Strip 1097 - Click strip above to goto the next strip.
First Seen: Tue 2015-05-19
Story & Art: Scott Bieser - Colors: Lea Jean Badelles
Sci-Fi Adventure Monday & Thursday.
Quantum Vibe
A thousand years in the future, humanity has colonized worlds in nearly 100 galaxies, thanks to Quantum Vibremonic technologies developed five centuries earlier. Other new technologies have created various off-shoots of humanity and extended life expectancies five-fold. The story begins with how a mad scientist and his plucky assistant, along with their robot friend, brought humanity to the stars, and continues with the adventures of some unique people in fantastic places.
What Comes Next [ Mar 18, 2024 ]
The war is over, but This Means War has a ways to go. Novo Paolo/Bubbleopolis is still in a nebula/stellar nursery, no one knows what happened to the planet Sharen (center of the Intergalactic Council), and the status of the now-surrendered Invaders is yet to be resolved. What will they do when they learn their homeworld is basically destroyed? Will Alyss and Li be re-united? How about Diana (the real one) and Otto?
These questions will be resolved in the next few weeks, before This Means War part 3 wraps in late May.
After that, I plan to go BACK in time about 400 years, to when Alyss and Li left their home in the Sol System to colonize a new world on the far side of the galaxy. As one might expect, hijinks ensue. New subtitle yet to be determined, start date sometime in around the start of July. Stay tuned!
Transcript For Strip 1097
From the beginning the idea was to start with a solar-system-spanning, human civilization which had not yet developed a practical interstellar drive. For gameplay purposes I wanted seven ‘factions’ which I determined early on would be grouped into ‘mercantile corporations’ which I originally called ‘Mercans’ before I learned about the word ‘merkin’ and what that means. After that I changed the term to ‘Mercorps.’It took me a bit to work out the factions, their characteristics, and where they came from. Here’s an early graphic outline:
[graphic]
‘Elfive,’ which later became ‘L-5 City,’ was an early player, as I had long been fascinated by the idea of an anarcho-capitalist space-city. ‘The Sisters’ and ‘Titan’ were aligned, and Pluto and Triton were aligned with the Jovian Moons.
I spent several weeks of my unemployment fiddling with these concepts, adding aspects, and dropping others. The seats of power shifted to the inner planets, with the outer worlds (as well as Mercury) being mere colonial outposts. The Belt was a bit Rougher in my original conception than it was to become, owing in part to my work with Sandy Sandfort on Escape From Terra.
Along with the scene-setting came a back-story to the back-story. I’d worked out a 500-year history from the 1990s into the 2500s with important events sprinkled throughout. This timeline chart is too small to read here but you should be able to get the general idea:
[graphic]
The details don’t matter now because I have since added, removed, and repositioned most of the events. (I didn’t come up with ‘The calamities’ until I was already drawing volume 1. I need a reason for Seamus to be hiding his true identity and a world-rending disaster seemed to fill the bill.)
As this fictional universe was coming together I knew I needed to populate it with interesting characters, and a plot that would take them through this universe. The plot came fairly easily, but the characters took a bit more work.
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Oglaf (NSFW)
Trekker
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