OOC: Q1 2026 Recap

OK OK OK so I didn’t quite make the goal I set out for myself at the start of the year. But, crucially, I tried, and two posts in as many months is better than I tend to do on average, plus there was a new comic in there! You got nothing to complain about.

I wanted to address two things here: number one, why did I promise a breakdown on the character of Kitty Kissbang but deliver a couple thousand words on fake action figures, and what the heck even is Wildheart Acceleration Unlimited?

On the first count, it’s basically down to logistics. I jot down a lot of names in my Character Index page (Brent Hokum, Greg Libertino, etc etc), but as far as comic production goes it is actually just all me, none of those folks are real. All part of the multilayered story of The Valiant Stars. I’ve had this notion for a while now though that I would commission other artists to draw art of the characters (appropriately credited, naturally), and use those as the framework to build out short fiction about the “development” of the character within the metafiction. But that takes money and time and a certain amount of gumption and the last little while has been quite busy (as ever) so it just hasn’t materialised yet. The action figure thing was something I wanted to do for a while (and will continue to do) and since that was looser in the holster I went with that rather than fall short by two posts.

The second is a longer story. The original (c.2019) plan with The Valiant Stars was to follow up Kobra Stallion with Starbreakers, as I’m doing. Then, the next arc was going to be Jet Generation- three books of the same length as Starbreakers and set at the same time, but focusing on The Five Who Went Bad and the deteriorating situation on and around Earth during the Zybo takeover. Then there was going to be a finale, Serpent Star Symphony, which would unite both arcs and close out the story, thereby setting me up to go do whatever I wanted. Starbreakers 1 and 2 were in the can, 3 was underway, everything was basically on track.

Buuuuuuuuut then the entire world got COVID! I pretty well crashed out in the first few months of the pandemic and then didn’t do any comics for like, 4 years. Took a long time (and therapy, and a prescription for some SSRIs for my chronic anxiety) to claw my way back up to being able to do comics again and I’m very lucky to have expanded my comic-making community, social circle, and ability so that I can keep making work I love.

But in the intervening years I got really into solo wargames. We all coped in different ways, and that was mine- I’d always liked wargames (and board games generally) but it’s hard to get people together, none of my local friends really liked those big rafts of cardboard chits, and it wasn’t getting any easier to have people over between 2019 and 2024. Solo games were kind of a revelation in that way. So, naturally, I got into miniatures too, so that I’d have, y’know, toys to play these games with. I grabbed a box of minis (the first Warhammer 40,000 Genestealer Cults combat patrol box, I don’t think you can get it anymore) and some paints, and made a hobby of it. My current collection is mostly Warhammer by volume (mostly 40,000 but with some Age of Sigmar) but there are some Dungeons and Dragons minis in there (good value, pre-primed) plus I got a 3D printer on indefinite loan from a friend so there’s some stuff I’ve run off that.

Anyway I liked painting minis but I always felt kind of bad because it was “art time” that wasn’t going towards comics. To be clear, I felt bad no matter what I was doing (again, anxiety disorder during the pandemic), but minis were like. Art, and I felt like comics should be the Art that I did.

To be doubly clear, this is a very unhealthy frame of mind, and the fact that I channelled it into a comic-related creative outlet doesn’t mean I didn’t need to break myself out of it.

The way I tricked my brain into not sweating it so much was to make a deal with myself- for each miniature painted, I had to think up a character to go with them, evoking as much of the miniature as I could without losing a sense of that character’s distinctive identity.

So, those characters are the ones “from” Wildheart Acceleration Unlimited. In reality it’s all just The Valiant Stars but you know I like to play pretend with my fake TV shows and whatnot. The new plan is to conclude this ‘arc’ with Jet Generation (I realised I didn’t really have enough story to stretch out as long as I thought I’d do), and then pick up more Valiant Stars stories after that (I have some ideas). And Wildheart Acceleration Unlimited was just a bucket I created because I suddenly had all these new characters lying around.

Oh and hey- last but not least, the RSS feed is finally up and running! Technically it already was- when Chris helped stand up the site back in the day, he implemented an RSS feed and I just never leveraged it. Shame on me! In any case, tho, there’s a link to it in the header now and anyway your feed reader can probably pick it up too. So go on and subscribe! It beats the heck outta Bluesky!

Anyway, consider that your quarterly peek behind the curtain. I’m going to spend the next while focusing on Starbreakers 3 in hopes of getting another chunk up by mid-May, but I also have an instructional zine I’m working on that shows some tips and tricks for drawing guns- just stuff I picked up over the years that I’m making for my peers in Cartoonists United, but I’ll probably make it available publicly too. Those are my two big things now that the Calypso March comic is done.

Anyway, take it breezy, guys! See you sometime else in April for the next in-character update. Till then-

Stay Vigilant, Stay Valiant
Bruce