Welcome friends to the story that never ends! Except... now it begins.
This has been in the works since 1989. Started out as a comic I did for myself (very bad) then a book (not bad, but not great) then put on the shelf for decades because some shit stole one of my conceits and turned it into a tv show (I am not making this up, receipts to follow). Wrote a short story with a couple of the characters that won the Writers of the Future Grand Prize, which meant they were published and therefore the universe became real (in the way fictional universes all do). Followed by three decades spent writing what amounted to historical fanfiction for a father who would not read my science fiction, and finally realizing that nothing would please him, so heck with it, and then the rediscovery of my absolute love for these people and this story. Now it comes to you.
Caveat: I am not a good artist. I'm using Craiyon to ink and color the pieces, but the story, concept, characters, script, and dialog are 100% human-created. I'm using Craiyon because I can't seem to get the hang of Photoshop, Manga Studio, or any other actual illustrator program, and I suck at inking and can't seem to understand shading or perspective. But here's the deal: I will post my originals as well as the finished pieces. So you will see how much is mine. I make no pretense at being an artist. I'm a writer, and I do words good; I don't even use Grammarly or any proofing program. And that's the extent of my artistic prowess. So yeah, hate me if you want for using AI, but just know that if I had the funds I'd be paying a person to do this for me, but here we are in capitalism 101 and I ain't asking nobody for no free shit so, there you go.
If you want to read the original short story you can probably pick up a copy of Writers of the Future Volume 12 (1996) at the used bookstore. My story's called His Best Weapon. And it kind of makes a nice primer to the universe at large, since the saga I'm telling kind of drops you in the middle and spreads out from there, the way all good time travel stories should.
Now that the preamble is out of the way, I'm going to slowly introduce you to the cast. I'll start with the two characters in the short story, Lieutenants Burke and Allenby. They are Morale Officers. The best way to describe it is "ship's counselors without telepathy, or aliens, and with a dash of sex worker added into it." Hey, you gotta keep the troops sane any way you can, right? And they're both very, very good at their job.
I'm posting some images done realistically, and some in a more anime style, which I think my work kind of gravitates toward anyway. Here's the first picture I did of them, back in 1990. When I was still married. Gah.
Here's the images drawn by the illustrator for the Writers of the Future publication. The artist's name is Konstantin Sheverdin. He is from Ukraine. If anyone knows him and can let me know how he's doing that would be awesome, he's not coming up in any of my online searches. Thanks.
And here's some illustrations done by someone named Freya when it was published in a zine.
I don't have a schedule of release or anything set up. This is all new for me, but exciting, too. I'll put the actual short story up here when I get a chance to OCR it in, yes, it's that old (and so am I).
Also, here's some pics I did using Craiyon from my originals. This is what I see in my head when I try to draw them. Hope you like them.
Until next time...
