about the second edition
Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.-- Raoul Duke
He said he understood. But I could see in his eyes that he didn't.-- ibid
about the chosen
50,000 years ago, seven people destroyed the entire human race.
This is their story.
Through a multitude of overlapping storylines, ATC explores the present incarnations of the seven magicians and the lives of those around them. While exploring themes of social engineering, mental health, sexual identity, post traumatic stress and institutional incompetence, ATC obliquely drives home the fact that we are all part of something greater than ourselves... rather we know it or not, rather we like it or not.
about the story
In broad strokes:
Book One : "Crash" : Incept of Addicaine and WGP programs, among other things.
Book Two : Dead City Radio : A man, a ghost, and a squad of cyborg ninjas. Cyborg ninjas from outer space.
Book Three : The Dualist : Not everything has a name.
Book Four : Transitional Voices : Context and Craze.
Book Five : "Society" : A glimpse at the world outside* the Templar/Heirotus conflict, as those involved struggle to figure out just what the hell is really going on. Also, bigass space battles and all kinds of explosions and whatnot.
Book Six : "Quest" : With all cards on the table, the time has come to pick up the pieces and get down to business. All threads converge.
Book Seven : "Finale" : (no comment)
The above list is temporary and is a condensed excerpt from notes generated the weekend of 2008.12.06, during which several bits of books one, four, five and seven were roughed out. One ("Crash") has been on the drawing board for awhile, but since production began on DCR it's become obvious that there's no way in hell Jason can remember events he wasn't present for. And those events kind of matter.
As for the present mess that is production... everything after The Dualist depends on The Dualist. DCR doesn't become critical again until "Society" and while the entire story is built on the events of "Crash," certain details of that story won't actually matter until much, much later.
The story has a definite shape. It has a definite beginning, a murky, sloppy, drunken middle, and a definite end. It's getting there - to the beginning or end, take your pick - that's proving to be the hard part.
DCR, TV, and the second edition of The Dualist will be finished before I start production on anything else. Which at the current pace means I'll be starting on Book Five or Book One around the time of the Mayan Apocalypse.
* By "outside" I mean "affected by but not directly involved with." This is the one point in the story where I'd love to "diverge" and turn things into an ongoing series... but considering just how long it's taken to get things as far along as they are, and just how big this particular book is going to be regardless, I doubt that's going to happen.
about the assets
Commissioned, freely downloaded, or purchased assets used in the production of ATC:All URLs are valid as of 2007.08.01.
Except for the Ural-375 - which needed only a small amount of detailing - all Turbosquid media, all texture maps, and all Terra components have been tweaked, cleaned up, and/or extensively modified between acquisition and deployment.
about the staff
Eric is ATC's webhost and admin. He's a gloriously hoopy frood who does the command line level ickiness so I don't have to.
Xenothaulus is the Official ATC Typornographer. This means I harass him to check a fresh page for typos and correct anything he finds before I print the thing off, duplicate the page folder and call it a night.
Linguistic gaffes don't really concern me unless they shit themselves all over a comic page- those take between a few minutes to forever to fix. I've no concern for typos in any section of the site save The Comic and the Wiki. Xeno handles The Comic. I've known him for as long as it's possible to know someone you're not related to- I'd love to be able to say he got the job through nepotism but the fact is he's good at it.
21:11 * xeno WILL typornorpgrahp;l.
21:12 <xeno> some day when ki'm not having drunk all the vaodak and beers
21:12 <xeno> studid fockad
21:12 <solios> O_o
21:12 <xeno> iI HATE IST
21:12 <solios> FOCKAD
21:12 <xeno> had klike have l bottle left
21:12 <xeno> and some mt. sdew
21:12 <xeno> and was like HEY!
21:12 <xeno> NAD misxed them
21:12 <xeno> and it sucked
21:12 <xeno> SO MUCHA SS
21:13 <solios> apparently.
21:13 <xeno> it was awesome
21:13 * xeno ponders bed (re: passing the fuciknout_
21:13 <solios> I AM blogging this.
21:14 <xeno> =P
Sometimes.
about the artist
Dan's been working on some facet of ATC since study hall in November of 1994. The latest incarnation of the website and the launch of the second edition of The Dualist mark the fourteenth anniversary of the first drawing of an Addicaine.
The fact that the Compost Heap Of Ideas didn't gel into the universe portrayed in the comic until around 2004 is a minor nit. It feels like more of a Big Damned Epic if the years of school, women, and drugs get counted as development time.
And they are, which is why what you're reading is more "David Cronenberg's Robotech" than "Michael Bay's The Crow," which is what it would have been if He'd leapt into production with all of the ideas and none of the experience.
Hobbies & Interests include : US & Soviet military hardware, armed conflicts of the 20th century, the history of computing (major in Apple, minor in MS/IBM w/ a tertiary interest in SGI, Cray, etc), scientific spirituality (expressed as obtusely as possible throughout the story), and whiskey.
Strengths : Geologic stubbornness and detailed broad-spectrum long-range planning (As applied to complex projects. Oppose life in general.), backed up by the kind of atypical life experience that makes the Templar arc a fan favorite and levels Thad's problems a notch or two above the traditional emo whinging.
Weaknesses : Prone to bouts of traditional emo whinging. Can't billboard his way out of a wet paper bag. So deep into ATC that he can't see the end of it and definitely can't crunch it into an elevator pitch... but really, if this story could be summarized in a single grammatically-impaired paragraph, it would have been told by now.