07/16/2024
Thoughts on this project (long read!)
As I attempt to market my second Kickstarter comic book project, I hear myself sounding like some Mel Brooks spoof of a hype man. It’s the hyperbolic terms I feel compelled to use—words like “awesome” and “epic.” They fail to convey the truth.
The fact is, they represent a lie that indie comic creators often tell, and I’d like to come clean.
You see, I’m acting like I’ve crafted the perfect story for you, but the truth is that I’ve concocted the perfect story for me.
Of course, I love it. Most independent creators aren’t receiving thick binders full of detailed market research data to plot our next creative foray. There’s no guy in a suit sheepishly telling me at a board meeting that “pirates are out and vampires are in.” More often than not, we’re consulting a test audience of one: ourselves.
It’s my world, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t welcome to visit. What my Charon 13 universe has in common with ogres, onions, and certain cakes is that it has layers. It’s everything I think is “cool,” wrapped in everything I think is “interesting,” and then drowned in everything I find “terrifying.”
On the surface, you’re getting the cool. As an elder millennial who was born dangerously close to Gen X, my first introduction to coolness was action: First Blood, James Bond, Die Hard. When I first realized my masculinity, it was out of admiration for men who “work alone.” Formidable guys. Guys who get things done and do it in style. Guys who are good but rough around the edges and don’t mind being abrasive. The archetype of an anti-hero is especially enthralling because as kids, we’re often jerks, and it’s nice to see jerkiness as a virtue. It’s validating. “You mean I can tell my boss to kiss my ass because I know better than anyone else how to get the job done?” As you’d imagine, this set up a sobering lesson in reality versus fiction. When I was writing Charon 13's character, I wanted to capture and bottle the very best of that, but I wanted to do it with a level of sophistication and maturity that removed some of the inherent pitfalls of being a renegade.
Charon 13 may be the best of the best, but he looks up to Captain Lewis, his partner. When she’s disappointed, he takes it personally. He may be a skilled killer, but he fears the toll it takes on him. He doesn’t want to completely succumb to the monster he must become to survive and succeed. He may be a loyal soldier, but he’s troubled by the cold pragmatism inherent in his organization. He’s a conflicted man who simultaneously represents everything a younger version of me thought was cool and everything messy about those qualities when applied to the real world.
On the next layer, you get the interesting. Without giving away too many Charon 13 spoilers, I’ll say that I’ve always been fascinated by the strangeness of what must exist outside humanity’s understanding. I’m not a cosmologist or an astrophysicist, but I know enough from Astronomy 101 and various books by people like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson to understand that even at our most brilliant and capable, our cosmic understanding is still extremely limited. We see so little of the universe from our “pale blue dot,” and we understand even less. The possibilities are endless. There is truth out there that mystifies and perplexes us so completely that we’ve had to construct powerful and fantastical gods to fill in those astronomical gaps.
I’ve always been drawn to things like the popular video game Mass Effect, The Martian Chronicles, Star Trek, and other science fiction that proposes possible answers to these lingering existential questions. The real magic of well-crafted sci-fi occurs in the late hours before bedtime. They serve as prompts to dream, ideas to mull over endlessly. Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While I didn’t know who he was when I was 11, his words perfectly encapsulated my sense of wonderment. What magic could exist with better understanding?
This is a question I sought to answer in Charon 13. I developed my own interstellar travel technology and attempted to explain it to the best of my ability. I also attempted to explain the nature of our existence, but that’s something I’m not going to spoil for you here. The point is, I wanted the aforementioned action trappings to exist in a world of science-based “magic.”
But there’s a flip side to that coin, and that brings me to the third self-indulgent layer of Charon 13: the “terrifying.”
Humor me for a moment:
We are little sentient specks of dust, sitting on top of slightly larger specks of dust, orbiting around an even larger speck of dust, and the nearest speck of dust is so far away we will likely never actually get to go there. We see faint blurs of light, and our scientists can observe energy and gravity from beyond, but even with all those incredible discoveries, we have no idea what… or who… is out there. We’re swimming in brackish water, unable to see the bottom.
When I imagine the universe, I think about that billboard poster from the movie Jaws, where a woman blissfully swims at the surface of the ocean, completely unaware of the giant, monstrous shark closing in on her. What unfathomable monstrosity lurks just beyond us? This, to me, is the ultimate existential dread. Religions tell us of an all-powerful God that occupies that space, and as an agnostic, I’d imagine that’s probably very comforting. But I imagine something worse. I envision something far beyond our capability that views us the same way we view ants, termites, or even bacteria. And that is fu***ng terrifying.
Enter the outer layer of Charon 13: cosmic dread. In issue #2, the hints are very subtle, and once again, I will not spoil it for you here… but beware, we will be staring into the abyss, and something will be staring back.
So, there you have it. I’ll probably continue to advertise Charon 13 as “awesome” and “epic.” And it is. But it’s not really designed to be some fan-service power fantasy or spectacle. At the risk of sounding like an egomaniac… it’s a tribute to me. Or rather, a distillation of my most all-consuming fantasies and obsessions. It’s an open invitation to my imagination—the cool, the interesting, and the terrifying. And you’re welcome to visit.
If you’ve made it this far, there’s a decent chance you’re willing to give Charon 13 a try. The Kickstarter is live and you can back it right here!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/troublestudios/charon-13-the-price-of-eternity-1-2-a-spy-fi-space-epic
