Rebel Angels was once Hell Lost

I printed up the first 50 or so pages as a short for TCAF, many years ago. 

2014 I think? 

Unused hellscape from Rebel Angels

I did a lot of explorations, pattern tests, and background building for Rebel Angels, and not all of it made the final cut. This particular Hellscape, for example, remains eternally consigned to Production Hell: 

Not the San Andreas Fault... or is it?

Unless, of course, it counts that I show it here and now... or does it?

Cover to Rebel Angels issue 2

Look what I found lurking in the dark corners of my hard drive: the cover to issue 2 of Rebel Angels! I forgot all about this thing. It depicts an assassin sent to murder Beelzebub in his fortress, only to be foiled by the warrior-queen of Hell. 

It was fun to work on. 

At least until I burned out.

Talk about loaded with energy!

Check out The Book of Maggor Thoom... if you dare!

The Dread Book of Maggor Thoom

Check out my other satirical graphic novel, The Book of Maggor Thoom:

On the dark and shadowy surface of a living black hole resides one Maggor Thoom, demon. After endless eons of success as the star employee of the Insanity Acquisition Department, he has lost his passion and purpose. Yet he knows all too well that those who do not drink the Antediluvian Kool-Aid are soon fed to the ravenous Maw.

To save himself from annihilation Mr. Thoom sets off on a desperate journey of self-discovery; he flees The Void and seeks help on a small blue orb called Earth.

Unfortunately for Thoom his arrival is detected by the Archon Hunters, an organization dedicated to protecting the world from eldritch horrors such as himself. Their task: hunt down and terminate with extreme prejudice the potential World Destroyer. 

Can Thoom find a new purpose before he's snuffed out or will he inadvertently bring about the end of the world?

Published by SLG Publishing, natch!

I wrote the book during Covid lockdown. Can you tell?

More pictures:

Demons in the Nether

Ol' Maggor and Great One

Maggor Thoom's true form!

Death to bugs!

Punch out in Toronto!

New from the creator of Rex Libris.

Hell PD

The first iteration of Hell Lost / Rebel Angels featured two homicide cops in Hell. 

Talk about a thankless task. 

Obviously, this left them in a less than upbeat mood...

Betrayal!

 

Alecta Fury stabbing demon

From the card deck. From the graphic novel Rebel Angels. From the web comic Hell Lost. 

It's complicated.

The Pot of Suffering

From the one shot anthology comic, leading to Rebel Angels:

 The red baron... in hell!

Check out the comic online here. 

Rebel Angels movie poster

The Rebel Angels movie poster from the Coming Soon show:

Check out the comic online here. 

Vector art reveal

Rebel Angels was built in a vector art drawing program called Adobe Illustrator. You lay down what are called Bezier points, which are attached by lines, and these define the shapes. It's quite different from photoshop.

Here you see the underlying structure being fleshed over with the final result as a mask is pulled back.  

The Lesser Key of Solomon demon collection

Came across some more wonderful artwork depicting this set of miscreants. It's fabulous stuff, riffing off of the Louis Le Breton originals. You can find those here.

Going down...

Stairway congestion in the Infernal Realm.

Is it Moment to Moment, or Aspect to Aspect?

The mind boggles!

Rebel Angels: The Card Game

Look! It's a book. Now it's a card game!

Rebel Angels now being solicited in Previews

A print edition of Rebel Angels is being solicited in this month's Previews. Head on down to your local comic retailer and order the book and make my dream of printed pages come true!

io9 on Revolutions: Fact vs. Fiction

io9 has a good post on how fictional dystopias tend to ignore certain aspects of revolutionary movements: 10 Lessons From Real-Life Revolutions That Fictional Dystopias Ignore.

They're wrong: not every creator ignores such issues.

Just the popular ones.

I've been exploring several of them in Rebel Angels, which uses the original revolution as a platform to explore the phenomenon in general.

And I played with it even earlier, in Nil: A Land Beyond Belief. 

So there.

Evil and Evolutionary Convergence

Evolutionary convergence occurs when, for example, nature winds up with at same solution from two different directions. Like how every planet in Star Trek is populated by white people with prosthetics stuck to their foreheads.

The dolphin and the ichthyosaur is probably a better example.

But ideas can also converge. For example: 

"When the existence of the church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, and death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed for the common good."

- Dietrich von Nieheim, Bishop of Verden, De Schismate Libri III, AD 1411.

"To us, everything is permitted, because we were the first in creation to take up the sword not for the purpose of enslavement and repression but in the name of universal liberty and emancipation."

- Krasny Mech (Red Sword) Bulletin, Kiev Cheka (Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, Soviet Secret Police), regarding massacre of peasant uprising, AD 1920.

Some things never change. 

Note the first quote is cited from Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, an anti-communist, apparently from a paraphrase by Ludwig von Pastor in History of the Popes (1906), extrapolated from a more meandering original statement by Nieheim on dealing with the Antipopes in De Modis. Of course, paraphrasing quotes kind of defeats the purpose. But then, that's what translations often amount to. The underlying point is the same but Pastor seems to have added a more poetic edge to it.

A relevant section from De Modis: 

"Then, if the Church will not be able to accomplish it in this way, then by way of deceit, fraud, arms, violence, power, promises, gifts and money, and finally, prison and death, it is appropriate to procure in any way whatever the most holy union and conjoining of the Church." - Dietrich von Niehem

As Stephen Pinker notes in Angels of Our Better Nature, more violence and murder has been carried out in the name of morality than has ever been committed for the sake of sin. 

Rebel Angels delves into the divide between righteous revolutionary theory and reality.

TCAF 2014

I will be attending TCAF once again (The Toronto Comic and Arts Festival), Saturday May 10 (9am-5pm) and Sunday May 11 (11am-5pm) at the Toronto Reference Library. Come on by, there'll be lots of amazing artists with fabulous stuff for sale, and entry is free. This years promotional TCAF poster (above) is by Michael DeForge, who illustrated the cover of Rebel Angels issue #5. His stuff is fabulous and utterly unique.

I'll have some exciting new stuff with me, too, so don't miss it!

Biplane flies over The City of Dis

Demon piloted biplane flies over The City of Dis in Rebel Angels. The Infernal Forces use Army Surplus and weaponry scavenged from the sea floor of earth to equip their troops. It's their only source of modern weaponry.

Added some effects (such as snow) and some glows to the footage. Not convinced myself. Loaded it directly into Blogger instead of linking to Youtube. Blogger's compression downgrades the quality quite a bit more.

Cover of Rebel Angels: Volume One

Rebel Angel animations

Worked on some animations for a possible Rebel Angels Kickstarter campaign using Adobe After Effects. Pretty basic stuff, just moving elements around. Timing needs to be fine tuned, but that can wait until a voice over's done.

After Effects is an incredibly powerful program, but I'm not very fast at it. Fortunately, I made Rebel Angels in Adobe Illustrator, so it's relatively easy to break up elements and animate them.

The Warlord of Io promotion video I made a number of years ago was much more involved (see below). Won't go that far this time around. Not worth the effort. The video, honestly, was just a big waste of time. Too flawed to do any good.