Let's just say it right up front and get it out of the way. This book is a fantasy.
That wasn't so hard, was it?
Fantasy is truly the redheaded stepchild of literature, looked down upon (with a few rare exceptions) by the reading world at large. It's derivative (and thus incapable of being entertaining), and unsuited for tackling serious issues. The plots are linear, step-by-step quests patterned off of Tolkein's The Lord of The Rings, the characterization is difficult-to-nonexistent (who can relate to a centaur or a guy with a singing sword?), the line between the good guys and the bad is so indelibly marked as to reduce both to caricature and stereotypes. Or so say a good number of readers of other genres, including, in some cases, science fiction, fantasy's nearest blood relation.
If that's the case, why, you're probably asking yourself, would anyone undertake to try to tell a story in this milieu? Why, especially, would three childhood friends invest so much of their time, money and talent into producing a fantasy comic book (whoa... double negative there!) when every reasonable voice would be raised in dissuading them from such a suicidal venture? Why pour themselves into a project that seems doomed to fail? Why tell a story in such an overused and unappreciated genre, in a medium that suffers its own inferiority complex in the world of literature, in an uncertain marketplace? Don't worry... they're good questions. And there are two ways of answering them.
The long way is to launch into a long-winded defense of fantasy as a part of the historical and oral tradition, to hold comics up as a serious art form ("sequential art"), to argue that the two go hand in hand and are uniquely suited to the task of exploring imaginary worlds that reflect the real one we all disharmoniously live in. But that's preaching to the converted, since no one picking this book up (and for doing so, by the way, you have the creators' sincere and heartfelt thanks) is likely to hold the opinions expressed in the above paragraph. And since we only have so much space to fill here, it seems wasteful to indulge in such an exercise.
The short way is to say that we think fantasy and comics, for that matter, have been given a bum rap.
Whether or not works as diverse as the above mentioned Lord of The Rings, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles are simply items of pop-cultural interest or enduring works of literature, or even whether they all qualify as fantasies, we'll leave for others to debate. What interests us here at Almagest Press are more concrete and immediate concerns.
First of all, we hope to produce an entertaining and involving work, in a serial format, that pays homage to such diverse influences as 1930's cliffhanger serials and science fiction and fantasy works from Childhood's End to The Road Warrior and all points in between. The ongoing saga of Aertimisan, Blackfell and their world is (hopefully) one that you'll find to be continually intriguing and engrossing, drawing you further in with each installment until mere curiosity is supplanted by an insatiable desire to know what happens next.
Whether or not we're successful in that aim will be for you to let us know over the coming issues.
Secondly, we want to explore this world we've created and see where it takes us. Aertimisan's world is a fractured and weary one, literally and metaphorically torn asunder by a giant rift in the earth itself, the result of a conflagration ages back between forces of religion and technology. The Artificers, once hailed as saviors and the bright lights of the world, are now hated and hunted figures considered to be a malevolent and largely irrelevant cult whose interests do not coincide with those of the populace at large. Aertimisan himself, as he evolves over the course of this saga, interests us and presents us with the opportunity to explore what it means to be blind and questing for answers in such a harsh environment. The motivations of Blackfell, the fates of Ignatz Seiff and Dorin and the others, the very backdrop against which all of these machinations take place are objects of interest and fascination to us, and we hope that over time they will prove to be so for you as well. And like the works mentioned above, we hope to explore some weighty themes in a setting tailor-made to it. What better way to ruminate on the horrors of war than Tolkein's much-maligned epic? What better way to explore the existence of God and the meaning of mortality than through Anne Rice's vampire saga? We feel that fantasy provides the perfect vehicle to explore these and other issues and hope that we give them their due.
But above all, we want to create an entertaining story that keeps you coming back; that other stuff, the oat bran, the "good for you" stuff, if you will, is just icing on the cake. More than anything else, we want to take you on a rollicking and thought-provoking ride... and in the process, to have some fun and generate some feedback from you. (That's a hint... please write us! Don't make us fill this space with more self-explanatory missives like this one!).
So come along and experience the fantastic world of Aertimisan.
Live the fantasy.
Kevin F. Moreau
(6/30/97)