see the comic here: www.seasonofdestruction.com
SEASON OF DESTRUCTION is based on the theory that everything in our universe is in motion, traveling in its own orbit. All these moving parts - the things we see every day, the things we can't see, the things we'll never live to understand - are being pushed or pulled along paths of attraction, for better or worse.
Some orbits are harmonious, like the circumstances that created Earth and positioned it to produce and support life.
Other orbits are erratic, even destructive - like the radioactive disruption of a single cell that becomes cancerous, then multiplies to corrupt and overcome a body in a mutiny of rot.
The paths of men and women are no different.
A gifted orator can unite the people of a nation or divide them, or incite one half to exterminate the other.
Mark Twain wrote:
"Man is the only animal that causes pain, knowing it to be pain."
Man feels secure when he can convince himself that the brutality of his species, the collisions of force and matter beyond his control, are the aftershocks of punches thrown between two cosmic boxers: Good and Evil.
These fighters wage eternal rounds of combat for the sake of a grand prize: The salvation or destruction of the human race.
Modern religion teaches Man that he and his fate are the pinnacle of all universal purpose, and that every detail of his life, from the grandest action to the slightest impure thought, has been scripted in advance and catalogued by a bearded ghost who lives in the clouds.
A cell is cancerous because God has willed it so. The gravitational pull of a distant star nudges a wobbling asteroid into the path of a doomed planet as part of God's plan. A tropical storm that claims thousands of lives is seen as God's punishment of the wicked, and as His pop-quiz test of faith in the righteous.
Man assigns to God sole and total responsibility for anything that occurs beyond the limits of human logic and understanding. At the same time, Man sidesteps culpability for his savage impulses and brutal actions by chalking his destructive behavior up to binary tosses of God's cosmic coin: heads or tails, good or evil.
Season of Destruction forms the hub of a loosely connected trilogy based on the premise that the killers among us are nothing more than naturally occurring elements of our world - drifting particles whose organic paths result in death and destruction. The characters who collide with these killers are not righteous heroes or principled, chosen defenders. They are merely opposing particles whose orbits bring them into contact and conflict with representations of Man's concept of evil. Two lumps of living matter dangerously arrived at the same wrong place at the worst possible time.
The outcomes of these collisions are neither predestined nor purposed. They simply are.
What if the two-legged predators of our species felt a born-again compulsion to honor their concept of God's imagined opposite number - a universal force of Evil demanding blood instead of prayer? What if our civilization, rather than standing as the pinnacle of this planet's evolution, were nothing but a failed incarnation: the latest, and not even the best draft, of a repeated experiment?
Our little populated rock of a planet would seem a precious stone perhaps, if cut and polished and mounted in a solitary setting. In truth, Earth is only one of a billion loose gems scattered and lost in a deep shag rug, invisible to each other, indistinguishable from above, each a lone winking flash lost among a galaxy of light. We are hardly a prize fit for the winner of an apocalyptic Battle Royale between God and the Devil.
What if there wasn't a single fickle God assigning the content and plotting the course of this world, but a boisterous and varied cast of players with personalities fickle and flawed, and just human enough to act rashly to serve their own motivations - a madcap Mount Olympus meets Sendak's Wild Rumpus?
What if these gods of nature were tasked with rising and correcting the unruly species of Man through the occasional catastrophic do-over, like a cosmic bouncer showing a sloppy drunk to the door?
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SEASON of DESTRUCTION - my hunt for a comic-book artist
VampirI'm looking for an artist to join me as a creative partner in developing this limited-series comic, "Season Of Destruction". I've drawn the first issue myself - you'll quickly see I'm not a professional artist by any stretch, but I wanted to have a...
