There's a lot of story I wanted to tell with THE ROMULAN WAR. As the film was originally conceived, TRW would have run as long as a feature film and in fact, the first draft of the screenplay clocked in at over 90 pages. But then CBS enacted the fan film guidelines and it was clear that I wasn't going to get to tell the entire story I wanted to tell. In some ways, that was a good thing since there is no way I would have been able to do a feature-length TRW on the budget I had.
But I still wanted to explore those concepts, so I had to try to figure out other ways to tell those stories. One way was to produce the audio episodes, which there are no studio guidelines for. But the format for the audio stories was pretty restrictive so I decided to take a swing at doing one of them as a comic story.
Folks who know me well know that I've been a lifelong comics fan and was drawing my own comic books as early as the first grade. People I went to school with still remember the comic books I wrote and drew and then sold on the playground during recess. Several of these issues were also picked out by our elementary school librarian as "recommended selections" for my fellow students. I still have some crusty issues of "Agents of SHIELD" and "X-Men" that I drew back in the late 70's and oh my, are they painful to read!
Suffice it to say.. I love comics! Always have, always will. I have a closet full of long-boxes and even a short film to prove it. So it makes complete sense for me to explore the idea of doing a TRW story as a comic.
The first story I'm releasing, Holocaust, tracks one of the MACO teams that arrives on Altair VI to liberate a captured Earth colony from the Romulans. Holocaust is only four pages long, but other tales have been written and hopefully with enough time and positive comments, I'll get to put some of these other stories out. (Incidentally, if you're an aspiring comics artist and are interested in possibly drawing/inking a TRW story, feel free to drop me a line and send some art samples!)
So take a look and let me know what you think. The art is by a new artist named Yudhi Suryo, who I was introduced to by Andrew Lucas (Andrew penned the TRW audio webisode "They Want Us Dead"). Colors were by Ulul Azmi and I did the lettering myself.
I think this is a good addition to the "War Stories" series and hopefully you will too!
- Mark