All subscriber copies have been sent to fulfillment.*
Paperback copies of Cirsova #8 are available now through Amazon.
Hardcover copies of Cirsova # 8 are available now through Lulu.
Kindle copies will be available June 1st.
*:If we had your address. If you haven’t sent us your address, we haven’t sent you your magazines!
[We will begin taking pre-orders for Wild Stars III on Friday! Be sure to keep an eye out for it when we reveal the cover by Tim Lim!]
Michael Tierney’s Wild Stars have a history in print going back nearly 35 years. In the Wild Stars, the stakes are high and the scale is grandiose. Aeons ago, a godlike being led an exodus to stars—the Wild Stars. Unbeknownst to those who remained on earth, mankind flourished in space, but it also found new dangers and new enemies:
The Brothan, a race of vile wolf-like creatures, war against the Wild Stars and hope to deliver a fatal blow against Earth itself.
The Artomique, warlords from a parallel universe, ally themselves with the Brothan and infiltrate Earth, acting as arms-dealers and mercenaries to destabilize the globe.
There’s also a giant megalodon space shark that eats space ships.
The Wild Stars is epic science fiction in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs and E.E. Doc Smith.
The original Wild Stars comics (1984/1988) told the stories of Erlik, an immortal son of the Ancient Warrior, and his conflict with his power-hungry nephew Carthage, and of Carlton MacKanaly, who is selected by the Wild Stars to act as Earth’s representative—the First Marker.
In 2002, Michael teamed up with Frank Brunner, Tom Smith, David Brewer, and Dave Simons to expand the story of the Wild Stars in a limited comic series. This prequel/sequel run was combined with the original Wild Stars comics as Wild Stars: The Book of Circles. The title refers to the fact that the story is so multi-layered you can read it a second time and see another level of the story not immediately evident on the first read. Michael has talked to people who have read it as many as five times, and he could still show them things they missed.
In Wild Stars II, the Artomiques sought revenge for the destruction of their world and attempted to recover a lost time travel device to recreate their alternate reality in ours. The traitor Carthage and his Brothan cohorts kidnapped the First Marker’s daughter and escaped into time. The epic battles across space and time against vampiric dragons, Nazi zombies, titanic space sharks, and worse threaten to tear the universe apart.
Michael’s new novel, Wild Stars III: Time Warmageddon, picks up where II left off, in the future history aftermath of the Brothan/Artomique war, but can be read as a standalone story in the Wild Stars universe.
I am absolutely thrilled to be working with Michael Tierney to put out this new story. Cirsova is all about high-octane action sci-fi adventure, and Wild Stars delivers. It is cool beyond belief to have a chance to publish this. Getting to work with cover artist Tim Lim and interior artist Mark Wheatley is icing on the cake.
Cirsova Publishing will be teaming with Little Rocket Publications to offer an exclusive Kickstarter-only edition of Wild Stars III. We will also be making a lot of the old Wild Stars material available to old fans and new without the resale and auction up-mark (the record listing for a “new” copy of Book of Circles is $615 dollars; Wild Stars Portfolio One currently lists for over $100 on eBay). You will not want to miss it!
No, she’s not what immediately springs to mind when one thinks “badass female character”. She’s not sexy-in-leather, dodging bullets, doing somersaults, and beating up guys twice her size with waif-fu, but consider this:
Fa fought in the Gryps War and survived a show in which more than half of the main characters, including all but three women, died.
She did so piloting an experimental mech that’s generally considered inferior to the post-Mk II Gundams many other characters flew.
She wasn’t military or para-military like Emma or Reccoa or the Titan gals, but she volunteered to fight for Anti-Earth United anyway and fought bravely.
She not only put up with Camille when he was going through his Giant Robot Hero angst and reined him in some when he needed it, she stayed with him to take care of him when he became a disabled vet on the losing side of a war.
So, where is all this coming from?
I’d seen this just before another thread I was in about bad girls and best girls spiraled off into a Gundam tangent:
Credit to this juxtaposition by @KateVsTheWorld
Now, I have mixed thoughts of my own regarding the Killing Joke (TL;DR, it’s overrated and I understand why Moore himself is critical of it), and this isn’t the place to address Gail “Women in Refrigerators” Simone’s comments, but it was what got me thinking about Fa and the context surrounding her as a “badass female character”.
Zeta Gundam is a show that not only has a lot of female characters, it has a lot of female characters who have horrible stuff happen to them. Yes, you can claim that some of them were there to give male characters motivation (that a woman who was a better pilot than him could take an interest in him but then be killed in an MS battle by a kid he’d gotten into it with really messed Jerrid up), but they’re all very rounded, very complex, very real-feeling characters that many viewers had deep attachments to.
From pink hair to the right: Dies in sequel, lives, dies, dies, dies, dies, lives, lives, dies, dies, dies, lives.
TFW Hypergamy Intensifies
Lest you think that the show was just particularly brutal to women, keep in mind that it would be easier to list off the main/major male characters who lived than rattle off all the ones who died. (Camille, Yazan[villain], Bright, Amuro, Astonage, and Char[though it’s left ambiguous, highly implied that he died, and he’s nowhere in ZZ], and the last three all die in Char’s Counterattack.)
In a story where none of the good guys die, the cute long-suffering girl-next-door girlfriend of the hero who gets to pilot her own robot every now and then is comic relief at best and obnoxious wannabe eye-candy at worst.
But in a story where anyone can die, and they often do, there’s something to be said of the character who can fight, survive, and still retain something of herself when it’s all over and go on to be a personal hero to those closest to her when she’s not fighting.
So, yeah, Fa Yuiry is a badass.*
*: And Best Girl. Sorry, Four, but teenage me was wrong about you. Get you a girl who will forgive you for liking Four and take care of you when you’re a disabled vet.
The artificer’s workshop is below the south end of the abbey. It can be reached either by the stairs in the annex behind the hidden door or via the well.
*:active if seal in L2-26 is broken.
Faster-than-light scouts are arriving at distant suns to discover that they have been “replaced” by white dwarfs… Where have the stars vanished to?!
Terraformers find a world that shows signs of previous human colonization: who were those people and where did they go?!
Former-President Bully Bravo seeks to solve these mysteries and more, but between an evil pirate queen with machinations to employ mind-control across the galaxy and a rogue time-traveler trying to create a god, the old spacer has his work cut out for him!
We’ll begin taking pre-orders for Wild Stars: Time Warmageddon at the start of June and will ship before the end of Summer.
More details and cover-reveal soon!
In the wake of the new Thundercats show, CalArts is taking a beating for being/producing an ugly, simplistic, and homogenized art style in animation that has become linked to SocJus.
It’s long been the subject of several memes.
There was a good thread recently about why “CalArts” has become linked with SocJus that can be read here.
But what is “CalArts” really like, and is it really to blame? Is it ugly and homogeneous? I’ll let you be the judge.
I found a page that has the 2018 films of CalArts animation students.
Here is something from a 4th year CalArts student:
Squiggly words and keyframes aren’t what comes to mind when most folks think of animation.
This animation from a 4th year would’ve been nuked from orbit had it been posted on NewGrounds:
On the other hand, 13 pages in, I did find this gem by a 1st year.
Here’s a first year that, while the art is kind of ugly, shows mastery of the concepts of animation.
CalArts needs Jeongho Lee and Katie Billions more than they need CalArts.
The few good ones are so out of the league of much of what’s coming out that being associated with CalArts may be to their detriment in the future, because the person who made Gumball Machine will now be inextricably linked with the person who made this:
Because the CalArts short films are listed by the number of plays they’ve received, fewer and fewer people will see Gumball Machine because it’s behind a dozen pages of stuff like that.
I don’t think that it’s fair to say that CalArts it turning out a homogenized style of design, but much of the design coming out of it IS rather ugly, and many of the student animations range from poor to mediocre in quality. Of course, some of that can be chalked up to student effort; you’ll always have your A, B, C, and D students turning in a varying quality of work.
Evil Princes everywhere these days.
Earlier today I received the following message from an Amazon support rep:
I have checked your cover file and was not able to see what the issue is. I will connect with our Technical Team who will be able to provide more information about what exactly is causing the constant rejection.
Hopefully this nightmare is almost over.
The physical softcover version Cirsova #8 is dangerously close to being late, so I thought I’d show folks why.
The problem we’ve been having is a combination of Createspace’s 24-hour turn-around time on file review and support contact with the fact that they have been inconsistent about what the blocking issues for the cover are.
This was the first issue we had.
I got this twice, even after making some tweaks to text, so I asked what the problem was.
It turns out that reviewers will actually show you the blocking issues they highlighted, but only if you contact them. It turned out that I’d accidentally set an additional 1/8″ bleed (the print area was fine) they thought that a small snip of white outside the bleed meant that I wanted a border; they didn’t highlight the text that was allegedly too close to the edge.
I had a manual and an auto-bleed on when I exported. Oops…
Then I get this:
The advertising images haven’t been a problem for us before, but this time it was because we had the Amazon logo. I also finally get an answer that the date under our artist’s signature is the text that’s too close to the edge; I explain that there’s really nothing I can do about the artists signature and ask if they can cut us some slack.
Below are the images the reviewer sent.
So, the artist’s signature, which is embedded in the art and can’t be moved is too close to the bottom.
Well, there’s room to squeeze in B&N’s web address, where you can also buy Michael’s awesome book.
Now I’m told that to reference Amazon, I need two other places listed. Well, there’s one already, so I add barnesandnoble.com. Notice that there’s nothing mentioned about text too close to the edge blocking the file. I resubmit having done what the last reviewer asked, making sure that there are two additional outlets listed. Then I get this:
What the last reviewer said was a problem is no longer an issue. And something the last reviewer didn’t mention was an issue is now an issue again. We are back to square one…
saywhatagain.gif
Amazon’s support hotline is broken; when you call, it tells you to dial an extension then hit #, but instead of stating an extension, it makes electronic farting noising.
I reached out to social media support, so I’m hoping that someone real will actually call me so this can get straightened out.
We have never had issues like before and hopefully will not again, but this has been so frustrating that I’m ready to tear my hair out.
Cirsova 