Chapter Three: Page Twenty-Nine

Sep12
by Christopher Mills on September 12, 2014 at 12:00 am
Chapter:

Colors by Ian Sokoliwski.

And so it ends. For you, it’s a been a year and a half or so of weekly updates. For Gene and myself, it represents the culmination of nearly a decade of (on-again off-again) hard work.

I wrote the first page of Perils On Planet X sometime in 2002. In 2003, it debuted as a weekly webcomic on a long-forgotten subscription comics site, illustrated by artist Jon Plante. For various reasons, it burned out quickly there, with Jon and I only getting about halfway through the first chapter. A couple years later, I signed with a small publisher to resurrect my interplanetary swashbuckler as a three-issue comic book miniseries. It was then that Gene Gonzales came aboard and made it his own, visually. Unfortunately, around the time we finished the artwork for the first issue, that publisher folded.

A few years later, we found another brave publisher, and got back to work. This time, we got the second issue pretty much finished, when outside forces (you know, that annoying thing called “life”) put the project on the back burner again.

It took another couple of years, and I had to receive a few kicks in the ass to get me through the last script, but we ultimately decided to return to the weekly webcomic format, run the complete story here online, and finally finish it.

And damned if we didn’t!

Will there be further adventures of Donovan Hawke on the lost planet Xylos? I don’t know. I have stories in mind – and some of them have even been plotted out on paper (or the digital equivalent of same), but before we can get to those, Gene and I need to evaluate our situations, and hammer out some things. The first – and biggest – thing, of course, will be getting this first story into print.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be exploring our options. I’ll be contacting publishers, to see if anyone wants to bring our little epic to the traditional comics market. I’ll be pricing printers and exploring the possibilities of self-publishing (and determining whether we’ll need to crowdsource the funding or not). I’ll be looking into other options as well.

If you want to see more Perils On Planet X, sound off here on the site. And it’s not too late to spread the word across the aether, either. For the immediate future, we’ll be archiving the entire saga right here on the site, and it will remain free to read. If you know anyone who might enjoy POPX, if you have a blog where you can review it, or frequent a message board where you can plug it, please, keep spreading the word.  If you’re a comics journalist who’d like to interview Gene or myself for print or podcast, drop us a line.

I very much want to keep telling stories of Donovan Hawke and the inhabitants of Xylos. In fact, In my notes, I’ve outlined a trilogy, of which this first arc, “Hawke Of Terra,” is mere prelude. The second arc is tentatively titled “Agent Of Empyr.” And the third? “The Triplanetary War!”

Want to read them? With your support, I’m hoping we can make them a reality.

Even though the weekly updates are finished for the time being, drop by often. Any news on POPX will appear here first, and who knows… there might be some new pages popping up one of these Fridays….

Thank you all. It’s been a hell of a ride so far!

– Chris