Zing Info #2!

It’s Tuesday, friends, and that means it’s time to talk, once again, about the upcoming Zing Comics #1.

Let’s review. Zing Comics is a 52-page anthology hitting the streets on June 6th at the wonderfully-low cover price of $3.99 (USD).

Today, I’m going to talk about the next story on our little list, an 8-page story called A Lesson in Life.

This story, like the one before it, is extremely important to the EW universe. However, the two stories are important for very different reasons.

While, The Origin of Al Djinn sets the stage for the rest of the universe, A Lesson in Life is the first story written after we created the universe.

Yes, Forces of Good and Evil was the first story we wrote for the universe, but we didn’t write it as part of a larger universe. It was just a little comedy story we wrote to submit to Mad Magazine.

It wasn’t until a year later that we decided to combine it with another story I had written to create one giant existence called Escher’s World.

Not long after that decision, A Lesson in Life came along. I had wanted to write something for this new universe we created. I wanted it to be something that would really pop and show off a good portion of what the universe was about.

I decided to write something about two different time periods, the Golden Age and the Silver Age of Escher’s World.

It is the story of a retired hero telling his son, who has followed in his father’s footsteps, about the dangers of the business and how much someone must be willing to sacrifice in order to accept the risks. He, essentially, tells him what it means to be a hero.

The story, primarily, takes place during World War Two. However, the ramifications and impact of the events are shown through narration 25 years later.

I remember, not long after plotting this story, I called my cohort, Rhys, and told him about it. We then decided that we had to get together and write our Golden Age. That night, we spent close to five hours at Shari’s typing away on a laptop, creating characters, events, timelines and stories. That document is still used, albeit amended, whenever a new writer expresses interest in writing something for Ideal Comics.

That night, we created a wonderful cast of characters for our Golden Age that included Al Djinn, The Gamesman, The Vickers, Night Terror and Dreamer, Golden Rapid, Barbarossa and Brigid. We wrote outlines for each character–where they went after, when they retired, if they had families and when they died.

We created a universe.