Stronghold is a comic book.
It was created by the team of Brian Visaggio, Kevin Roberts, and Martin Krause as undergrads at Virginia Commonwealth University over a couple episodes of Power Rangers and some heavy nostalgia. The goal was, and has always been, to do a sentai-style book with a mature sensibility and a love for good storytelling.
The original book was set in the middle of an alien invasion against which fought a group of transforming superheroes, who were to find themselves increasingly bogged down. The point was to tell a story where we were losing. It was supposed to be an exercise in despair.
The first issue of the first incarnation was hammered out over three months and involved an overly-detailed script. It was sixty pages long, overly-wordy, and probably too obscure for its own good. But it managed to snag some attention in Richmond’s tiny indy comic scene, and got picked up for national distribution by comic retailer-cum-publisher Brett Carreras. Some editing was done, the cover was redesigned, and issue one split in two just in time for five-thousand copies to be printed up and get listed in Previews. We sold three-hundred of those five-thousand copies, and Diamond Distribution dropped us right after asking after our second issue.
So we took it online.
We put out six issues of increasing quality through 2010, delayed by our own mercurial personal lives, until we realized we could probably stand to completely revamp it and start again. So we did.
So that’s there we are now. We’ve retooled the entire book, given it a proper beginning, and hopefully made it more accessible without curtailing any of its ambitions. In the meantime, I (the writer) have gotten much more interested in political radicalism and anarchism, having spent some time down at Occupy Wall Street, and I wanted the book to deal with the moral questions of resistance more than the moral questions of war. What are your limits? How far can you go? What pushes you over the edge into action?
We’re Redline Comics. This is Stronghold.
