3 Worlds / 3 Moons / 3 Years

Celebrating what's come before and what's ahead.

Three years ago this month, we sent out a post entitled “New Worlds Await” with just this image:

When we did it, we genuinely had no idea what to expect. Nothing like this had ever really been tried before, certainly not in the way we were trying to do it.

But we had knew we had an opportunity to make something special, and that was the risk worth taking. Looking back now, the question is: was it worth it?

And obvious answer is god, yes.

Okay, to back up: what exactly were we trying to do? Well, the first goal was building a thing in front of and with an audience, a community, making them a vital part of it.

In comics, like in many mediums for telling stories, there are a whole host of intermediaries between the creators and the audience. A lot of times these are useful and vital, but it does create a kind of disconnect. In many cases the comic you read on the day it’s released is something the creators themselves put to bed over a year ago (sometimes longer), so the feedback, the response, feels distant to the work itself.

If you’ve ever been to a convention that’s hosted some kind of live draw event, you know how exhilarating it can be to watch a creative work come to life in front of you. To watch the image take shape and form from a few scattered lines into something that tells its own story- and even better, to see a group of people do it together.

In its best moments, we wanted this to feel like that. And we think it has. We consider the community (now over 30k strong!) we’ve built here to be our strongest accomplishment to date.

But we also wanted to build something bigger than ourselves. To not just tell one story, or make one comic, but to create a canvas for an infinite number of stories to be told. To do that, though, we needed two things.

The first was a fully, richly realized world. The compromise in most projects is you start with a story, and then you make up those details as you go- which ends up inevitably making them subordinate to your story needs. We’ve used this example before, but very few creators get to do the Silmarillion before they do Lord of the Rings, right?

But we felt it was absolutely necessary here. When you look at fictional universes, the ones where their creators toiled for years building the lore and mythology out in depth first are the ones that best withstand the test of time.

So, to that end we have so far assembled two gorgeous 200-page sourcebooks- [SYSTEMS] and [MAPS], detailing the functions and topography of these new worlds and moons, with each containing a dozen comics, as well, to illustrate these concepts and locations through story.

We’re enormously proud of both, but that was really just the beginning. The second thing we needed was to bring in more voices and ideas to be a part of this. We did that from day one, inviting Al Ewing, Tini Howard, and Ram V to help design what would grow into the contents of [SYSTEMS].

Then, we invited all three of them, and a host of other enormously talented creators, to tell new stories set in our universe, which became [LEGENDS], Volume One. (And this was actually where we saw immediate validation of the first point- we were able to hand them 400 pages worth of lore and background to work off of and hopefully be inspired by, which netted incredible results.)

So if the twin goals were to build a universe that could outlive us, and to build it around/in collaboration with a community, three years in, there’s a lot to celebrate. As well as some key people to thank- our designer, Sasha E Head, who has taken the material in this work and elevated it into something special. Molly Mahan (and before/alongside her, Stephen Wacker and Rob Levin) who edited and project managed all of this with expert care. Hank Kanalz who shepherds through our physical rewards and product. And so many others, too many to name, really.

But as you welcome the triumphs, you also get a sense for the challenges. We’ve identified two big ones.

The first is conceptual. We’re doing this in such a weird, never-before-seen way, that it can cause confusion, both about what it is and where it’s going. There are always perfectly fair questions about what is the “main” narrative or what “counts.” To us, that’s always gone a bit against the ethos of the thing. Ideally, with a true story universe, The “main” narrative should be the one that resonates with you the most, and that might be completely different than the person next door to you.

But we knew even before we launched that there’d be a demand for some longer, ongoing threads. So we settled on the tale of Tajo Vallar, an Institute Man and explorer leading a doomed expedition to the Kaoso Moon. This began across two stories (with art by our own Mike del Mundo and Mike Huddleston) later collected into our [FOUNDATIONS], a 40-page comic, then followed up with BREATHE, an epilogue with art by the amazing Jerome Opeña.

Those were quickly followed by two bigger projects. ACADEMY, continues Tajo’s journey, now headed With art by the great Steve Epting, we’ve so far serialized 24 chapters.

Then came THE VALLARS, which travels back in time a few decades and features a young Tajo and his adventuring family, on his first jaunt across the three worlds and three moons. Drawn by the fantastic Jason Howard, we’ve released over a hundred pages of story so far across 17 episodes.

Which brings us to the other challenge, which is logistical. The reality is comics take considerable time and resources to make. They’re sort of inherently inefficient- expensive and slow to produce, quick and easy to consume- but that’s also the beauty of them.

We’ve worked hard to find the right balance here. We obviously wish for a day when we could release new comics every week if not every day. It’s certainly the goal to get there. But from a human standpoint, that’s a big challenge at this stage.

So to counter this, we put an incredible amount of effort into the [REWARDS] packages, the second of which should be arriving to many of you right now (and over the next couple weeks, depending on your location/place in the queue). It’s our hope that the results you hold in your hand act as a testament to the level of craft and care we’re putting into this whole endeavor, and demonstrate the value of your patronage.

Which brings us all the way back to the beginning, and the first goal. None of this exists without you. You have enabled us to create something we think is meaningful. For that, we are extremely grateful. And now, as subscriptions renew for many of you and we enter the next phase of this, we’re excited to share what’s coming.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be outlining what’s ahead in a series of posts with the header [3W/3M/3Y]. This coming year really represents the culmination of all we’ve built so far, and the beginnings of the next phase of where we’re going. If we set out to build a universe in collaboration with a community, the very nature of what that means is going to change and grow with what’s coming. We are not done doing new things, that’s for sure.

We’ve been building so much behind the scenes that we can’t wait for you to see. That is not just hype; this represents a significant escalation in the ambitions of this whole thing. The future is very, very bright.

And we want you to be there for it. Thank you again, as always, for your support. 3 Years! That’s something worth celebrating. But not nearly as worthy as what’s in front of us.

[3W/3M/Y3] starts NOW.

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