STRONGHOLD

The Alaqash. The D’Rizzar. The Salomak. The names of the doomed. The names of the dead.

Something about this comic has bothered me for some time: due to my own inexperience as a writer, and my desire to reinvent the goddamn wheel, I thought it would be fun to dive in in media res without spending a lot of hairy time expositing the story, allowing it to be drawn out and revealed in bits and pieces. It’d be more interesting. More organic. More twenty-first century. And all of these things are, in a sense, true. But the format of the book — especially once we took it online, proved me wrong.

I was an idiot.

Considering we did the first issue of this nearly four years ago, I’ve learned quite a lot. But one of things I couldn’t seem to do was find a way to solve the basic problem that at no point have I really told you guys what’s supposed to be happening here. And I, as the writer, couldn’t see that after a while. After all, I know the story. I know where it’s going and where it’s been. Shouldn’t you?

Well, no. How could you? You haven’t been told. It wasn’t fair to you as the audience, and I apologize.

In an attempt to rectify this mistake, in November, we began planning a six-page minibook designed to relay some of the backstory. There’s still some elements that haven’t really been revealed yet, some concepts we haven’t gotten across, but here, at last, is the sidebar story we’ve needed to put out there since day one.

The art is being provided by Chris Johnson, a friend of ours from college who is immensely talented and profoundly slow. So it has taken us months to reach this point, but I am very satisfied with the finished results. This issue is beautiful; not that Kevin’s art is lacking, but Chris brings a very different feel to the book, and that’s pretty welcome. It’s very gratifying to see a these characters of ours interpreted in new ways.

Here’s a little more information for you, regarding what the hell this book is about. You see, all the characters have a totemic animal in the best tradition of Super Sentai.

• Ruth has a white eagle;
• Marc has a yellow ram;
• Emily has a blue fox;
• Greg has a green sea-turtle.

Yes, eventually they’ll get giant robots.

Keep reading, and thanks for sticking with us.

-Brian