• Archives
  • Contact
  • Drawings
  • Meteor Mags
  • Music Albums
  • Paintings
  • PBN
  • Sea Monkeys
  • Secret Origin

Mars Will Send No More

~ Comic books, art, poetry, and other obsessions

Mars Will Send No More

Tag Archives: science fiction

book review: The Secret History of Empress M (Book 1 of The 64)

05 Wednesday Oct 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in science fiction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

book review, books, outer space, science fiction, self publishing, Space Detective, Space Police, telepathy, the 64, the secret history of empress m, tony padegimas

The Secret History of Empress M tells two action-packed stories that eventually intersect on the interstellar frontier. The first story concerns a ten-year-old girl named Em who starts out held in isolation from humanity due to her telepathic powers. Her only human contact is with some friends who visit her for tea parties using a technology that allows them to communicate from a distance through mechanical bodies. But Em’s secret location is breached by a mercenary hired to kidnap her, kicking off a star-spanning saga of conspiracy and conflicting agendas. And as you might suspect, a telepath is not so easy to kidnap.

The second interwoven story begins by gathering an interesting set of characters one-by-one to become the first members of The 64, a new police force meant to patrol the politically complex “landscape” of space where many different civilizations coexist—and not always peacefully. A war hero, a detective, a killer, and a futuristic samurai combine forces with a sentient spaceship and gain extra powers by submerging in a “grey goo” of nanobots. Soon, the team crosses the chaotic path of Em and her would-be captors, and the results are anything but predictable.

The Secret History is full of twists and turns made even more complex by the same consciousness-projecting technology Em’s tea-time friends employed, and by various means of exchanging consciousness between two people. You’ll need to pay close attention to follow who is who they appear to be, and who isn’t. But the reward for staying sharp is a one-of-a-kind adventure that will keep you turning pages until the very end.

Author Tony Padegimas has a knack for mining the humor from serious situations and finding a way to make us laugh by juxtaposing characters who all have radically different personalities and perspectives. The novel could easily be marketed as “young adult” science fiction, but I’m almost fifty and thought it was a great read. Tony covers so much ground and deftly juggles so many plot threads and characters that I never knew what was coming next, despite a lifetime of reading and watching science fiction and space opera. And yes, there is a sequel in the works!

Buyer’s Guide: The Kindle ebook edition of The Secret History of Empress M is currently available for $4.99 on Amazon, a bargain price for an epic of its length. If you are more into fantasy, you should check out Tony’s two novels about the continuing adventures of Jack the Giant Killer from the classic Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale, both wild, fast-paced rides much like Secret History: Beanstalk and Beyond and Taliesin’s Last Apprentice.

short story draft: Gods of Titan

03 Monday Oct 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

meteor mags, octopus, Patches, science fiction, self publishing, Titan, writing

Chronologically, this episode comes before the one I posted earlier this week. It just took a bit longer to get everything sorted.

art generated by Midjourney

Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan
© 2022 by Matthew Howard. All Rights Reserved.
Episode 37 of The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

Mags, Patches, and Alonso travel to Titan to check on her errant octopus babies, only to discover their eight-armed friends have other plans.

4,500 words.

Now all you merry blacksmiths,
a warning take by me:

Stick to your country horseshoes
and your anchors for the sea.

When the gods of war come calling,
promising you gold,

they’ll take your hammer,
take your anvil,
take your very soul.

—The Longest Johns; Hammer and the Anvil; 2022.

🏴‍☠️

March 2032. From the letters of Meteor Mags.

Lonso and I had a blast partying on Isla Salida with the friends we left behind.[1] Patches did, too, but she seems to have fun no matter where we go. She couldn’t give a single fuck, so long as no one lets her dishes go empty.

I’m convinced she doesn’t need to eat anymore—or drink, or breathe. I think she just does those things because cats prefer routines, and maybe she finds comfort in familiar things that make her feel normal instead of like some kind of freak. I know what it’s like to be thought a freak. But maybe she just likes screaming at her bowls to remind everyone we exist to serve her.

It took so long to get to Titan that Lonso and I weren’t even hungover anymore. In fact, we’d had a few too many hairs of the dogs that bit us, and we were a drunken mess by the time the Saturnian moon came into view. We’d been listening to my massive collection of chanteys—what some people call “sea shanties” without realizing that every bloody chantey is a sea shanty by definition. Most of the damn things are older than me, and that’s saying something.

Lonso especially liked a tune that warned blacksmiths about working for the war machine. We listened to a bad-ass rendition in a minor key about five or six times in a row, and I knew why he liked it. Lonso was just a kid from the hood when I met him, and after the fascists slaughtered his bandmates, he got a fake identity and went to work for the interplanetary Port Authority.

Whenever he talks to me about those days, he makes a show of how he got all this awesome pilot training and combat skills, and so many high-tech toys to play with. He’s quick with a story about his drunken brawls, black-market entrepreneurship, and breaking all the rules.

But like most guys, he’s not so quick to talk about the emotional pain behind the funny stories. He doesn’t talk about how it was eating him from the inside out to be working for the man after so many years of rebelling and playing kick-ass rock. He doesn’t mention how serving the war machine and the incompetent bureaucracy that killed his friends took something away from him every day of his life.

Not that I want to paint a picture of Lonso as some sort of broken soul or wounded warrior. Fuck that noise. He’s right as rain these days. In ’29, I accidentally rescued him from all that Port Authority bullshit, and the time he spent rocking out with my telepathic octos did him some good.[2] Hell, that kid’s way more level-headed than me and far less cynical. Lonso’s happy to be alive, doesn’t sweat the small shit, and seems to make friends everywhere he goes—even in places where I’d make enemies.

But he did cry a little at that blacksmith song. I gave him a hug and another can of ale.

I’m an only child. I never had sisters or brothers. But even though Lonso still calls me tía after all these years, he’s the closest thing I ever had to a brother. I’d move heaven and Earth for that kid, even if he’s nearly fifty now. Even if he found my microphone and is drunkenly screaming along with the Dead Weather album Horehound.

Curse me for a papist. Patches is howling along with him now. She doesn’t even know the words.

What an ungodly racket.

I guess I better join them.

🏴‍☠️

Our space-bound karaoke trio had exhausted most of Jack White’s side projects and all but the last bottle of rum when we landed on Titan. The last time I’d been there with Patches and Plutes, a faction of twenty octopuses had teamed up with an object of unimaginable power we called the triglyph, and they’d merged their mental skills with its god-like abilities to terraform Titan, destroy Enceladus to get its water, and build a monumental radio from a star core and materials they found in space.[3]

Don’t get me wrong. The crazy shit they started broadcasting is awesome, and I still tune it to years later thanks to Plutes playing a couple of hours of it every day on his radio station. It’s the sound of the cosmos. But we had a bit of a misunderstanding last time, when the octos tried to dissemble me and Plutes and Patches to join a group mind and leave our bodies to die.

I don’t love any radio station enough to die for it, unless it’s the PBN. Fortunately, Patches showed those unruly octopuses who was boss, killed a few of them to make her point, and saved the day. We figured they’d be up to typical octopus things when we visited again.

We were so very wrong.

Listen, I’ve heard all the criticisms about how I should have known about this shit earlier. Get off my bloody case. I had a lot going on the past few years, and this shit on Titan wasn’t even on my radar. Why would it have been? When you have telepaths doing whatever they want, they can easily hide it from you.

We set down on the shore of nowhere, on a lake no one had ever named—not even its creators.

🏴‍☠️

The whole reason we went to Titan was that the octopuses living there had been members of the batch of genetically altered babies I helped get born and liberated back in ’29, and all the other members were approaching the ends of the lives. Lonso and I got the rest of my babies sorted on Earth, but we’d been out of touch with Titan for a couple of years. In ’32, I didn’t want them dying on me, either.

Lonso, who insisted on driving long past the point where he should have been in control of a space vessel or even a bloody tricycle, set us down on a flat spot near the beach. We came to an abrupt halt as the Hyades rocked back and forth from her off-kilter landing and settled onto the rock. I accused Lonso of trying to kill us. He pretended that was his plan.

He’s lucky I love him.

We were hardly out of the ship before the octos contacted us. It’s hard to explain what it sounds like when telepathic space octos get inside your brain. It’s like a language made of math and music, sensation and emotion. You feel yourself dissolving into that weird group mind they have. But somewhere in the center is something you still consider yourself.

I’m pretty sure it would melt your circuits and give the octos total control over your thoughts and feelings, but me and Lonso and Patches had been dealing with that shit for years. We knew who we were and what to expect.

What we did not expect was the society my errant babies had created.

🏴‍☠️

<Welcome, friends.> The octos spoke directly into our minds.

Thanks to the telepathic group chat, I knew Patches was offended they didn’t call us “mothers”. She had helped them get born just as much as I did. But she let it slide.

<We have been waiting.>

“For what?” I surveyed the sandy beach and the species of crabs, anemones, and the empty shells of lesser mollusks populating it. Strands of kelp lie strewn above the waterline. I picked up a sand dollar and held it in my hand. It was still alive. Tiny hairs around the opening in its shell struggled to bring food to its mouth. I whipped it back into the saltwater. It skipped along the incoming waves and disappeared.

Patches and Lonso were checking out stuff in their own ways. Lonso said, “Are we even on Titan? Because this beach is like the ones in SoCal.”

“They changed it.” Patches ran to my side and bared her little fangs. “They changed the entire moon. They used the triglyph to teleport some décor from the oceans of Earth so they could have a home. This is the result.”

“Trippy,” said Lonso. “Is that lake, like, real water or some kind of methane bullshit?”

“It’s water they got by destroying Enceladus. They salinated it using the triglyph to create a miniature sun on the far side of Titan—an energy source they used to fuse elements they needed to transform the atmosphere, raise the temperature, and do damn near anything else they wanted.”[4]

“Sweet,” said Lonso. He stripped off his clothes. “I’m going for a swim!”

“Lonso,” I said. “We don’t—”

But he was already in the water.

Patches jumped in after him.

From the beach, I watched them frolic and splash in water that shouldn’t even exist in liquid form that far out in the solar system. I must be getting old, because there was a day when I would have been the first one in. I stripped off my combat boots and arranged the rest of my stuff in a pile on the sand before plunging in.

🏴‍☠️

From every direction, octopuses swarmed me. Their suckers gripped my skin, and their arms embraced me. The added weight pulled me down, but upon sensing my distress, they brought me to the surface for air. Lonso and Patches bobbed above the waves beside me.

I sputtered and flung wet strands of hair away from my face. “You bloody bilge rats! I can’t breathe underwater!”

<Apologies. Everyone here lives in water.>

“How do you forget something like that? After all we’ve been through?!”

<Apologies. But we have never met before, though our grandmothers are legends among all the tribes of Titan.>

“Grandmothers? What the—” Then it hit me. Those little squidlings weren’t my babies at all, but their sons and daughters. If that were true, it could only mean one thing.

The octos followed my train of thought as fast I could think it.

<Their final thoughts were of you. As the light of life dimmed inside our parents, and we were tiny things taking shape inside our eggs, they communicated their knowledge and history to us.>

Patches had made herself at home, curled up and purring on the squishy, bulbous head of an octo who appeared perfectly content to be her throne. She let out a polysyllabic mew.

<Yes, even your languages.>

“What about math?”

<Would you like to hear our proof of the Riemann hypothesis?>

Hell. Even I hadn’t cracked that one, and I’d made a hobby of proving or disproving unsolved math problems. The Riemann hypothesis proposes that the non-trivial zeroes of the zeta function—oh, bloody hell. I’ll explain later.

I said, “Of course I do. But something like that could take hours. Maybe we should—”

<No. It’s simplicity itself.>

They sang me the solution. Objectively, it took no time at all. Subjectively, it was fucking epic. Imagine you took every Beethoven symphony and compressed them all into a single second, and you’ll have an approximate idea of what I experienced.

Poor Patches and Lonso. They got hit with it, too, and neither of them has my understanding of higher-level math. We’re lucky they didn’t get their brains burned to a cinder.

The solution itself was gorgeous. Intricate, complex, and rigorous, it involved a kind of math no one on Earth had ever seen before, even the nerds working on Monster set theory and higher-dimensional topology.

But the way the octos laid it out, from the basic premises to their surprising ramifications, it all made perfect sense. Compared to Beethoven it was, to my mind, even more rapturous—a beautiful re-imagining of how the universe works, a million melodies intertwined, a fundamental re-thinking of math itself that at first felt like gazing into the sun until you go blind. Then everything came into focus again, with crystal clarity and the last echoes of a symphony lingering in my ears.

“Curse me for a papist,” I said. “When did you come up with that?”

<Ten minutes before you landed. We sensed your approach and felt we should have an appropriate gift for our grandmothers.>

“Right, then.” They did all that in ten minutes? The Riemann hypothesis had stumped everyone for two hundred years! “I don’t even know what to say. That was—that was perfect. Perfect in every way. You should be proud of yourselves.”

Lonso looked like he had been hit by an eighteen-wheeler. I think if my babies—sorry, my grandbabies—hadn’t been holding him afloat, he would have sunk to the bottom. “Tía,” he said, “what the fuck was that? I saw fractals and crazy shapes and colors, and all this music and—”

“I’ll explain later,” I said, “but that’s what it’s like when they’ve solved a math problem.”

“I saw the music. I tasted it. That was math?”

“That was brilliance.”

“Whatever the hell it was, it was fuckin’ rad. Made LSD look like a cup of coffee.”

Patches meowed her agreement. Not that she’s ever taken LSD. Not that I know of.

But something my grandbabies said raised a question. “You said ‘the tribes of Titan’. Who are these tribes?”

<Would you like to meet them? We wanted to introduce you, but we forgot you would drown.>

“They’re underwater.”

<Yes.>

Lonso said, “Hey, I got an idea. We got some spacesuits on the Hyades. There’s no reason we couldn’t use them for an underwater dive. I mean, except for Patches. We don’t have a cat-sized suit.”

“Something tells me she’ll be fine. Baby kitty?”

She squinted at me a couple of times to show she was totally fine with the idea.

That’s how the three of us became the first mammals to explore Titan’s lakes.

🏴‍☠️

Titan had lakes long before the octos arrived. The lakes were made of liquid methane and, in some cases, ethane. Titan had, for millennia, possessed clouds that produced rain and snow, too—a complete “water” cycle like Earth’s, but with elements made from hydrogen and carbon instead of hydrogen and oxygen.

The largest of Titan’s ancient methane lakes dwarfed Earth’s largest inland, freshwater seas—at least as far as surface area goes. On the other hand, many of them were incredibly shallow, only a few meters deep. The deepest was about 170 kilometers to the bottom. All those lakes had familiar forms around them: tributaries, gullies, deltas, fjords. Some contained islands.

But the giant lake basins were not carved by glaciers. Instead, they formed from underground gas explosions, sort of like volcanic crater lakes you might have seen before.

No one could dispute the natural beauty of those lakes, but they were unfit for life from Earth’s oceans. When the octos and the triglyph had their terraforming adventure, they filled in dry lake beds and depressions in the surface with good old dihydrogen monoxide—H2O. They also made their fusion factory work overtime to convert the atmosphere, because what’s the use of having some nice saltwater to swim in if methane is just going to rain down and poison it?

I explained all this to Lonso as we suited up and prepared for our dive. Some of it I knew from my own research, and the rest I gleaned from my babies’ group mind on my previous visit.

Soon, we were soon ready to go exploring with my little grand-mutants. The only delay was coming up with a harness and tether to connect Patches to my suit. I mean, she can swim just fine, but we decided it would be easier if she wasn’t constantly struggling to stay submerged and could just swim at my side—or, you know, be a total lazy butt while I handled the swimming.

Finally, I needed suitable weapons to strap to the suit. I had no idea what we might encounter, but I wasn’t going into the unknown unarmed. The problem was that the fingers of my suit were too bulky to handle the trigger on a standard pistol or rifle. I settled on knives, grenades, and a sawed-off semi-auto I’d modified for use with a spacesuit.

I got a machete and grenades for Lonso, and we were ready for a night on the Titanic town. We locked up the Hyades and waded into the lake where the octos waited.

🏴‍☠️

On the way down, we discovered there were way more than the original twenty octos I’d left behind. Octopuses lay anywhere from hundreds to thousands of eggs. On Earth, most of those babies are eaten by natural predators. On Titan, they had none.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? But if nobody is culling your species, then food becomes a major problem. After all, octos need to eat, and if no one is eating you, then you either need to get smart right quick about raising food or die from starvation.

They chose the former.

As the octos guided us down through the Titanic waters, they introduced us to gardens of meat. They had become farmers of the lifeforms they needed to survive: crabs, polychaete worms, clams, and other basically brainless animals they loved to snack on.

All up and down the craggy slopes below the surface of Titan’s new seas, thousands of octopuses tended their gardens. The aquaculture extended far beyond my field of vision, beginning in the light from our headlamps and stretching into blackness that might as well have been eternal. Hunger knows no bounds.

Lonso and Patches wanted to make sushi. Not that I blame them. But I had a bit of a problem with the idea of mind-controlling every species in sight just to make them into food. I mean, it was a crazy efficient idea, but was it right?

We dove deeper.

🏴‍☠️

I checked my oxygen to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. I called out, “Patches? Lonso?”

Lonso responded in my helmet.

Patches drifted by my side. I sensed all the seafood was making her hungry. Iridescent scales of a thousand colors dashed around us in a living rainbow constantly shifting and reorganizing into something never seen before. I reached out a hand and almost touched the beauty before it sped away.

My grandbabies explained that we had entered the zone of fish they did not eat. They had tried to teach telepathy to those fish, with mixed results. Most fish, despite their ability to feel emotion and pain, are not intelligent enough to maintain telepathy on their own.

But the octos, in the years I’d been away from them, had discovered the fish could achieve a rudimentary group mind with the proper support.

Debate about that development had gone on for some time. It would have taken you and me several years. But when you are dealing with telepathic octos, it only takes a few minutes. The speed of thought is an amazing thing.

The short version is: They left the fishes alone to cohabitate in all their colorful glory and decided against extending their telepathic gifts to the species they needed to eat. None of the octos had the stomach to grant self-awareness to their food.

Lonso, Patches, and I descended past the coastal farms and the deeper realms of those independent tribes the octopuses allowed to survive. All those organisms were known to us. Then my grand-squiddos revealed their biggest surprise.

🏴‍☠️

They presented me with a single glass bottle. Where the hell did they get glass on that godforsaken rock? It must have been something they crafted in those brief days when they had the triglyph at their beck and call to make anything and everything they imagined.

Even more mysterious was the horde of tiny microbes inside the vessel. I have better eyesight than most, but I couldn’t see them without the octos zooming in my vision and telling me just what the hell I was looking at.

Inside their little vial swam hundreds of thousands of single-celled organisms. Every one of them thrived in a methane-rich environment that would have instantly killed any organism on Earth.

Those little bastards. My octos had discovered an entirely new lifeform, and they hadn’t even bothered to call me.

“Lonso,” I said, “check this out.”

He said, “Is that methane?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing can survive in that.”

“No,” I said, “it can’t.”

He drew closer. Patches seemed unconcerned. I guess when you can survive in any environment, evolving to survive on Titan probably isn’t a big deal.

But it was a big deal to me. “Babies,” I said, “where did you find this?”

I’ll spare you everything they told me. Cephalopods are notoriously long-winded. The short version is: Their parents discovered native life on Titan in the form of unicellular animals. Before the triglyph buggered off to parts unknown, they preserved a handful of specimens.

A tentacle full? Whatever.

Even after the triglyph disappeared, my babies reached out with their minds and contacted a million billion organisms living in the methane lakes around them. It wasn’t the easiest telepathy. Imagine trying to teach kindergarteners about calculus.

But the octos were nothing if not patient, and far more patient than I’ll ever be. They tried to connect my mind to those methane microbes, but it wasn’t really working for me. It was like trying to explain Jackson Pollock to a cockroach. Or chess to an ant.

Lonso, however, was undaunted. He said, “Micro bros, what the fuck? How long you guys been living here?”

They gave him an answer that compressed hundreds of millions of years into the present moment and just about fried his circuits. I grabbed the shoulder of his dive suit and shook it as hard as I could while screaming at him.

His eyes sprang open.

I locked my eyes on his. “Puta madre! Look at me!”

His pupils bounced back and forth for a second before he locked onto my gaze. “Tía,” he said, “we gotta save them.”

Fuck. I was afraid he’d say something like that.

The problem with the brilliant new lifeform was that it had evolved to live in methane lakes. Other than inspecting the tiny sample I held in my hand, my grand-octos hadn’t studied the animals other than telepathically, at a distance from a lake beyond the horizon behind jagged peaks and unconquerable terrain.

To make matters worse, microbes have never been the best conversationalists.

The octos worried that the long-term effect of interfering with the hydrocarbon “water” cycle would result in Titan’s first extinction. H2O would completely replace methane in the atmosphere and bring an end to native life on Titan.

They had set out to create a utopia, but they had begun a genocide. The octos appealed to me to do something about that tragedy.

The only solution was for us to take a large supply of the methane “water” containing those organisms so I could sequence whatever crazy strands of chemicals they used instead of DNA, record their biological processes and structures, and preserve the endangered animals.

I admit I wasn’t thrilled about the idea. But Lonso wouldn’t let it go, so we did it anyway.

🏴‍☠️

Lonso removed his helmet and set it on the pilot’s seat inside the Hyades. “We can do it, you know.”

I said, “We need a way to transport a bunch of methane, cooled to a liquid state. Maybe we could convert the old octo tank?”

“Word,” said Lonso. “I got an idea.” He picked up the journal I had lying beside my bed.

“Don’t touch that.”

“Just look.” He sketched out his idea in pencil.

The diagram made a lot of sense. I spent a moment in thought with other questions. What would happen if anyone else found about this? What kind of scumbags would start going to Titan to exploit these animals? How the fuck did those things make chromosomes without any phosphorus?

“Lonso, how many hours will it take for us to build this?”

“Depends on how much Anarchy Ale we’re hiding on this tub. The real question is: How much is it worth to you to get in on the ground floor of a whole new lifeform?”

I took a seat beside him on my bed and snatched my journal from his hands. “Don’t ever touch that again. I need a lab, and a fuckton of staff.”

“That sounds like a yes.”

Patches leapt into my lap. “Fine. Will you tell the octopuses?” I brushed a stray lock of hair away from my face. “Nevermind. They already know.”

Lonso said, “It’s funny. Most people think of you as a killer. Look at you now.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Lonso, I never wanted kids. But somehow, I ended up being a mother to all these goddamn species.”

“Life’s fucked up, tía.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

We smoked a joint then got to work.

🏴‍☠️

EPILOGUE

“Puta madre,” said Alonso. “That was the last of the rum.”

“No worries,” said Mags. “We’ll be at the Jolly before you know it.”

“I hope so.”

In the vast darkness between planets, Mags lit a candle and placed it in a candleholder. She set it on the back of her keyboard. She played a couple of chords, adjusted the volume and EQ, then played the chords again. Satisfied, she closed her eyes and sang.

On Earth, stars twinkle in the atmosphere. In the vast emptiness of space, they stare unblinking at everything in the reach of their ancient gaze. They never flinch.

Alonso wiped tears from his face. On the last chorus, he joined his oldest living friend in harmony. He lent a rich baritone to her soprano, and though she had intended the performance as a solo piece, she could not have been happier that he was there to create a moment with her.

Titan faded into the distance. Saturn faded into the distance.

Mags felt closer than ever to her friends.


[1] Mags refers to the events of Pieces of Eight, which immediately precede this story.

[2] A very general summary of events in Blind Alley Blues and subsequent stories such as Small Flowers and Farewell Tour.

[3] As recounted in The Crystal Core.

[4] Mags refers to the “far side” of Titan as the one that permanently faces away from Saturn. Titan is tidally locked with Saturn, so one side of Titan is always facing the ringed planet—which appears quite a few times larger in its sky than Earth’s Moon does on Earth.

short story draft: Reborn

02 Sunday Oct 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

genetics, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, self publishing, writing

While I work on finishing Episode 37, enjoy this draft of the much shorter Episode 38. Despite being only 2,500 words, it is an important bridge to what comes next for our criminal crew.

art generated by Midjourney

Meteor Mags: Reborn
© 2022 by Matthew Howard.
Episode 38 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

Mags assembles a genetic research lab in her old hangar on Vesta. Her first experiment is a complete disaster. After much bloodshed, she tries again.

As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace.

—Ursula K. LeGuin; She Unnames Them, 1985.

🏴‍☠️

In April 2032, Meteor Mags flipped a switch and turned on the lights. Patches ran past her feet. The hangar on Vesta had stood dark and unattended for the better part of two years—but not silent. The recently re-named Planetary Broadcasting Network played over the speakers non-stop, powered by the free-energy system Mags installed on her test run in 2030.[1]

Mags turned up the volume. “Baby kitty?”

Patches scampered here and there, sometimes stopping to listen and smell the faded traces of once-familiar scents, sometimes to carve gouges in the furniture with her indestructible claws.

For a moment, the weight of memories overwhelmed Mags. Her shoulders slumped forward as she removed her glasses and polished the lenses unnecessarily. She remembered the hangar filled with the survivors of the invasion that destroyed her club, killed so many of those dear to heart, and almost ended in her death.[2]

But even in the aftermath, her crew had found ways to celebrate the fact that they were still alive. To celebrate each other. Mags recalled the impromptu drum circles and singalongs.[3]

She lifted her head and got down to business.

After the invasion, Mags protected Vesta by installing a killer satellite network built by her friends on Mars. But she had never decided what to do with the lonely asteroid. Ceres kept her busy.

The experiments she had in mind required privacy and distance. If they went wrong, Mags didn’t want them happening anywhere near a Ceresian city. The more she thought about it, the less she wanted them on Ceres at all.

With one leather-gloved hand, she brushed the dust off an old console. Mags had often bragged that her private hangar was nuke-proof, but nothing could conquer an asteroid’s constant dust. Lights flickered below her fingertips, then shone brighter as she wiped them clean. She typed instructions to check all the systems.

“Patches? Patches!”

A howl came from a far corner.

“Be right back.”

Mags returned not once but three times pushing a pallet jack loaded with stacks of crates. She wiped sweat from her brow and lined them up against the wall.

Patches, content with her scouting and marking, sprawled on the warm green lights of the console. She licked a forepaw and laid her chin on it.

Patches purred.

Mags uncrated a few things, plugged a storage drive into a machine, and lit a smoke. She raised her hands above her head. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new headquarters of GenetiCorp!”

Patches typed the word into a search engine on the touchscreen beneath her. She mewed.

“What do you mean, ‘It’s already taken’?” Mags frowned. “Way to ruin my big moment.” She paced back and forth, and the sharp smack of the soles of her combat boots against the floor echoed in the empty chamber. “Weyland-Yutani? SkyNet? Omni-Consumer Products Corporation?”

She interrupted Patches’ typing with a hand on the bushy calico’s torso. “I was just kidding. Those are definitely taken. Oh, well. Fuck the name for now. Scoot over. We have work to do.”

She cracked open a bottle of rum, took over the typing, and posted several jobs on darkweb.

🏴‍☠️

Four months later, the lab was in full swing. Fifty staff members had joined, all individually vetted by Mags, and paid for with the interest she was earning by loaning her ill-gotten fortune to Solana’s central bank on Ceres to be loaned out again to start-up companies.

The staff lived in newly constructed apartments built by a Ceresian company Mags partially owned. Though small and decidedly functional, the residences were posh by the standards of the asteroid belt. Mags knew the accommodations weren’t as much fun as the former club, but they got the job done.

Her net worth, by her closest estimation, had ballooned to more than seven trillion dollars, not counting the value of Vesta itself.

Not that she ever filed taxes. That was the least of her crimes.

In August 2032, on an asteroid rarely visible to the naked eye on Earth, and only then under the darkest conditions, Mags made a poor decision.

She set a hand on her lead technician’s shoulder. “Sure,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

Her staff got to work.

🏴‍☠️

Cloning is never an easy process. To grow an animal from a pair of cells or a strand of chromosomes requires a womb. At some point, the blastula becomes an embryo and needs a mother in which it can grow.

Mags’ lab workers had settled on Komodo dragons. The scientists believed the reptiles’ robust and occasionally parthenogenetic reproductive systems resembled the ancient wombs that first gave birth to the ancestors of the dinosaurs Mags intended to bring to back to life. Plus, the massive monitors tended to mate between May and August, giving birth in September. The timing seemed fortuitous.

Mags visited her dragons several times each week and joined them in their pen which mimicked the dry, open grasslands and low tropical forests they preferred. She knew she was committing an unspeakable act upon them, but she pet the fearsome beasts and spoke to them in soothing tones only they could understand. They trusted her. They welcomed her touch. They laid eggs.

🏴‍☠️

The first birth began when Mags was away. A leathery, reptilian egg cracked open, and something the solar system had never seen before shoved its face through the shell and screamed. The infant clawed the atmosphere in a rage.

The scientists called Mags. That did not save them.

They had placed an embryo cloned from Odonata’s genes into one of the dragons to see what would happen. Unfortunately, all of them saw what happened.

🏴‍☠️

Mags set the Bêlit on the rocky Vestan surface and called out, “Patches!”

The lazy calico groomed herself. Humans, she had long since decided, had a knack for turning every event into an emergency. Surely there was nothing on Vesta she could not kill.

Still, she loved her best friend. She appeared at Mags’ feet and loudly mewed while showing her fangs.

“About time,” said Mags. “Everyone on this rock is apparently dead—everyone except one malevolent arsehole.”

Patches chattered as if she had seen a bird through a window.

“You and me both. Let’s send this motherfucker to hell.”

Patches rubbed both sides of her face against the smuggler’s boots.

“Alright,” said Mags. She pressed a sequence of numbers to open the side hatch on the Bêlit. “You go first.”

🏴‍☠️

Most of the Vestan experiments had gone well. Besides fully sequencing the alien genes of the methane-based microbes Mags brought back from Titan, they showed quite a bit of promise for resurrecting Mags’ unusual space pets, including her cybernetic mantas and the reptiles she had once abandoned on Earth.

Sadly, for the fifty dead members of the laboratory, Mags had underestimated the human cost of bringing one particular alien species back to life. She and Patches encountered a monster who grew out of control with a single-minded focus on destroying everything it encountered.

The unnamed clone had been born with six limbs. It sprouted more in its personal torment. Eyes spread across its face and sprang into existence up and down its limbs and torso until they defied counting. Spasms wracked its body. It dripped with the blood of those it had killed. The flesh it had consumed fueled its growth. Already a meter and a half tall, it grew with every passing second.

Mags introduced it to a spray of .50-caliber hollow-point rounds from a Desert Eagle. Like a mosquito in a camping tent, the beast took to the air on a chaotic path and evaded death. Mags shouted, “Patches! Can you take him down?”

Borne on four diaphanous wings like a dragonfly, the monster sliced through the air and divebombed Patches. But to the cat, it was merely a game. Her claws rebuked his attacks. His violence was met with even greater violence in a white and coffee-colored blur.

Mags holstered her pistol. The Benelli shotgun slung over her shoulder flew into her hands. “Go for the wings!”

Patches launched herself into the air and shredded every part of him she encountered. A whirlwind of destruction, she swarmed over his head and dug her claws into his back. Once she broke his wings, he plummeted to the floor. Patches landed on her feet and pounced on him. She howled her triumph. The nightmare struck out with flailing limbs and sent her sprawling.

Mags stepped up with the shotgun and blasted the monster in the face and chest until she ran out of buckshot. The clone’s brains and blood and shattered carapace decorated the floor and walls. Even in death, its remnants writhed and grew new organs. Mags stomped it without a shred of mercy.

“Motherfucker!” Mags swept a sticky lock of hair away from her spattered glasses and spat on the corpse. “Don’t you ever touch my fucking cat!” She knelt and held out one hand. “Are you okay, baby kitty?”

Patches rubbed a paw across her face and demanded petting.

Mags scratched the fuzzy face. “I guess it was a rhetorical question.”

Patches flopped onto her side with no regard for the rapidly expanding pool of green blood below. She licked her fur. It made no difference to the tufts of her unruly coat. Her enemy was dead. Her friend was alive. Her bowls were empty.

Such was life.

🏴‍☠️

Mags filled Patches’ bowls and scrubbed the hangar without any help from her friends. She did not want them to know what had happened. After the remains of the alien clone were taken outside and burned to ash on the unforgiving Vestan surface, bleach water destroyed all the errant DNA in the lab. Mags mopped every centimeter of the floor three times, wiped down every other surface, swept up broken glass, patched bullet holes, and deleted several terabytes of incriminating audio and video evidence.

She collected the bodies of the slaughtered humans and Komodo dragons, stacked them on pallets as best she could, and took them outside for a proper burial attended only by her and Patches. Through her friend Solana’s bank on Ceres, Mags paid out fifty generous pensions to next of kin who electronically signed non-disclosure agreements, per the staff’s original contracts.

The process took three days, and she almost ran out of rum.

Then she posted some job listings on darkweb.

🏴‍☠️

One month later, Mags’ new employees began what they believed to be their first project. Neither Mags nor Patches disabused them of that notion. Using the cells Mags had harvested from the remains of her cybernetic mantas, they created embryos they injected into rays imported from Earth.

The scientists supplemented the mother mantas’ diets with minerals they hoped would support the development of the metallic and electric components that defined Mags’ original mantas. The animals grew not from DNA but from a similar chemical spiral that had replaced one of our mammalian nucleobases.

That unfamiliar structure was the blueprint for the clones, and the main problem for the staff was providing raw materials for construction.

The mother rays floated at first in narrow glass tubes that rose from floor to ceiling. Mags decided that was unacceptable and ordered the construction of a gigantic tank to hold them all. On more than one occasion, she dove into the tank to have words with them.

Those words were not anything another mammal would have understood. But after three years of telepathic bonding with an odd assortment of species—from the normal to the mutated, from the cybernetic to the prehistoric—Mags had become adept at talking to more animals than just humans and cats. She swam and cursed and conversed like a space-age Doctor Dolittle with a penchant for profanity.

The rays understood. They spoke to her about their lives in Earth’s oceans, gossiped about their simpleminded yet effective cousins the sharks, and spun poetry about what it was like to be a beast made of wings and cartilage. They told her secrets no mammal had ever heard, oceanic mysteries much older than humanity. They whispered legends mantas had passed down to their children since unrecorded eons, and the meaning their species had found below the surface of the seas.

Mags listened, learned, and told them secrets of her own.

Manta ray gestation takes about a year before—unlike their egg-laying cousins the skates—they give birth to live young. In September 2033, Mags and Patches attended the birth of a new generation.

🏴‍☠️

Mags stood before the massive tank. Mantas swam in oddly geometric patterns that conveyed meanings to her but not to her staff. She would explain later.

Some of the mother mantas possessed wingspans greater than three meters, but their newborn pups were much smaller. Such tiny things, born alive.

Mags said, “Come to me.”

She had not controlled a manta in nearly four years, not since she summoned them to help her during the attack on Vesta. Still, the baby mantas responded. They swam to the top of the tank.

“Come to me.”

One by one, they broke the surface and breathed air for the first time. They survived.

Mags held out her hand and beckoned them, curling her fingers toward herself until they formed a fist. “Come to me.”

One by one, the baby mantas descended and gathered around her. They swarmed in the air, swimming in the atmosphere as gracefully as their mothers swam in water.

Patches batted them with her paws, but her claws remained sheathed. As if she were gathering her own kittens toward suckle and shelter, she herded them into a ring around Mags.

Mags said, “Show me what you got.”

The shiny, silvery mantas crackled with electricity that threatened to destroy the laboratory. Lightning bolts cascaded across every surface. The employees dove for cover below their desks.

In a storm that lit up her face in a stark relief of light and shadow, a sinister smile spread across the smuggler’s black-painted lips. She produced a cigarette and lit it on the hot, sparking wing of the nearest manta.

Mags took a puff. The tip glowed as red as a dying star.

“Bloody hell,” she said. “It’s good to see you again.”

Her mantas agreed.

🏴‍☠️

“Earth,” said Mags.

“Get the fuck out,” said Celina. “You can’t conquer a planet with only a handful of your fucked-up pets.”

“No?” Mags stretched out on the bed and crossed her arms behind her head. “Watch me.”

Celina brushed her hair in a mirror and thought about that. “You do realize it’s just you against thirteen billion people?”

“Fourteen. And fuck them,” said Mags. “Their nations have been at war for thousands of years and caused more suffering than anyone can comprehend. I’m fucking sick of it.”

“So am I, magpie.” Celina set down her brush and turned away from the mirror to face Mags directly. “But we always made a lot of money on those conflicts.”

“We did,” said Mags. “We absolutely did.” She lit a stolen cigarette. “But now, we can end it.”


[1] See Small Flowers for the test run. The PBN was renamed in Infinite Spaces.

[2] As told in The Battle of Vesta 4.

[3] As seen in Hunted to Extinction.

playing with midjourney – the robotic artist

11 Thursday Aug 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in art studio

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

ai, art, artificial intelligence, computer art, discord, midjourney, robot, science fiction

The painterly image above was one of four generated in about a minute by Midjourney, an artificial intelligence that creates images based on prompts you give it. You can find Midjourney on Discord and put it to work for free at discord.gg/midjourney or start out at Midjourney.com. The prompt for the image above was “/imagine mars will send no more”, the title of this blog.

Below is a variation on the prompt “/imagine calico cats become space pirates and conquer the moon in the future”. It looks to me like a vintage science-fiction book cover, but painted on drugs.

If I had known about Midjourney a month ago, I probably would have used it for cover art to Permanent Crescent. The only drawback is that copyright doesn’t seem applicable to A.I.-generated imagery, at least according to this month’s article in The Register, which features Midjourney’s founder.

Below is a result of the prompt “/imagine alien dragonfly attacks a space colony”. Truly trippy!

I’d never used Discord before today, but I’ve been curious about trying A.I. Art platforms and saw some amazing Midjourney renders this week on Reddit. You can get about 25 renders before needing to pay for a Midjourney subscription, and you are basically producing them in an open chat room. On the one hand, that’s a little annoying because there are dozens of people using the robot all at once, so it is hard to keep track of your images while new messages are entering the chat every couple of seconds. On the other hand, it’s fascinating to see what everyone else is conjuring with the robot. (A paid subscription allows you to invite the robot to your own chat room so you can work with it one-on-one.)

My renders for “/imagine giant space wasps attacking people on an asteroid” looked cool but not at all like wasps. However, I was impressed with the results for “/imagine telepathic space octopuses controlling the brains of dinosaurs“!

I used up all the images from my free trial, but I will return to play more with Midjourney. Below is a gallery of the stuff it made for me today in about an hour based on the five prompts I’ve shared with you.

Note that these are “upscaled” versions. The first thing Midjourney does is make a set of four low-resolution images, which you can then instruct it to “upscale” individually to get more detail and greater resolution, or you can tell it to create “variations” of any of the originals (which can also then be upscaled). You also have an option to “upscale to the max”, which means even higher resolution.

The Final Issues of the Walt Disney Black Hole Comic – from Germany!

02 Monday May 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in science fiction

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Black Hole comic adaptation, Black Hole comic book, Das Schwarze Loch, Disney Black Hole, germany, science fiction, Walt Disney

This beauty was purchased on eBay and scanned by reader Demeted Derek, who kindly agreed to let me share some pages with you. Derek first contacted Mars Will Send No More back in 2018 nearly six years after I shared the original four issues of the Walt Disney Black Hole comic published by Whitman. Issue four is extremely rare because, as far as I can tell, it was recalled.

Look! The Robots have collapsed!

Issues five and six were printed by a German company as part of the series Das Schwarze Loch. From what little information I can find, it seems the original art was hand-lettered in English, but the German edition replaced that with typed German. Below is an example page of the original art, followed by the full-color German version.

Shout out to user bellerules on the CGCComics board for posting, in 2010, the two original pages he purchased, one of which is featured above. Shout out to user HugoDeVries for starting that forum thread in 2009 with information about the German issues.

As Hugo explained, all the issues of the German series were double-length, combining pairs of the English issues into one. That’s why you see “Heft 3” on the cover shown above: “Issue 3”.

Heft 1 combined issues 1 and 2—the full movie adaptation that was also printed as the single-volume trade paperback I read a million times as a kid. Heft 2 combined issues 3 and 4, and Heft 3 combines the two unreleased and final issues (5 and 6). You can tell the final issue is intended as a true conclusion to the series—even if, like me, you don’t speak German.

Let’s have a look.

The first story is called Retter des Universums, or Savior of the Universe. (Thank you, Google Translate.) I have no idea what is happening most of the time. But after a tour to see an alien sloth, a glowing crystal, and a gnarly old woman who is really intense about her scroll collection, we go for a ride on space unicorns!

We are not allowed to continue here, Kate! The Mountain of Unity is holy!

Suddenly, a robot battle breaks out—and what a time to be wearing a toga and sandals.

It works great with ours. Out of the way, Aran!

Then things get really sinister. An elderly dude explains what horrible mischief our old enemy Reinhardt is up to. Reinhardt was the evil space captain who died in the movie, but here he is again, causing trouble. He excels at looking like a raging psycho while his robots do bad things to people.

Most of us were killed by the robots.

The next story is Reinhardts Rückkehr, or Reinhardt’s Return. It opens with a ton of discussion, but then we get another unicorn ride.

All afternoon I practiced Aran’s signature for the surrender document.

The equestrian journey ends with Kate meeting a random robot in a space coffin. Why is he the world’s saddest robot? I assume it has something to with Reinhardt being a jerk to him. Who knows?

A robot that feels love and cries real tears! Not even Vincent can do that.

Our heroes do what anyone would do in that situation. They visit Reinhardt to give him a scroll.

It seems like a nice gift to me, but Reinhardt is livid about the scroll. There’s just no pleasing some people! He captures our heroes and makes them watch while he verbally abuses old people in the middle of their Shakespeare performance.

This roll is mine now, and I am… the ruler of the universe!

Alright, I admit it. I am just making up what I think the plot might be. I warned you I don’t speak German! The following panel from one of the original English pages suggests that our heroes were not captured by Reinhardt but invited him to the alien toga party. Close enough.

Here’s the coolest part. Max, the big red robot, freaks out and destroys Reinhardt—who also turns out to be a robot!

I don’t need you anymore! Max!

Off with his head! Another robot battle breaks out, and things get pretty intense.

Max! No! Release me! Help! Uaaaaahhh!

In the end, our heroes bust up all the evil robots, get on their old ship, and peacefully sail through another black hole. Their intended destination is their original home planet — but wouldn’t it be fun if they ended up someplace even weirder?

The destination is called Earth… and it is their home!

And there you have it! If you want physical copies of this German edition, you probably need to go to eBay for them. I have never seen them listed anywhere else. A big Thank You to Derek for sharing this rare treasure and completing a quest that began so many years ago. You are truly Das Retter des Universums!

Indie Box: Steak

06 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in dinosaur, science fiction

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

dinosaur, dinosaur comics, eating dinosaurs, hunting dinosaurs, indie box, Indie Comics, Marc Olivent, science fiction, Steak, time travel, Will Conway

Steak is an independently published comic from the UK that explores the personal and political ramifications of traveling back in time to hunt dinosaurs for their meat. Author and educator Will Conway reports that when he started out, he had not heard of the Flesh series from 2000 AD, and that Steak is an entirely different beast. While Flesh sprung from the violent imagination of Pat Mills and focused on brutal chaos in a prehistoric setting, Steak delves into more psychological dimensions of the dino-hunting enterprise. But there’s plenty of Cretaceous carnage, too!

The main character, Benjamin Buckland, comes up with the idea while recovering from a brain injury, and he and his scientific partner Roger Dukowicz conceive the means of time travel after eating “a rare cactus”—presumably peyote. If that sounds like a mentally unhinged way to start a business, then it should come as no surprise that by the second issue, Buckland’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic. It doesn’t help that his more even-keeled partner gets abducted, and a shadowy organization is spying on him.

As a self-proclaimed “zoophage” who gets a thrill from eating exotic animals, Buckland asserts that his main goal is to eat dinosaurs. He pays for his hobby by opening restaurants and doing licensing deals to expand the market for his Mesozoic meat. This leads to hilarious narration about how different dinosaur species taste, several gory yet coldly factual pages about how to butcher them like cattle, and pun-filled products such as “Apattiesaurus” burgers and “Psit-taco-saurus” food trucks. Dukowicz sports T-shirts with dinosaur-themed pop-culture references such as “Iguanodon Corleone”.

Nature is brutal, indeed.

But with corporations trying to steal his technology for profit, and militaries trying to obtain it for a pre-emptive advantage in warfare, Buckland is beset from all sides. How it will all play out remains, at the time of this writing, a mystery. Issue number three of this five-issue series is currently in production, so now would be a good time to subscribe and see what happens next.

Marc Olivent’s artwork is a lot of fun, especially in the scenes of dinosaur hunting and how they go horribly wrong. The dinosaurs are impressive and energetic, whether they are chomping someone’s head or stampeding off a cliff. The narrative structure is creative, jumping around a bit in time in the first issue without much guidance as to when things take place other than intentionally vague captions like “Now then” and “Meanwhile”. It works well for a time-travel story, and piecing together the puzzle is part of the pleasure.

Steak considers the ethics of killing animals that died off millions of years ago. Are they endangered species because they are now extinct or, as one character puts it, is it “morally okay” because “They were already dead before they were already dead, I guess?” And when members of a hunting party get killed by dinos, the lawyers struggle with the question of how to handle someone dying millions of years before they were born. But these philosophical conundrums don’t bog down the narrative, which remains fast-paced and lively, and lets you draw your own conclusions.

So far, the series has avoided the complications of potentially altering the future by killing animals in the past, an idea most famously explored in Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. But who knows? Maybe we will get there eventually, because Steak is a smart, funny, and exciting romp that serves up a unique and unpredictable take on a classic concept.

Collector’s Guide: You can order print copies at the Steak website, and subscribe to updates about upcoming issues. Currently the first two issues are available for Kindle in the USA and in the UK.

Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus. Now in Paperback and Ebook!

03 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags, writing

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

books, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, second omnibus, space pirates, writing

Thanks to Vamkire Trannel for the cover illustration!

The Second Omnibus collects and updates volumes 7-10, plus two all-new stories, previously unpublished interviews, scenes, drawings, a mini-comic, and more!

In the aftermath of the disaster that nearly wiped out civilization on Ceres, a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat get set to throw the greatest birthday party of a lifetime—until alien death rains down from the sky!

Join Meteor Mags and her criminal crew, including the hard-rocking Psycho 78s and the teenage Dumpster Kittens, as they rage against the forces of law and order, struggle to control the future of the Asteroid Belt, and confront the total destruction of their beloved home on Vesta 4. Some will live, many more will die, and nothing in the Belt will ever be the same!

In fifteen episodes of relentless anarchy, sci-fi madness, and violent revolution, the pirate crew comes face-to-face with betrayal, annihilation, telepathic octopuses, evil space lizards, cybernetic murder wasps, game-changing technologies, objects of unlimited power, and much, much more! Strap on your battle armor and get ready to rock, because the asteroid-mining frontier is no place for the faint-hearted.

What readers are saying about the series:

“A violent, feel-good space romp. An irreverent, rocking series.”

“A lot of guns and bloody battles. Fast-paced and full of action.”

“Anarchy, asteroids, and rock music abound. A great read.”

“The swashbuckling spirit and generous—but murderous!—hearts of Mags and her cohort are endearing and engaging.”

“So insane.”

578-page paperback edition or Kindle ebook

(154,000 words plus illustrations).

BUY IT ON AMAZON.

Infinite Playground of Imagination

13 Friday Aug 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

memoir, meteor mags, Patches, reflections, science fiction, writing

art generated by Midjourney.

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir.

Back in 2017, in the first few months of my writers workshop, I received feedback from a science-fiction writer I respect and admire. As you might already know, many of the first thirty episodes of the Meteor Mags stories take place from 2027 to 2030. The feedback I got was that science-fiction stories should be set at least forty years into the future.

I think the idea was that this buffer of time gives some plausibility to the development of “futuristic” technologies. It might be a decent rule of thumb for aspiring SF writers. But futurism isn’t a central concept or concern in Mags’ stories, and as a lifelong reader of comic books, I could list dozens if not hundreds of sci-fi stories set in the present or the distant past.

I won’t belabor the point but merely offer an example: The Manhattan Projects by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra was published from 2012 to 2015, but that absolutely insane sci-fi epic was set in the 1940s through the 1960s.

You can probably think of many more comic-book examples, such as the 1980s Watchmen series set in an alternate 1980s universe. Or you can go back to early prose classics from H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley. Any fan of steampunk can come up with science-fiction tales set in the Victorian era, and any Ray Bradbury fan knows that many once-futuristic dates in The Martian Chronicles have long since come and gone.

Science fiction’s future is old news.

The Meteor Mags stories take place in a solar system that shares many aspects of ours but is clearly different. One of the more obvious clues is how asteroids are named with their number after their name: Our “4 Vesta” is Mags’ “Vesta 4”. Call it an alternate universe, an alternate timeline, a Marvel What If scenario, or, for you Robert Heinlein geeks, a “ficton”. I don’t care. It’s just where Mags lives, and while it sometimes offers a commentary on or satire of our solar system, it’s unique unto itself.

In terms of satire, a few examples come to mind. The Musical Freedoms Act of 2019 is an obvious satire of the “Religious Freedom” laws that recently plagued the United States. In Jam Room, Mags mentions that Ted Nugent ran for President in 2020 but was assassinated. In Hunted to Extinction, Mags concludes a parody of gratuitous female shower scenes in SF movies with a comment about the Alien franchise.

Her solar system and ours have a few things in common, but they also have many differences.

In terms of divergent timelines, the divergences go back at least a few hundred years in the backstories about how Mags’ ancestors affected the golden age of Atlantic pirates in the 1700s and the economic landscape of Europe in the 1800s. Some of those events have been specifically mentioned in the text, some have been implied or alluded to, and some remain in my massive pile of notes for unwritten historical tales.

The history of space exploration and asteroid mining were influenced by Mags’ presence in her solar system, especially in terms of her contributions to localized gravity control. I do not expect that humans in our reality will have a lunar base established in 2023 nor be mining asteroids on a massive scale a few years later. We certainly will not be colonizing Mars and building major metropolises there in our current decade. These “futuristic” concepts overlap our timeline and are a direct consequence of the existence of Mags and her illustrious and unusually long-lived maternal ancestors.

A futuristic approach to science fiction is based on the idea that readers expect a story that is set in the future of their personal reality where scientific and technologic advancements have materialized. It’s a place where our dreams and aspirations about tech have come true. It’s a fantasy about where our species is headed. We might be headed toward utopia or dystopia, but these are somewhat distant futures that science fiction speculates about; hence the term “speculative fiction”.

That isn’t my approach at all. My approach is to consider myself as being Mags’ biographer. That position gives me not just the future to play with, but the past. The events relevant to her life include—as Carl Sagan liked to say—”billions and billions” of years, from the earliest days of her solar system to the heat death of her universe.

Even that timespan and location is too limited. I’ve already published a story about Patches that suggests the end of the universe is not the end for Mags and Patches, and I have notes for a story where Mags gets a glimpse of every possible alternate universe where she existed.

So, we’re way beyond guidelines to set these stories at some arbitrary number of years in our future. They don’t take place there. They take place in the infinite playground of my imagination.

The series has always—first and foremost—been about the characters and their friendships through the insane adventures they encounter. The science-fiction aspects are far less important to me than that emotional core. My intent is not to make fantasies about future technology seem plausible. I only want each story to be fun—fun for me to write, fun for my characters to live though, and fun for the readers who might consider the adventures of a hell-raising, shotgun-wielding, piano-playing, feline maniac with an odd assortment of space pets to be a nice break from the drudgery of everyday life.

As I’ve said before: This isn’t science fiction. It’s rock’n’roll wearing science-fiction clothes. Feel free to take yours off and join the party.

We3: Home Is Run No More

18 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in science fiction

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

animals, bandit, cats, DC Comics, Frank Quitely, Grant Morrison, pirates, science fiction, tinker, Vertigo Comics, We3

Every now and then, I read a tragic story that breaks my heart, but no comic-book adventure has ever broken me so relentlessly as We3. A friend who isn’t really into comic books got into Grant Morrison thanks to the live-action show Happy—based on the four-issue series of the same name published by Image—so I’ve been digging into the Morrison archives. Along the way, I realized I’d never read what many people consider to be one of Morrison’s best works, if not the best. We3 is an action-packed story brought to life by Morrison’s long-time artistic collaborator Frank Quitely, and though I’ve enjoyed Quitely’s artwork for years, he outdid his own genius on We3. Before we delve into the book, let me just say that this story features one of my all-time favorite things: a cat who absolutely kicks ass.

The cat’s given name is Tinker, but she is only referred to in the story as “2”. Tinker is part of a team of three normal animals who have been surgically altered and had their brains messed with so they can become killing machines encased in high-tech armor to perform military missions and assassinations instead of having human soldiers do the job. Joining Tinker in this horrifying experiment are the dog Bandit—referred to as “1”, and the only one of the three to re-discover his real name in the story—and a rabbit named Pirate (“3”) because of a black spot over one eye.

Each of these animals was someone’s beloved pet before the story began. Instead of telling the reader this fact through flashbacks or exposition, the creative team shows it much more powerfully with “lost pet” flyers on the covers of each issue. When you realize what has been done to these hapless animals, the covers hit like a punch to the gut.

When the higher-ups decide that these lost and kidnapped animals need to be killed—decommissioned, per orders—the three of them escape their containment facility and run away. Their combat modifications and training make them dangerous to society, so the military pursues them. One of the many tragic aspects of this story is that the trio doesn’t mean to be dangerous murder machines. These animals were forced against their will to become horrors in the service of the same humans who want to put them down.

Nowhere is this more strongly portrayed than through Bandit’s canine emotional crises. Bandit truly wants to be a good dog. He wants to protect his beloved animal allies in We3 and also help humans, but he is forced into situations where his combat programming takes over and he kills humans. In the aftermath of the killings, his simple, mournful repetition of “Bad dog” hits home more powerfully than pages of dialogue or narrative captions could ever do.

Tinker does not share the dog’s remorse. She thinks the whole thing stinks. When Bandit tries to save a human body to convince himself he is a good dog, Tinker bluntly tells him the man is dead. As the two animals fade into the horizon while arguing, the panels reveal the human is annihilated from the waist down. In a combination of graphic images and minimal, broken dialogue, Morrison and Quitely set up the tension between the cat’s no-nonsense and apparently correct assessment of the situation with the dog’s potentially delusional idealism.

Each animal’s cybernetically enhanced speech pattern says volumes about them. On the first read, I had trouble understanding their speech, but it all became clear to me upon the second reading. Bandit the dog is haunted by regret over what he has been made to do, and he struggles to lead his “pack” in a volatile and untenable situation. Pirate the rabbit is the most simple-minded of the trio, only speaking in one-word sentences, but that doesn’t stop him from delivering a heart-wrenching reminder to his comrades that they are friends and are all in this together. Sadly, Pirate’s speech degrades into mere electronic noise after he suffers an injury.

Cat-lover that I am, I especially enjoyed Tinker’s dialogue. Her feline disdain for just about everything is expressed through the word “Stink”, rendered as “ST!NK” or, when she is really angry, “!SSST!!!NKK!” Compared to the peaceful rabbit and optimistic dog, Tinker appears to be the least bothered by all the killing. She seems at times to revel in it. Tinker is also the group’s cynic who doesn’t believe the trio will ever find a home, because “home” no longer exists for any of them—a point of contention that leads to an argument with Bandit.

And what is home? What does “home” mean to Bandit after all the awful things the team has endured? To the dog, home is a simple concept. “Home is run no more.” Home is a place where these involuntary machines of war can find peace and rest, and that is Bandit’s hope for We3. But as the story progresses, it’s impossible to escape the feeling that Tinker is right, that home and peace will be forever denied these unfortunate animals because of what’s been done to them—and what of their lives and identities have been stolen from them.

Quitely employs many innovative and dramatic approaches to action. A video by Strip Panel Naked does a good job of analyzing the groundbreaking visuals in this story, so check that out. Regarding the page where Tinker hacks and slashes her way through a series of panels filled with her enemies, I am reminded of what Scott McCloud taught in his book Understanding Comics, where he asserts that part of the magic of comics is what happens—but is not shown—between the panels, allowing the reader to fill in the blanks. Quitely gives us two-dimensional panels rendered in 3-D with Tinker in action, demonstrating how the cat is a fast-moving agent of destruction. While Tinker’s opponents exist entirely within the panels, she flashes like lightning through the spaces between them.

Go, Tinker! As Bandit says in a dramatic moment, “Gud 2! 1 Protect!”

Quitely also does amazing things with panels-within-panels to show a sequence of fast-paced actions in a slow-motion strobe effect, and he often employs elements of the scene’s environment to create panel-like divisions, such as rendering trees in all black to create dividing lines, or using the metal structure of a bridge to divide a series of movements across that bridge.

For a few pages, Quitely captures the narrative in an insane number of more than one hundred tiny panels to show footage from multiple security cameras in the containment facility—only to present a spectacular release from all that claustrophobic tension by finishing with a two-page double splash where our heroes burst into the night.

We3 has been collected in paperback, hardcover, and a second hardcover “deluxe” edition with ten new pages of story. But I recommend you read We3 either in digital format or in the original stapled comic-book format so you can see all the amazing two-page spreads without any part of them disappearing into the gutter of a bound book. Like I said in my recent review of the Bendis/Maleev run on Daredevil, it is a rare and beautiful thing to see a comic book story where script, art, and overall design are perfectly married for maximum narrative and emotional effect. We3 is one of those perfect unions.

Collector’s Guide: It’s hard to find the original three-issue printing, but you can easily find a reasonably priced collected paperback on Amazon. Current prices on the deluxe hardcover are ridiculous. Instead, I suggest getting the $10 digital edition so you can fully appreciate the two-page spreads.

indie box: Patience

06 Sunday Sep 2020

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in indie, science fiction

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

book review, daniel clowes, Fantagraphics, indie box, Indie Comics, patience, science fiction, time travel

Patience is my favorite work by Daniel Clowes. It tells a relatively (for Clowes) straight-forward yet suspenseful science-fiction tale. Having deconstructed the superhero genre in his previous work, The Death-Ray, which was a pastiche of multiple comic-strip conventions, Clowes gave us Patience in a more traditional narrative style. Despite that, this book subverted my expectations many times, and I love that about it.

The story begins with the quiet slice-of-life drama you might expect if you’ve read Clowes’ Ghost World or Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve. Humdrum everyman characters encounter mostly typical problems while filled with a persistent existential malaise. I usually find stories about average people to be quite tedious. Real life is average enough for me, thanks. So, I began to wonder what all the hype was with Patience, because there are about twenty pages of this stuff before the story really kicks off.

But after an unexpected tragedy, the story shifts tone and becomes a mystery, and I began to wonder just what kind of book I was reading. Then the story jumps into the year 2029, which has been one of my favorite years for science-fiction tales since the first Terminator movie came out, and the tone radically shifts again. About forty pages in, our humdrum everyman has undergone a dramatic emotional change as he sets eyes on the catalyst for the rest of the tale.

Okay, now we’re into exciting territory! A force of nature! But the problem for the protagonist is that despite his delusions of grandeur, he is still a bumbling, incompetent lunkhead. Full of raging desire to set the world straight by exacting his revenge, he only makes more of a mess of everything. His bungling ineptitude reminds me of the 2007 film Timecrimes which, if you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend watching without reading about it or seeing the trailer first.

The visual style of this book feels like an homage to the brightly colored pulp comic books of a bygone age, the kind of books Clowes also paid tribute to in David Boring, which included excerpts from an imaginary superhero comic about The Yellow Streak. But there’s one convention he repeatedly messes with: He places all or most of many speech balloons outside the panel borders, cutting off their edges so the dialogue is incomplete. The result is a sense that the dialogue is less important than the protagonist’s relentless interior monologue as he narrates the story in captions which are never cut off.

Throughout the adventure, the hero becomes increasingly deranged, experiencing wild moods swings and psychedelic visions. These are shown in a style that feels more like the trippy underground comix of the 1970s than their pulp predecessors.

While Patience employed some common science-fiction tropes, it excelled at keeping me guessing about what would come next and how it would all play out. Several times I thought I might have it all figured out, only to be proven wrong. And that’s the fun. With all the plot twists and turns, gradual character reveals, and the tonal and stylistic shifts, Patience kept me riveted to the page.

Collector’s Guide: Patience is usually out of stock at MyComicShop, but you can get it on Amazon for about $22.    

indie box: Metalzoic

13 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in science fiction

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

book review, comic books, DC Comics, graphic novel, indie box, Kevin O'Neill, metalzoic, Pat Mills, science fiction

This is the second time a book published by DC Comics has broken the rules and earned a place in my indie short box. This time, it’s Metalzoic by the legendary team of Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill, and there’s not much about it you can call “mainstream”. Metalzoic takes place in a future where the Earth is ruled by intelligent, mechanical beasts patterned after modern and prehistoric animals — and boy, do they love to fight!

Yes, you just witnessed a brutal showdown between a gorilla with a saw blade on his head, and a lion with a chainsaw for a tongue and metal skis for feet. Do I really need to say anything about the story’s plot, or is that cool enough for you? Two of my favorite pages show a shark attacking a caravan of wooly mammoths during a trek across the ice.

It’s like some sort of psychotic nature special! I can almost hear David Attenborough narrating it for a BBC documentary.

O’Neill always delivers wonderfully twisted artwork, but he pulls out all the stops to illustrate Metalzoic‘s endless mecha-menagerie.

The story is interesting, especially since the main character — the saw-blade gorilla — is a brutal, amoral hell-raiser whose brawn and ferocity might be the only thing standing between the Earth and total destruction.

And just look at him go!

When all this takes place and how it came to be are slowly revealed throughout the story. We don’t get a clear timeline until about 50 pages in. It might have been helpful to see a historic summary earlier in the story, so here it is.

If you’re like me, and you wish Godzilla movies would cut out most of the human-related nonsense and just show more monster fights, then this 64-page epic adventure is the book for you!

Collector’s Guide: Metalzoic; DC Comics Graphic Novel #6, 1986. Though it’s often out of stock at MyComicShop, you can usually find it on Amazon for between $15 and $30.

More Retrofuturistic 1950s Cards: Jets, Rockets, and Spacemen!

15 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in science fiction

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

bowman, cats in space, jets rockets and spacemen, outer space, pteranodon, science fiction, space octopus, space pirates, trading cards, vintage space art

029a-jets rockets spacemen cards phobos
029b-jets rockets spacemen cards phobos

Bowman produced these beautifully painted trading cards beginning in 1951: Jets, Rockets, and Spacemen! The “jets” cards merely showed normal airplanes with informative text on the back, but the rest of the series told a story about a fantastic space adventure, with each card as a chapter.

Though I only heard about these cards this year, the series is clearly a direct ancestor of the Meteor Mags stories. Its conception of space involves pirates, cats, octopuses, and dinosaurs (flying reptiles, actually: pteranodons). That’s my kind of space adventure!

054a-jets rockets spacemen cards octopus
Octopuses in space!
058a-jets rockets spacemen cards polar cat
Vicious cats on other planets!
067a-jets rockets spacemen cards pirates
Space pirates!
051a-jets rockets spacemen cards pteranodon
Interplanetary Dinosaurs!

The gallery below features some of my favorites.

I love keeping up with current developments in space exploration, but I guarantee you that interplanetary travel will never kick as much ass as it did in 1951! Tragically, this series stopped before the complete story was told. You can read more about its production and why it was never finished at https://www.psacard.com/articles/articleview/6976/psa-set-registry-1951-bowman-jets-rockets-spacemen-trading-card-thats-blasting-off-popularity

now in print: The Baby and The Crystal Cube

30 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in science fiction, writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

books, dream fiction, Dreaming, dreams, lucid dreaming, psychological thriller, science fiction, self publishing, sleep lab

The_Baby_and_the_Cry_Cover_for_Kindle

Two lucid dreamers meet in recurring dreams, fall in love, and conceive a dream baby; but the unreality of the dream world leads them to distrust each other—with nightmarish results.

A paranoid exploration of two minds dreaming the same dream, and fighting to control it.

On Amazon in paperback and Kindle. On Barnes & Noble in paperback and Nook Book. On Apple iBooks.

indie spotlight: tomb of the triceratops

11 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in dinosaur, science fiction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

dinosaur, dinosaur books, fiction, michael ajax, science fiction, tomb of the triceratops, young adult

tomb of the triceratops cover

Tomb of the Triceratops takes you on a dinosaur dig where researchers and a group of young students uncover a realm where dinosaurs are still alive. The boys selected to go on this archaeological expedition risk their lives to free a triceratops from the clutches of its brutal, otherworldly tormentors.

And that’s just the beginning.

Author Michael Ajax seasons the story with plenty of dino facts that will surely please any dino-maniac. Between the action scenes, the characters are just as likely to discuss the biology of a Stygimoloch as they are their interpersonal conflicts. The people in this story are passionate about dinosaurs, and that makes it especially fun for those of us who share that enthusiasm.

Though action-packed, Tomb of the Triceratops keeps its language and violence in the “family-friendly” range. Even as an adult reader, I was pulled into the nightmarish struggle of the captive triceratops, but the level of detail and word choice did not venture into overly graphic territory. If you thought Jurassic Park and Rex Riders were fun, this is a good addition to your bookshelf.

The boy heroes of the story casually banter with each other, keep secrets from the adults, and have an unforgettable adventure in this first novel by Michael Ajax. Discover the mysteries inside the Tomb of the Triceratops in paperback or for just 99 cents in Kindle.

318 by autumn kalquist

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in science fiction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

318, autumn kalquist, book review, books, defective, fractured era, science fiction, short story

318 - autumn kalquist book cover

In a future threatened by disease outbreaks, immunity will become a valuable commodity. 318 explores the horrifying plight of those born with a special immunity and imprisoned as dehumanized test subjects to be studied. This short story introduced me to Kalquist’s work and quickly drew me in. With crisp, clear language, it elicits an emotional connection to the suffering of the main character, known by her number 318.

Kalquist takes you right into the action and then fills in the backstory with dialogue and character memories. In the process, you become invested in the dystopic world she has created and what fate will befall her characters in Kalquist’s longer Fractured Era story Defective, to be released this Fall. With sympathetic characters and a frighteningly believable near-future threatened by disease epidemics, the 318 short story is one of the best short sci-fi works to come across my review desk in the last couple of years.

Buy the Kindle version for 99 cents.

Dan Dare

12 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in science fiction

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2000AD, black and white, Dan Dare, Indie Comics, Massimo Bellardinelli, science fiction, UK comics

Dan Dare 2000AD 1-20 (29)

For years, we passed up UK science-fiction hero Dan Dare because of his terrible name. Big mistake! But, some scans of his early adventures in 2000AD really floored us. Fantastic space art full of raging aliens cranks the awesome-meter into the red. Dan Dare has the interesting points-of-view and dramatic panel layouts chock-full of action that typify the 2000AD classics.

Dan Dare 2000AD 1-20 (10)

If you know of a collected edition that features these 2000AD tales, we would love to hear from you. We can’t find one! Many artists and writers, including Pat Mills, Dave Gibbons, and Massimo Bellardinelli worked on Dan at 2000AD. We will share with you a few of the scans we found from these late 1970s stories.

Dan Dare 2000AD 1-20 (19)

A more vintage take on Dan Dare “The Pilot of the Future” awaits readers in a series of Titan Books reprints collecting early Frank Hampson tales in the 1950s and 60s. Readers wanting a more contemporary take on Dan might enjoy the Dan Dare by Garth Ennis Omnibus, Ennis being well-known for his work on Preacher, The Boys, and Punisher.















Swamp Thing Volume One

24 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in occult, science fiction

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Berni Wrightson, David Michelinie, DC Comics, Gerry Conway, horror, Len Wein, monsters, Nestor Redondo, science fiction, Swamp Thing, Volume One

swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (5)

Many before us have sung the praises of the Len Wein and Berni Wrightson stories that kick off the first volume of Swamp Thing stories. Have you seen the first issue of Swamp Thing? We might be in the minority, but the first chunk of issues where Swamp Thing takes on some pretty generic monsters seem like merelyt a warm-up for further greatness.

swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (6)
swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (7)
swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (8)

Even the Batman crossover in #7 fails to get our engines revved. But then: issue #8 comes along. Swamp Thing encounters a demon in a cave on the outskirts of a small town, giving us a dark visual feast that brings the series to life for us. The Lurker in Tunnel 13 may be the first of the early tales that hints at what Swamp Thing would later become in the 1980s –the first appearance of Arcane notwithstanding. It’s cosmic, satanic, horrific, and sports one of our favorite Wrightson covers.

swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (9)
swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (10)
swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (11)
swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (12)
swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (13)
swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (14)

Wein and Wrightson also present a great story about a stranded alien trying to repair his ship and return to the stars. Making this freakish beast sympathetic and compassionate reminds us that monsters and heroes come in many forms.

swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (15)
swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (16)

Before leaving the book, Wein & Wrightson deliver the consummately creepy Man Who Would Not Die, the first return of Arcane from the hell where he deserves to stay. The confrontation between Arcane and Swampy in a graveyard may be our favorite artistic moment of Wrightson’s legendary contributions.

swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (22)
swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (23)

Nestor Redondo steps into Wrightson’s shoes without missing a beat, working with Len Wein on three issues before David Michelinie takes the reins. We have some other images of Nestor Redondo’s Swamp Thing art if you’d like to check them out.

swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (20)
swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (21)
swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (19)

Michelinie and Redondo seem to lose steam towards the end of their contribution, and what happens next is a bit of a disappointment. The creative team changes, and the book loses much of its horror appeal quickly. Readers must have felt the same way at the time, as Swamp Thing would soon be cancelled. Swamp Thing’s gambit to revert to a normal Alec Holland once again just doesn’t work for us, and it’s been more or less ignored in subsequent Swampy stories.

swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (17)

The end of the volume is a bit of a mess, but the early stories have definite high points. We sold our collection of VG+/FN issues — almost a complete run — on eBay. But a few of them we would be happy to collect and read again. You can get many of the early Wein/Wrightson issues in Roots of the Swamp Thing reprints.

swamp thing vol 1 4-24 lot (18)

Having owned both the reprints and the originals, we prefer the originals. Though the printing and color is more crisp and clean and bright in the reprints, the vintage horror vibe feels much more authentic with a well-worn copy from the early 1970s, the smell of tanned comic book paper, and the distinctive original covers.

Jim Starlin’s Origin of God and Birth of Death!

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in first issue, indie

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Death, Eclipse Comics, first issue, God, indie box, Indie Comics, Jim Starlin, origin, science fiction, Star Reach, Star Reach Classics

StarReach01-4-50


Jim Starlin’s single-page origin of god and his short origin of death originally appeared in the first issue of the 1974 series Star Reach. Star Reach Productions published its own Greatest Hits in 1979. In 1984, Eclipse reprinted six issues of highlights from the series as Star Reach Classics. We recommend it for fans of classic 70s science fiction. It’s in stock far more often than the original issues, and Eclipse printed it on high-quality paper, a really nice production. You can get most of them for just a couple dollars a piece.

Starlin gives us some of his finest 70s illustration, artistically superior to his more famous work on Captain Marvel, and on par with his best Warlock stories. If you enjoy these, you will enjoy Starlin’s Darklon the Mystic from that same era. Diversions of the Groovy Kind hosts some pages from Warren’s Eerie magazine where you can read part of Darklon in black and white. Or, you can drop a dollar on a back issue by Pacific Comics that reprints the complete Darklon story in color.

StarReach01-4-42
StarReach01-4-43
StarReach01-4-44
StarReach01-4-45
StarReach01-4-46
StarReach01-4-47
StarReach01-4-48
StarReach01-4-49

Collector’s Guide: From Star Reach Classics #1; Eclipse, 1984.







Jack Kirby’s Captain Victory: Splash Panel Gallery

14 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in indie, science fiction

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Captain Victory, Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers, Galactic Rangers, Indie Comics, Jack Kirby, outer space, Pacific Comics, science fiction

jack kirby captain victory splash panels- (41)

In the early days of Mars Will Send No More, we ran a series of daily splash panels from many of Jack Kirby’s masterpieces. Captain Victory proved very popular, perhaps because not many readers have seen this underrated series near the end of Kirby’s career.

jack kirby captain victory splash panels- (31)

As Kirby continued what seems now like a life-long struggle for creative control, he released Captain Victory through Pacific Comics. But in 1981, well before the Internet or even specialty comic shops had taken root in America, most readers of Marvel and DC never even heard of Captain Victory. What Kirby lost in widespread promotion, however, he made up for in unrestrained outrageousness and endless gallons of Kirby Krackle.

jack kirby captain victory splash panels- (6)

We think you will agree the over-the-top awesomeness of Jack Kirby’s comic book style rarely looked better than in these eye-popping splash panels. And so, in celebration of sharing three years of comic book awesomeness with you here on Mars, please behold the splendor of Captain Victory.

Collector’s Guide: From Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers #1-13; Pacific Comics, 1981.

In 2011-2012, Dynamite Entertainment published a new Captain Victory series with some wonderful Alex Ross covers.

















John Byrne’s Space 1999 #3-6; Charlton, 1976

08 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in science fiction

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Charlton, indie box, Indie Comics, John Byrne, Nicola Cuti, outer space, science fiction, Space 1999, Space 1999 Magazine

Damn it, these issues are hard to find in print! John Byrne worked on four issues of Charlton’s short-lived science-fiction series: Space 1999. You don’t find too many of them in the back issue bins.

Archaia Press recently published new Space 1999 material by Gary Morrow, who also turned in some great black-and-white artwork for the original 1970s Space 1999 Magazine. John Byrne’s issues, however, remain a rarity.

I suspect that once you see the pages, you will understand why. Nicola Cuti’s storytelling got me way more involved in the space drama than I expected. Byrne’s art rocks at the level of his classic X-men and Alpha Flight stories that garnered him far more fame not long after this brief stint. My sole complaint: This outer-space adventure tale did NOT run for 50 or 60 issues! What a great team Cuti and Byrne make here. Enjoy!

Collector’s Guide: From Space 1999 #3-6; Charlton, 1975. John Byrne art, Nicola Cuti story. John Byrne fans might also want to collect Space 1999 Magazine #4 produced by Charlton at the same time. Byrne worked on the fourth issue only.
































2022 Update: Shout out to the desert-rock enthusiasts at MonsterRiff.com who found this post nine whole years after I originally made it and reminded me that the cover art for issue #5 was used as the album cover for Gravity X by Truck Fighters, a fuzz-drenched band I absolutely love! Below is the song Desert Cruiser, which earned a spot on MonsterRiff’s Top Ten Stoner Rock Riffs. You can find this album on Amazon.

Behold the Awesomizer; comic book pop art painting inspired by Jack Kirby

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in art studio

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

acrylic, art, awesomizer, behold the awesomizer, comic book art, eBay, Jack Kirby, Kirby Krackle, outer space, painting, science fiction

behold the awesomizer - (2)
behold the awesomizer - (3)
behold the awesomizer - (4)

Painted in bright, primary acrylics with chrome enamel highlights, it has a protective high-gloss varnish. Behold the Awesomizer measures 16x20x1 inches, with the artwork extending uninterrupted over the edges of the canvas.

Inspiration for this work of comic book-themed pop art comes from comics legend Jack Kirby, whose style practically defined Marvel Comics art of the 60s and 70s. Best known for co-creating Captain America, the Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer, the Eternals, OMAC, and the DC classics of his own Fourth World series, Kirby published Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers near the end of his career.

Behold the Awesomizer pays tribute to Kirby and to the sense of cosmic wonder found in science-fiction comic books. As the powerful hand emerges from a whirlpool of rippling energy, a metallic eye shoots beams of light into the krackling vastness of outer space. Kirby Krackle coalesces around the hand as beams of light radiate from its fingertips. Inside it all, a great cosmic brain thinks thoughts that only you can determine.

behold the awesomizer - (5)
behold the awesomizer - (6)
behold the awesomizer - (7)
behold the awesomizer - (8)
behold the awesomizer - (9)
behold the awesomizer - (10)
behold the awesomizer - (11)
behold the awesomizer - (12)
behold the awesomizer - (13)

Toy Robot painting

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in art studio

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1970s, acrylic, art, painting, robbie robot, robot, science fiction, Tomy, tomy toys, toy robot

IMG_1885

Painted in bright acrylics with a high-gloss varnish finish, it shines like a metal robot should! It measures 10×10 inches, with gold, red, black, and tan colors. Inspiration for this work of pop art comes from the Tomy toy robot in the 1970s.

IMG_1889
IMG_1890
IMG_1896
IMG_1900
robot 1 scan

The Man Who Drank the Blood of Satanus!

24 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in dinosaur, indie

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Blood of Satanus, dinosaur, dinosaur comics, Judge Dredd, Lizard Men, Pat Mills, Ron Smith, Satanus, science fiction, tyrannosaurus

Sometimes it’s hard to tell a good idea from a bad idea. Let’s say you had a totally evil tyrannosaurus that died in the Cretaceous but was brought back to life through cloning. Then, after being set loose by atomic weapons, he killed and maimed his way through the future before vanishing into the wild. As a scientist, at what point do you think it would be a good idea to drink that tyrannosaur’s blood?

Collector’s Guide: From Judge Dredd #17; Eagle, 1985.

Satanus first appeared in the Judge Dredd storyline The Cursed Earth. You can find that in the Cursed Earth TPB. But, be warned that due to being sued by fast food fast chains from America, the publishers of 2000 AD did not include four chapters of the 25-episode story (episodes 11-12 and 17-18.) So, go pawn some family heirlooms, and you can pick up the original Cursed Earth stories in 2000 AD, #61-85.

Satanus also appeared in a story gorgeously illustrated by Colin Macneil called Satanus Unchained in 2000 AD #1241-1246. Satanus fans will also enjoy Judge Dredd #7, which reprints the Satanus chapters of Cursed Earth with a cool Brian Bolland cover.

If you like Satanus, check out our gallery of Flesh from 2000 AD, featuring the mother of Satanus, Old One Eye. 

The Black Hole – Whitman’s 1980 Adaptation, #4!

16 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in science fiction

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Black Hole, Black Hole 4, Black Hole comic adaptation, dinosaur, dinosaur comics, Disney Black Hole, rare whitman, science fiction, Whitman

Continuing our tribute to The Black Hole comic books, here is another complete issue for you to enjoy: Issue #4, often touted as one of the rarest of the rare Whitmans!

Collector’s Guide: From Black Hole #4; Whitman/Walt Disney, 1980. Note: Issues #1-2 contain the same material as the 1979 Golden Press Black Hole which is superior in color and paper quality!

 Click to sample the Jack Kirby version of Black Hole.










Fantastic Worlds 5: Flight to Venus!

21 Thursday Jul 2011

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in educational, golden age

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

edgar allen poe, Fantastic Worlds. Golden Age Comics, Flight to Venus, Moon, outer space, Richard Adams Locke, science fiction, Space Dictionary, Venus

Golden Age Comics story time! Fantastic Worlds 5 actually blew compared to Fantastic Worlds #6, but it had some awesome educational features including Space Flight to Venus!

← Older posts

Mars Will Search No More!

Mars Will Stat No More!

  • 6,427,600 minds warped since 2011
Follow Mars Will Send No More on WordPress.com

Mars Will Advertise No More!

My Comic Shop banner

Mars Will Categorize No More!

  • art studio (97)
  • crime (41)
  • dinosaur (222)
  • educational (148)
  • first issue (110)
  • golden age (133)
  • humor (25)
  • indie (184)
  • jungle (58)
  • MeteorMags (15)
  • music (41)
  • occult (80)
  • poetry (62)
  • postcards (35)
  • quarterly report (35)
  • science fiction (407)
  • superhero (435)
  • war (45)
  • western (10)
  • writing (22)

Mars Will Tag No More!

2000AD abstract acrylic advertising Alan Moore Alex Nino alien Al Williamson Amazing Spider-man animal inside you animals art Avengers Batman big box of comics Bill Mantlo birth black and white Black Panther book review books brains Brave and the Bold Captain America Carmine Infantino cats Charles Yates Chris Claremont Classics Illustrated collage collection comic book collage comic books crime Dark Horse Comics DC Comics dinosaur dinosaur books dinosaur comics Dinosaurs an Illustrated Guide Dr. Doom drawing Dreadstar dreams EC Comics EC Comics reprints Fantagraphics Fantastic Four first issue Flesh Flesh the Dino Files Galactus George Perez Gilberton Gil Kane Godzilla golden age guitar Harvey Comics Image Comics indie box Indie Comics Inhumans Jack Kirby Jack Kirby art Jim Lee Jim Starlin Joe Simon John Buscema John Byrne jungle Ka-zar Kevin O'Neill Last Gasp library of female pirates Life on Other Worlds lizard Man-Thing Mark Millar Marvel Comics Marvelman memoir meteor mags Micronauts MiracleMan monsters music occult OMAC origin painting pastel Pat Mills pen and ink pirates Planet Comics planets poems poetry postcards prehistoric mammals Prehistoric World Prize Race for the Moon racism Ray Bradbury Robert Kanigher robot Roy Thomas Satans Tears Savage Land science fiction self publishing Silver Surfer sketchbook sundays Smilodon Spider-man Stan Lee Steve Bissette Steve Ditko Steve Rude Strange Sports Strange Tales Strange World of Your Dreams Superman Swamp Thing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Teen Titans Thor time travel Triceratops Turok Turok Son of Stone tyrannosaurus rex underground comix Vertigo Comics VT Hamlin war war comics Warren Ellis Warrior Weird Fantasy Weird War Tales WildC.A.T.S Wolverine writing X-men X-men covers Young Earth Zabu

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Mars Will Send No More
    • Join 783 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Mars Will Send No More
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...