That title is the opening to the tagline of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K miniatures game; a game I played for around 15 years (along with Warhammer Fantasy Battles, Battlefleet Gothic, Epic Armageddon, Necromunda, Mordheim, Battlemaster, Man o’ War and pretty […]
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Author: Jackwraith
New Behind-the-Scenes Lore Commentary Posted
A new behind-the-scenes article exploring the mythological and narrative roots of Chapter Three: SCYLLA has been published on the Dystopia Patreon. Jackwraith examines how ideas of lore, risk, and inherited mythology influence the Dystopia current chapter and how those concepts […]
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WIP: The Chamber
From Chapter 3: Scylla – A sneak peek at some of the underground activity… Ventrik and Tanya emerge into the Chamber – this is where we’re heading.
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Welcome aboard the Dystopia patreon
This is a quiet side door into the world you’ve already glimpsed on the dystopia website. The comic pages, the strange fragments of “found footage,” the clinical readouts and half-remembered conversations. All of it is part of the same signal. […]
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Gardening around neural nets
AI, or artificial intelligence, is the topic of the moment. From kids using it to write their papers to corporations deciding that it can replace whole swathes of their employees, it’s the latest hot thing in how the economy that […]
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Creative process and long-term visions
It’s sometimes difficult being “just” a writer in a visual medium. Despite the fact that writers are the very foundation for those media (be they films, television, comics, video games, or something else), they’re often deeply in the shadows of […]
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Persistence unto (and sometimes through) death
It’s been a couple months since the last time I tapped out one of these. In the interim, I’ve been writing in other places, although not as often as I could’ve been there, either. I’ve also been working on the […]
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The concept of oligarchy
The third level is the one that fits most neatly into the old school cyberpunk vision that drove a lot of the Dystopia setting. It’s very high-tech. It has a lot of cyberized-type characters and it contains that “corporations as […]
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The essence of control rings out
In some ways, the Control Ring (level Two) of the city is the most obvious of settings and, in turn, the most aptly named. Government of any kind is essentially about control: controlling who is considered a citizen, what the […]
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The tribal mentality
As I mentioned in the historical publication piece, the gangs have almost always been a fascinating topic for whomever has read the bible. When I started listing them off on that day that I dumped the majority of this whole […]
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Shadows on (and off) the ‘Net
The opening story, Into Darkness, is primarily concerned with what’s happening in “the Real” as the city expression goes. We’re presented with Force Command, which is the main route of interaction with the outside world, which is almost always only […]
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Plans for the moment
When Jeff suggested that we try to get back into comics (him drawing and me writing), he immediately suggested the Dystopia material that I’ve been regaling you with in these first few posts. When he did that, he asked me […]
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Edge of the known world
Dystopia was originally envisioned as a multi-genre project. Early in the lifetime of Fifth Panel, we didn’t have a ton of variety in our genres (e.g. it was still mainly superheroes), but there were at least some variations in approach, […]
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The grand vision
Me being me and having new stories and characters springing into my head on an hourly basis, I immediately knew that just doing one book and calling it “Dystopia” wasn’t going to serve the situation. With a setting that was […]
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The origin story
The most basic identity of the Dystopia setting was two-fold: 1. It was a place that everyone at Fifth Panel Comics could play around in. 2. It was a way to compile a ton of random ideas that I’d built […]
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