for some language, adult themes, partial nudity, and innuendo.
Author's Note for UnComix Tales: The Dark Child Saga: The Fall Of F.I.S.H. #3: Part Three: "The End Of Life As We Know It" (Un-Iverse #71)
I have now told the story I NEEDED to tell to finally tell the story I WANT to tell. The dues have finally been paid.
Lance and Vulgaris' final fight scene is one of the rawest scenes ever in The Un-Iverse. The Narrator steps out during much of it too, so its brutal, bloody, lethal violence is being played out in as jarring a manner as possible. If the scene were animated there wouldn't be any music during it.
There are fights more elaborate than it. There are fights gorier than it. There are fights more epic than it. But I think it is rawer and more brutal than anything I have ever or will ever show. There is a realism to the violence here that is absent from the other gorier stuff. Even the blood-spattering stuff is ultimately fantastical and not very realistic. This is arguably imitable for anyone who possesses fists and / or a heavy rock. Don't try this at home, kids.
Lance Lockjaw has been a very troubling character for me to both write, and to get my brain around. I don't like him, and I don't understand him very well. He's not a character like Dr. Buzz that I don't understand at ALL, but he confuses me, which is probably the wrong character to put as the lead of an entire book. He's Roland Deschain and I'm Stephen King. His choices often frighten me.
I tell you this so you will understand how much the tears streaming down his face as he realizes he's saying goodbye to Redmond for the final time helped me with him. I don't understand much about him, but I understand THAT thing, and I think it's his biggest and truest moment so far, so I'm glad it's the one thing I got and portrayed correctly. Lance is a mystery to me. That one moment solved a HUGE part of the puzzle.
"Kill The Moon" is a pretty great Doctor Who episode of the mid 2010's during the Peter Capaldi run. It posits the idea that Earth's moon is actually an egg for a giant alien creature. You might think I got the idea there. I didn't. I drew a similar "Kitchen Sink" detailed drawing of a monster breaking out of a planet's surface as a teenager, loved the idea, and basically made that specific egg Klawrania in my early 20's. Even before F.I.S.H. was put to paper, and a conception rather than a reality, that was the vague idea in my head. Redmond was very gradually turned from a bad guy into an unwilling victim, as the ideas of how to make the prophecy come to term took shape. By the time I started the last iteration of Gilda And Meek, the idea had already been decided on for a couple of decades, and I had the details for this miniseries planned out already. Very little has changed in the meantime.
I added spider characteristics to the Creature, but the notion of a creature exploding a planet like an egg occurred to me when I drew that drawing and I later got the idea in my head that this is how Redmond's planet gets destroyed. I've had this idea forever, and kept it a bit of a secret. It's weird that it's finally out in the open.
I will say it took a bit of finesse to fit the planet exploding into a prophecy, figure out a way to suggest the prophecy was both bullshit AND true at the same time, and suggest there was a lot of deliberate effort on the part of bad actors to make this devastating occurrence happen. It wasn't merely ironic bad luck. It was sustained corruption led by people of hubris, ego, ignorance, and power. Frankly, it now fits easily into a climate change political allegory for current events, which is another thing I am very happy with. But this whole idea was planned out for a couple of decades, but both the details of it, and the mechanics of how and why the Crisinians would attack and try to destroy Earth took a long time to thread the needle of. Luckily for me as a writer, I had a LOT of lead-time to get those things in the story straight and set. And I think it paid off (for this part of the saga at least).
I redid several action sequence pages, just to make sure they looked right. I think that MOSTLY paid off. But I STILL don't like the drawing of the Spider-Creature exploding. Unfortunately, I realized I wasn't gonna be able to do better, so we're stuck with it.
Like on Star Trek, the transporter pins are the second most logically inconsistent bit of future-tech in F.I.S.H. (the first, of course, being Universal Translators). When the pin is and isn't needed is wholly inconsistent and seems to change for story needs rather than logic. Crusty needs to grab onto somebody with a transporter pin to be transported away, yet the Klawranians' ships tracking Redmond on Skarn can read his Klawranian lifesigns via sensors and use them to transport him without one. It doesn't make sense. And on some level it's worse than the Universal Translator in that I never point it out or make fun of it in the story itself. I simply hope you didn't notice it when you first read it.
Let me TRY and offer a speculative theory on how this could POSSIBLY work. Keep in mind I have not kept track of every instance of transporter use in the saga, and there may be instances in it that prove this desperate and clunky theory wrong. But for now, assuming I didn't mess it up elsewhere, I speculate the pins are necessary for either long-range transporter distance, or if the transport is from a heavily fortified area (like a prison). From a planet's surface people can be beam to and fro just using their unique lifesigns that the sensors recognize. Pretty fast and loose explanation if you ask me, and I might have fucked it up somewhere (and maybe more than once). But unlike Star Trek's inconsistency there, which is somehow worse because the pins are also used for communicators, a feature that also has entirely inconsistent and inexplicable rules attached, there is a good chance this unlikely explanation at least fits what I've shown. Maybe. If only because if it didn’t, I would have noticed and bitched about it long before this. You see, this shit bothers ME too.
And the reason the explanation MIGHT fit is simply because in The Un-Iverse long range transporter travel IS possible (whereas it is not in Star Trek). Zalia's ship was NOT close by when she beamed Crusty and his group out of the prison last issue. Long-range transport is not used a ton because there are risks involved, but the pins would obviously lessen them. The more I think about it, the more sense that makes to me.
All right then. I just talked myself into buying my own bullshit. Good deal.
The reveal of Vulgaris unmasked is in my mind the scariest thing I have ever drawn. I believe the drawing it dethroned was the drawing of Mistress Augatha on Page 6, Panel 3 of Gilda And Meek “All Blood Things… Step One: What Ben Franklin Said”. You ask me, this is a LOT worse. What’s interesting about it is it looks far worse on the page than the scene did in my head when writing the script. That should not only not be artistically possible for a shitty artist like me, that shouldn’t even be possible for a GREAT artist. I’m as shocked by that as anyone.
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