The Story

In late 2016, I painted a piece that I titled ‘Midnight Rider’. After publishing it, I started to consider expanding on the character’s world and her story. I just felt like one piece wasn’t enough to describe the potential that was there.

The origins of the story were developed during my discovery of the synthwave/retrowave era of 2016-2018. The musical genre, coupled with my love of ‘80s nostalgia, helped me create the world and the themes within. From that point, I’ve expanded it to include elements borrowed from my favorite stories and real-world experiences. I wanted to create a love letter to all the films, television, books, music and video games that had fueled my own creativity.

I launched the Kickstarter campaign for Duskrider, Vol. 1 in August of 2018. It was successful beyond what I had hoped, and that meant I actually needed to make this thing real. In all honesty, I just wanted an excuse to draw some cool sci-fi imagery.

I knew what kind of story I wanted, but I didn’t want to have to compromise with anyone else. Working alone and creatively unchecked, I ran the risk of developing something akin to Wiseau’s infamous film, The Room. The possibilty still horrifies me.

With the success of Vol. 1, I immediately jumped into a follow-up. Although Vol. 2 was shorter, it functioned as a segway to where the story was headed. I had already planned out how the entire plot would develop: from the first nine chapters of Vol. 1 and 2, to the final fifty or so that would compromise the entire story.

Volume 2 shipped out in Fall of 2019. And again, I wanted to strike while the iron was hot and jump into the next segment. The Winter of 2019-20 was spent building materials and writing the chapters for Vol. 3. I had my eyes set on March 2020 for a launch date. If I could have the story of Vol. 3 written and drawn by the time I was ready to launch, I would be able to ship out by Summer.

In late February ‘20, I was given an opportunity through my freelance business that I couldn’t turn away. I decided to put Duskrider on hold while I worked on the new contract project. Fortunately, the advent of the pandemic did almost nothing to my workload, and I stayed consistently busy until August, when the project ended. I finally picked up Duskrider where I had left off.

But I soon found out that the happenings of the year had inadvertently mirrored some story elements that I had written back in the winter. A plot device that had been developed, “The Contagion”, was eerily similar to the real-life coronavirus. The concept of “fake news,” and media misinformation became a common political topic. Even a conspiracy of Bill Gates developing the virus in order to further his own wealth is straight out of a cyberpunk story. Can you imagine how frustrating it is to write your own science fiction story and then have elements of it take hold in real-life before you have a chance to publish? If real-life was a person, I would assume that I had been plagiarized. I have the dated Word docs to back my claims.