Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, kickstarter

Developing Schismatic's Fantasy World With Science

Published Sun, 06 Sep 2015 09:00:36 -0500

Schismatic is a six-issue mini series written by Andrew Adams and illustrated by Rachael Briner. Issue One is finished and available to download through Kickstarter, where they're trying to raise $12,000 by September 19th to cover production costs for issues 2-5.

Schismatic is a revenge thriller set in a fantasy world, inspired by both dark fantasy and Tarantino/Elmore Leonard crime stories. It follows a pair of pacifists whose family is destroyed by an evil, deep sea-worshipping cult. So they set out on a mission of revenge, which takes them on an epic adventure across their perilous planet and deep into enemy territory…

by Andrew Adams

This story started with the world: Arka Dune, a tropical planet with thousand-foot tides. It was very important to me to create an interesting world that our readers could live in for six issues. The worlds are often my favorite elements of fantasy stories, and I wanted one that was really special.

But I struggled with fantasy. Because anything is possible in a fantasy world, I had no rules or constraints to abide by. I began to comb fantasy blogs and art books, writing down any imagery that inspired or intrigued me. But at the end, all I had was a long list of unrelated ideas and no thread to tie them together with.

I did notice that a lot of my favorite imagery had been nautical in nature, and had inspired one idea in particular that I was really fond of: a city with tides so large that it would completely change shape between high and low tide.

So I did the 2015 thing, and I Googled. I was mostly curious to see whether or not there was already some famous fantasy world with extreme tides. But what I found, instead, was a book by author and physicist Neil F. Comins. It was titled What If the Earth Had Two Moons?

The answer to that question, it turns out, is that it would have insane tides.

The two days between when I ordered the book and when it arrived felt like they took forever. But the chapter on moons was so informative. It broke down, in layman's terms, what would happen if a second moon ever wandered into our Earth's gravity. And what I saw, instead, was a twenty-page document dictating the rules of my fantasy world.

Once I understood what sort of real, scientific phenomena could lead to the imagery that I had in my mind, it was easy to create the cultures and religions that would populate it.

I learned that the centuries after a second moon came into a world's gravity would create decades of darkness and storms. So I imagined that deep sea creatures would have centuries to rise to the top of the food chain. Which is why there are so many sea monsters in Schismatic, and a cult that worships them.

I learned that coasts would crumble and erode much faster on Arka Dune. So I imagined that the poor would be forced to live there, in cheap nomadic societies. Rachael imagined that they would need constant construction to maintain their towns. Hence the support beams.

I learned that the new moon would be subjected to 'land tides.' The land itself would rise and sink so much that it would turn to magma, creating a red/glowing surface. The way that this changes the light levels at night would change how animals evolve. Which gave us a guiding principle for the kind of creatures that we could populate our world with.

Soon, we had built what felt like a fleshed-out and cohesive fantasy world full of new and interesting sights. And we did it by using science to guide our imaginations.

You can download the first issue of Schismatic immediately if you pledge $5 to our Kickstarter.

The full series is $25. And if you help us reach our stretch goals, then we can launch a print run!!

BLEEDING COOL SPECIAL: And anybody who backs $5 or more before Wednesday (9/9) will also get an exclusive PDF of a "Deep Sea Soldier" mask to print out and wear around the house and scare children with.

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