Issue #1...

Is finished!

Well, part 1 anyway. Of the first issue of the first part of the sprawling epic otherwise known as "Fiends of Nashville." The very first issue, when completed, will be about 40-48 pages long, a two-parter of which the first part is now complete. A couple weeks ago I was sitting around trying to figure out how to tell a chronological story that takes place in the afterlife, a place where time is eternal, there is no passage of time. I finally figured out the answer, and it's so good it scares me.

Anyway, part one starts off with a single title card: 1989. Then, we're introduced to Joshua Danton as he's walking into a Louisiana bayou roadhouse. Very choppy storytelling here, we're flashing brief, small details as Joshua is hit with a flood of sensation. This is the last moment of his life, and it's going to be preserved in his memory for the rest of eternity. Before he dies, we're cutting ahead to things he hasn't even seen yet. Before his eyes the bar starts to take on western properties, foreshadowing where he's going. We start to make the transition to the afterlife even before he's "killed" so it seems that much more seamless.

On page 19, Joshua dies, and by the end of this first part he arrives in Purgatory. We don't know a whole lot about how he got here, except in the literal sense. We know he was looking for his wife, who he thought was taken prisoner by these guys with guns, but it might be that she simply walked out on him.

In the next part, Joshua begins to explore his new bleak, bare world, and in doing so, builds it from the ground up. Technically at this point he's just a disembodied mind floating in a stream of electronic data. His reality is undefined, so he has to construct his own from essentially nothing. The reality he's going to construct for himself is a western, straight out of a John Ford movie. But in the beginning, there is only chaos. So the second part of this "pilot," so to speak, is told mostly through flashes of random-but-not-so-random imagery, memories of where he's been, scraps of dialogue that he took with him to his grave.

Anyway, just thought I'd share my progress. I'm pretty excited to get back to work and see how this thing starts to come together, because right now it could be anybody's guess.