HAIL TO THE KING!

Quantum Comics Blog will be back after the Labor Day Weekend with more of our preview of The Adventures of Lucky Vega.  Meanwhile, please join me in celebrating what would have been the 96th birthday of the man without whom you'd be surfing some other Blog right now.  At Kirby-Vision, it's Jack "King" Kirby's birthday, and a number of artists and I have contributed a suite of drawings to honor the King of Comics.  Thanks and have a great holiday.

ART AND TECHNOLOGY

Don't let me hear you say you can't get ideas when ideas are all around you all the time.  Sometimes they're even sitting right in your hand.  Case in point:  Since the lead characters in The Adventures of Lucky Vega don't have super-powers (this is pre-Environauts, remember), I wanted them to have some clever weaponry.  One idea that I came up with was the Vega Shield, the reveal of which we saw last week.  But energy shields are a very familiar idea; I wanted Lucky and his posse to have something that was distinctly theirs.  It then occurred to me that a very clever idea was right at hand--right there in the very materials that I work with as an artist!

Some of you fellow artistic types are probably familiar with the way some inking and coloring pens are made these days.  Some of them are actually two pens in one, with a different kind of point at each end.  Typically, one end will be a marker-type point and the other will be a brush-like point.  In a flash of inspiration I imagined a weapon that would be kind of like one of those pen combinations.  At one end it would be a light sabre, typical of the weapons used as the Jedis and Siths in Star Wars.  But at the other it would be a particle beam weapon, comparable to Star Trek's phasers and any of the myriad other such beam weapons in popular fiction.  This was the birth of the Vega Duoblade!  Problem solved, unique weapon created!  See, you just have to look in the right place for the right idea.

THE TRUE TEST!

As Lucky and Roger's workout in the Immersion Room continues, we start to discover the extent of the inventiveness of our young hero and his father as Lucky reveals a new technology and challenges Roger to help him test its effectiveness.  What is the true purpose of the Vega Shield?  Is it merely a defensive weapon, or is the vision of the brilliant Dr. Esteban Vega much broader in scope?  Future strips will tell the tale about the Vega Shield and many other things!

A FRIENDLY DUEL

As Lucky and Roger have at it in the Immersion Room, they are surrounded with holographic tableaux of outer space scenes that were suggested by a lot of the things I watch on TV.  I'm a science-documentary buff, and I spend a lot of time on channels like Discover, Science, and History, watching programs on subjects including astronomy, astrophysics, and space travel.  I can't get enough of shows like that, and I incorporate some things that I see on them into my storytelling.  I'm always on the lookout for ideas, and science is one of my favorite places to look!

IMMERSED

Lucky, who is capable of virtually anything scientific, is about to try out some of his new super-high-tech innovations with the help of his friend Roger.  The Immersion Room is not quite a Holodeck such as you see in Star Trek.  Its tableaux are not solid like the ones aboard the Enterprise.  But Lucky has something planned for this room this morning, as we shall see...

STARTING THE PROGRAM

And now we begin The Adventures of Lucky Vega in earnest.  As we open the first story, young Lucky is about to do something both awesome and fun.