As Chapter 2 draws to a close, I have to say that this particular experience has been a very interesting one. Chapter 2, as you may or may not know (and as you would know if you reread all my posts) started out with me drawing by hand, with 2B technical lead, and, through a series of misadventures and a very expensive computer upgrade, saw 6-Commando go one hundred percent digital by the end. And this page is about as far down that road as I’ve gone so far. Frankly, I really like this one – it looks the most like my original conception of the story, a kind of “Cartoon Gone Wrong” cel-shaded look I’ve been reaching for.
Some interesting notes, now. The airplanes in panel 4 are American-made, an F-16 and an E-2D Hawkeye. They exist in the real world (obviously). They are being flown, however, by the Royal Mozambique Air Force, which does not exist: Mozambique is a republic (formerly a communist party dictatorship) which, to my knowledge, has no air force to speak of. In the 6-Commando universe, the early rise of the United Nations allowed many countries to work out their differences, at least within the UNA, and I envisioned a lot of the European monarchies establishing overseas commonwealths like the British. And so, I allowed for a Portuguese restoration, and assumed that, because there was never a militant fascist/nationalist movement in the world of 6-Commando, their colonial issues were solved peacefully, allowing nations like Angola and Mozambique to be much better developed. And so Mozambique is now independent, rather like Canada, and is a leading African member of the UNA, operating Early Warning for the atomic powers as part of the overall UNA atomic deterrent. For some reason the idea appealed to me. This peaceful decolonization was not uniformly the case, however: hence the Disrecognized Zones and the violence in the former Belgian Congo, which is what started this whole story off.
The roundels on the planes are my own invention, based on the colors of the Portuguese monarchy, the Cross of the Savior, and the triangle-in-circle device of Mozambique. It’s almost a shame it’s so small, as I rather liked the look of it. Ah, well.
On another side note, the two mainframes there are part of the crew at AADC, the United Nations’ Atomic Aerospace Defense Command. Their names are a joke you may or may not get: they’re labeled “TMSN,” my homage to “Thompson and Thomson,” the English-language names given to the Tintin characters Dupont and Dupond, who were two well-meaning but generally incompetent police detectives who were always getting in the way when Tintin and his companions had something serious to take care of. I dunno, it seemed funny to me.
Anyhow, this again is part one of a two-page spread, but not quite so critically as the previous page, since it’s a multipanel setup. But either way, I like the outcomes I’m getting from designing two pages at once, and I plan to continue the practice into chapter 3. But more about chapter 3 later. For now, this part of the story is hurtling towards its end, two weeks hence. And after that… well, we’ll just see!
The response last week, by the way, was absolutely astounding. Thanks to everyone who took time to comment! And another thing: I’ve been remiss in congratulating Joost Haakman, who recently released a children’s book in the Netherlands titled “Hop.” No, not the smarmy, predictable Disney nonsense – his actually has some genuine artistry to it! Not to diminish the hard work of the animators, but I mean… well, you know what I mean. But if you speak Dutch, see what you can do about getting a copy. And if you don’t, pester him to produce an English-language version so kids in the English-speaking world can have their chance!
And once last comment: the story on reMIND is still going: this week’s page is by Peter Hon of the comic Malden. Check out his page over at reMIND, for sure, and Malden, if you’re ready to have your mind blown by one of the most bizarrely imaginative comics I’ve ever seen!
Anyway, that’s all for now. Be well, folks, and see you next week for the penultimate page of Chapter 2!
Regarding what’s going on in 6-Commando. Warhead strikes? That can’t be good.
Thanks are in order for mentioning my page on Remind. Now I have to figure out what I want to draw from 6-commando (so many mechs/characters to choose from).
No prob – I may not have any idea what’s going on in Malden, but damn if it isn’t a hell of a lot of fun to look at!
And yes – atomic missiles are a very serious thing. They may not have invented the H-Bomb in this world, but A-Bombs are plenty big enough. And dirty, too, with all that uranium.
–M
I’ve never seen rockets depicted so… elegantly. Strangely beautiful, majestic, a calm in the middle of the chaos as you take us above the clouds and the melee below.
The penultimate page is still to come?
Thanks! It was very much my intention to make this page a much simpler, “quieter” page, given the confusion and mayhem of the rest of the chapter.
And yes, there’s only two pages left in this chapter! Then I take a week or two off and then I launch into Chapter 3, which will be the last part of the first 6-Commando “book.”
–M
Thanks for the plug man! Let the pestering begin! 😀 I have started on the translation, but to translate 14,922 words from Dutch to English is quite different from the few lines of text that are in Semmie the Forest Gnome.
It is by the way really uncool to have sent my first book to the printer and then see an ad in a magazine that Hollywood made a film with the exact same name as my book. And as far as I can tell they only use the word Hop in the title, let’s hope it is a really bad film and everybody forgets about it soon.
Panel 2 by the way is really, really cool. It looks like chapter two is going to end with a big bang as well.
I’ve always said you have a good eye for children’s books – here’s hoping Hop makes it to the US market before long!
–M
Why do they have all those CRT screens if there is nothing on them to look at?
They might have something there… it is simply too dim to be noticed from here, so that looking into the screens do not stress eyes.
Or, it might be a temporal blackout… Maybe even a Fed’s sabotage to distract AADC crew from a launch…
I bet it’s so they don’t get distracted by wikipedia and facebook and random military themed webcomics that they stumble across…
Yes. Let’s go with that over “He didn’t realize he’d left it out.”
–M
Say, have you ever read any of the Bolo series? Mike sort of reminds me of that series with the autonomous tank thing.
Oh-ho-HO, have I EVER. BOLOs are a major part of my formative science fiction years. And Mike’s lineage is pretty clear – anyone who tries to make a robotic tank in fiction is doing so against the backdrop of Laumer’s opus.
–M
I’m a very VERY amateur sci-fi writer myself (As in fan-fiction and round-robin RP fiction) and… I’m always kind of an Imperialist in my sci-fi. I even started writing a very complex sci-fi universe that I called Pax Terra, that was the future history of mankind’s expansion and conquest of the known galaxy and man’s post-human evolution via gentic engineering.
Really, I’m a born royalist and I can’t get away from romanticised images of a future Terran Empire, defended by elite Imperial Knights and ruled by an emperor.
On this, I’m partly inspired by the Dune series, at least in the idea of the Empire and its noble houses, but technology wise I tend to stick to fairly basic stuff like ships without magical artificial gravity generators, slug thrower weapons still being a mainstay in the far future ect.
I hope this doesn’t sound like a challenge, but why the imperial stuff? (I’m not being a jerk – I truly want to know!)
It seems to me an interstellar empire would be impossible to rule autocratically. We haven’t even managed to make one last more than a decade or so here on Earth, and it has never spanned an entire planet. The best that could be hoped for, if you think hereditary monarchy has any kind of future, would be some sort of constitutional monarchy with a lot of decentralization. It would be such a balkanized state that it would practically not even BE a state in any sense but some kind of confederacy.
I make no secret of the fact that I think feudalism and monarchy is an insane way to run a country – I’m a firm supporter of republicanism. And not the George Lucas Galactic Republic where people elect kings for some reason. I think the Federation from Star Trek is much likelier to be the way we go – the Earth Alliance from Babylon 5 is even likelier, or even LIKELIER would be CEGA from The Jovian Chronicles, or a form of anarcho-capitalism like you see in Aliens. Monarchy with all its associated pseudo-religious trappings has long since been exploded as a theory of governance, and it’s in its final death throes even as we speak. The balance of human history notwithstanding, monarchy is dead, and the future is the Republic.
On the other hand, Republics can have empires, as well – look at the United States. France, in its day, had the Union Française, and the British Empire was run primarily by Parliament, not the Monarchs. Now if you want to talk about absolute government, a military junta could probably keep a lid on an interstellar empire, though not a terribly large one, unless they had a huge military force and a major secret police apparatus. But the bigger and broader an empire, the more varied its citizenry will be, and the more likely they will be to feel disaffected from the central authority and the less willing they will be to obey it. That’s the reason that, though we think of Rome as this monolithic entity, the whole Imperial period in Roman history was torn with civil wars, rebellions, uprisings, coups-d’état, usurpations, and near constant warfare and strife on all levels of society. I think an interstellar empire would only amplify those problems.
In 6-Commando, all the monarchies are remnants, or are constitutional monarchies with strong parliamentary traditions. The only monarchy left in the “free world” is Japan, which is ruled in reality by the Imperial Diet, not the Emperor. Britain, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and Sweden were all constitutional monarchies with strong democracies, and all have since fallen and been replaced by socialist republics. Germany’s monarchy was abolished in about 1927, shortly after the end of what they call “The Great War,” and Austro-Hungary was one of the original states to undergo a socialist revolution – Karl I, the last Austro-Hunagarian monarch, was executed by Communist partisans as he tried to flee into Bavaria in 1923.
The dominant political system in 6-Commando is the Supranational Alliance, which is the illogical extension of the World War I-era alliance system. The Arab League, CONASUR, FSR and UNA are all composed of many smaller independent countries, some of which are themselves confederations of countries, like the United Provinces of Central America, the Andean Group, the North American Free Trade Area, the Pacific States Alliance, the Organization of American States, the International Atomic Co-operation and Control Organization, and so forth, and many of them overlap with each other. At some point I plan to make a poster of the 6-Commando world with all the interconnecting alliances and corporate entities depicted graphically, though I have yet to decide exactly how.
–M
I never claimed that in my Pax Terra universe, that monarchy was perfect. Indeed, its actually my slightly cynical part that comes to the fore with the empire being built and maintained on constant wars. There is a parliment and elected local govorment, but ultimately, the Emperor’s word is law, to be enforced by a fanatically loyal personal guard, the Imperial Knights.
In Pax Terra, I was trying to portray quite a dark future, sort of an Anti-Star-Trek with humanity’s expansion into the galaxy being driven by a bloodlust fueld need for revenge for an alien invasion of Earth in the mid 22n’d century, which has more or less ‘tainted’ the whole of man’s perceptions of the universe and the alien races that live in it, even after a campaign of systematic genocide against the race that invaded Earth in the first place.
You mention Imperial Rome and that indeed was a major influence, in fact its where I go the name ‘Pax Terra’ tranlating from Latin as ‘Peace of Earth’ derrived from the hugely ironic Roman term ‘Pax Romanum’ or ‘The Peace of Rome’ that they used to describe everything they had conquered and all the peoples they had brutally subjagated. My Terran Empire is very much modeled on Imperial Rome in its outlooks of disdainful paranoia regarding those races they haven’t conquered yet ( IE Barbarians beyond the walls ) and the might makes right policy of crushing all dicention with massive military force and of course, the Byzantine internal politics of the empire.
I chose a monarchist system for Pax Terra, not because I think it was the best system for ruling a galaxy, but because I thought it would make for interesting and dramatic story telling.
I am actually British and if any country can be said to have had a rocky history with its own Monarchy its mine having fought two civil wars over the subject and effectively been under the rule of a military dictatorship as a result. When I call myself a born monarchist, I am expressing pride in my nation and in the system we presently have. I am proud to have a queen and I am proud to be her servant and subject. People have talked for years about getting rid of the monarchy in this country and just having a president, but… I think I would hate that and I think in a very real way, Britain just wouldn’t be Britian any more if that happened.
Gota say, that sounds like an intriguing comic. Definitely something to look into, as well as this BOLO comic that keeps getting mentioned all over the place. For now though, i must remain silently and anxiously awaiting this combined book of yours M. With you stating that there is all this extra content, ON TOP of the already insane and completely awesome art, it’s goan be awesome. Hope im one of the first 100 to get it! Good stuff dude, cant wait to see the next one!
– Slim
USA forever!
I appreciate the in-depth response: I was afraid, after the fact, that I’d come off as dismissive or snarky, which Iw as not trying to do – it’s a subject I’m genuinely interested in. And in your response you make, indirectly, a very good point – few things point up human fallibility like monarchies, since they rely so much on the actions of a small group of people. So in that sense, I can actually see the attraction of a monarchical empire as a framework for a story. Britain, as you say, has also been one of the countries that struck an uneasy balance between the traditions of a monarchy and the greater representative needs of a broad-based population, and that tension is also an interesting one to explore.
To frame my comment in a less confrontational way, in the United States, there is a strange fascination, in particular among writers of science fiction, with monarchy, which I have never understood. The problem with depicting a republic, though, I suppose, is that it would tend to be a more broadly political society than a monarchy, and when writing fiction you could easily get bogged down in political wrangling and lose sight of the plot. Still, republicanism and its intrigues seem an under-explored area of science fiction. Or, to put it in terms of a more British mixed form of government, my mind’s eye sees “House of Cards” in space. “You might very well think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.”
Perhaps it isn’t so much monarchy per se which I don’t understand as it is the innate American fascination with it in works of fiction. But I do understand the idea of being committed to one’s system, as well, and the sense of “nation-hood” (though I would not say nationality or nationalism) that one gets from it. In the States, we have a strong pride in the Revolution, the importance of our participatory democratic traditions, and the throwing-off of monarchy and imperialism. Interestingly, however, that didn’t stop us from building our own empires, nor did it keep us from having a very warm feeling for monarchies in general (and Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden in particular) And I personally have a significant pride in Québec and Acadie and the cause of French-American culture and its preservation, though that is less political and more cultural.
Interesting side-note, however: one of my early concepts for Rumblers was that, to give them a grounding and make them easier to talk to, they were programmed with a personal sense of the nationality of the nation which sponsored their construction. Mike-One-Echo is an American Rumbler, though I had imagined others might be British, French, Portuguese, Mexican and Canadian, etc. In the event, it ended up not making any difference to the story, but the idea of a Rumbler who’s a committed monarchist and supporter of the exiled British Queen would be a very interesting character indeed!
–M
Over time I worked out quite an involved history for the Pax Terra Universe, in which indeed before the empire there is a Republic, which just evolved into the empire. It wasn’t like Star Wars wherin the political system was just hijacked intentionally, but rather as man’s expansion into the universe was more or less linked to its conquests and military campaigns, more and more power passes to the military untill the Supreme Admiral of the fleet becomes the defacto ruler and was finally just made the official ruler.
Pax Terra is a universe that I created, actually to give me a lot of freedom to play with when telling lots of different kinds of stories, from intrigue riddled stories about the nobility, war stories following the Imperial Marines on campaign, but also less obvious subjects, like a story about Motor Sports in the far future set in the same universe.
“why the imperial stuff?”
I don’t know how closely my reasons compare to Cameron’s, but the reasoning may be informative. In a way, it splits into two questions: how the People identify and align, and how they are led.
A lot of the ‘old’ Empires made a point of having the Empire be an entity in its own right, on a level above and separate from National identities. You might have several different National identity groups within even the same town, but all bound together by the larger-scale shared identity of being Imperial citizens. That started to break down in the 1800s, as the myth of Nationalism took hold – the idea that dividing people by identity group would give consistent political/ideological groups, which would map neatly to geography. Two centuries of evidence that it doesn’t work that neatly, and people are still pushing it, probably because it makes a good story and gives an excuse for not thinking about the real issues. Instead, we need a return to the old ‘Imperial’ structure, uniting via common interest rather than continually dividing in the vain hope of eventually finding stable and workable fragments.
As for the leadership question, consider the proportion of people fit to fulfil that scale of leadership role. Let’s say one in a million per generation, for sake of numbers. Meanwhile, that same million contains hundreds of thousands who either cannot or will not look beyond their own narrow self-interest, media manipulation, or blind tribalism. You can either spend effort finding and training that one leader, ready to take over in their turn, or you can ensure that the one will be drowned out by the million who have neither the vision nor the responsibility to act in the wider interest.
A traditional hereditary system probably isn’t the way to go; it gives the best opportunity to ensure that the new leader is well-trained, but gives little option about the suitability of the candidate for the training. Better some sort of ‘open recruitment’ to bring in promising candidates, train them over many years and through lesser roles, and ensure that the eventual overall leader is the best that the Empire can provide for itself.
Mike is all “I can’t let you do that steve”
Yes conquering space is gonna be a little difficult. If their’s anything I learned from Star Wars is politics are corrupted to the point of self destruct.
Those rockets make me imagine the feeling. you see them going up, turning around and now heading towards the earth… towards you…
There`s going to be a major explosion, no doubt.
As always, great job. ^^
The AWACS having a big UN logo painted on it is so wacky.