We’ve gotten new art in from Mark Wheatley for Michael Tierney’s Wild Stars III: Time Warmageddon.
The piece is a double-page spread depicting the heroes escaping on a dead giant spider being used as a raft as more giant spiders drop out of the sky. It’s rad.
Over the first weekend of our kickstarter, we’ve hit the first and nearly the second stretch goals (Backers will receive free copies of the entire 2002 run of Wild Stars). If you haven’t backed yet, now would be a great time to do so, especially while we still have a couple of the Ultimate Fan Packages left.
Domestic US backers will receive all stretch rewards comics for free with their copies of Wild Stars III: Time Warmageddon.
International backers will have the option to pledge an additional amount to cover the shipping and handling for these comics (Sorry, but mailing a 6 lb box of comics overseas costs significantly more than whatever deals Amazon & Lulu have cut for their dropshipment rates.)
I’ll have the shipping and handling figured out for overseas backers soonish (hopefully today).
Art by Mark Wheatley
[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.
First, we’re gearing up for Wild Stars III: Time Warmaggedon.
This is a high-octane space and time-travel in the vein of Gardner F. Fox, Albert DePina, and Raymond F. Jones. Written by Michael Tierney, whose 4-volume history of the Art of Edgar Rice Burroughs is coming out this summer, and edited by Brian Niemeier (The Soul Cycle) and yours truly, I can assure you this is gonna be one heck of a ride.
What does Brian think about this project?
Wild Stars III: Time Warmageddon is a significant source of all your daily pulp requirements:
The more I’ve read this story, the more I love it. We understand, though, that since this is the newest entry into a franchise that has been around for 35 years, it might not be immediately accessible to new readers, so not only will we be making some of the rare and out-of-print Wild Stars material available, we may even be giving the 2002 comic-run away for free to new fans and old picking up this limited edition of Wild Stars III on Kickstarter.
More details on that soon, but we’re looking at taking pre-orders in June, once we get the cover art in from Tim Lim (yes, that Tim Lim).
In other news…
Cirsova #8 draws ever nearer to being done and ready to go out the door. Actually, it should’ve been ready today, but Amazon is being weird about stuff and they have an obnoxiously long turn-around time for corrections.
But the digital editions are done and there is a pre-order page up.
Issue 9’s art is done and the latest work-file is in the hands of one of our trusty editors.
I’ll be ready to start taking subscription orders for the final issues of Cirsova Volume 1 soonish.
Lastly, here’s a tease for you:
Art by Star Two.
We have a HUGE project that will be out later this summer!
Cirsova Publishing is teaming up with Michael Tierney and Little Rocket Publications to celebrate the upcoming 35th Anniversary of the Wild Stars with the exclusive release of an all new Wild Stars adventure: Time Warmageddon!
The fate of mankind and the current timeline are at stake—Space Pirates make a play for control over life in the stars and must be stopped, while rogue time travelers seek to undo the damage of tangled time as a mad-man reaches for apotheosis!
Wild Stars III: Time Warmageddon will be an illustrated novel by Michael Tierney, featuring cover art by Tim Lim (Donald Thump, My Hero Magademia) and interior art by Mark Wheatley (Jonny Quest, Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall).
This is a big deal for us at Cirsova. Wild Stars III will be our first release other than our flagship magazine. We’re aiming for a release in August and will begin taking pre-orders in June.
Be sure to keep an eye out for details we’ll be posting throughout May!
So far, the DCEU has been pretty terrible.
Now for my dangerous claim: the one bright spot of the DCEU was Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor. It was the one genuinely interesting thing that the films did in terms of storytelling, direction, and acting. His Luthor was not without problems, of course—the biggest being that his character was named Lex Luthor.
The main complaint I hear about him is “He’s not Lex Luthor; he’s not my Lex Luthor,” and no, he’s really not. Which is why it’s a damn shame they call him Luthor, because now you CANNOT do anything else with the character. Lex Luthor is usually portrayed as either a criminal mastermind, a mad scientist, or evil corporate billionaire with tons of resources at his disposal. In most cases, he’s set himself up as untouchable, and in fan favorite portrayals (StAS, L&C:NAoS) he’s often a cool, calculating and collected character—quite the opposite of Eisenberg’s portrayal. You need that aloof, powerful and untouchable nature to remain an ongoing villain to Superman. Yet the Luthor portrayed in BvS is a fantastic Batman villain and far more interesting than your typical portrayal of Luthor.
At its core, Batman vs. Superman is a story about three men who are living in the shadows cast by their absent fathers*. Their fathers have shaped who they are, what they do, what they believe, and they are constantly trying to live up to ideals that they think will make the ghosts in their memories proud. Eisenberg’s Luthor is shattered by this pressure. He’s the broken mirror that’s held up to Batman and Superman; could they turn into this broken and groveling man who is desperate to make Daddy proud? Many times in his adventures, Bruce Wayne comes close to this; he approaches the edge and often has be pulled back by his friends and loved ones. He sees himself, to a degree, in a character like Eisenberg’s Luthor, and it terrifies him. He wears the mask of the happy playboy billionaire, but every day inside he’s asking himself “Am I making my father proud?” And it makes Bats and the folks watching him wonder “How is he going to avoid ending up like that? Can he? How similar they are!” Like I said, A GREAT BATMAN VILLAIN!
Now, I understand why a lot of people don’t like him, I really do! And I agree, he’s NOT Lex Luthor, and his character should NOT have been called Lex Luthor. Calling him Lex prejudiced fans against character and ensured that this intriguing villain, great in his own right, cannot be used or explored further in future. It’s a shame, because really he was the one worthwhile thing the DCEU gave us.
*:One aspect that sets Supes & Bats apart from Luthor in the film is their love for their mother—something which Luthor is not shown to have—which brings them together against him at the movie’s climax, but that’s like an essay unto itself, right there!
