Why We Fight – Fan Film Factor

AXANAR fan comic begins PART TWO of “ARCANIS IV”!

AXANAR has inspired several fans, including me, to “expand” that universe. Whether you consider it “Prime” or the “Axa-verse,” for some of us, it’s FUN to play in this particular sandbox. ALEXANDER RICHARDSON (the designer who created the console graphics on the USS Ares bridge set…along with many other graphics for Axanar Productions and Ares Studios) is currently working on full blueprints of the USS Ares. MARK PAYTON has written a multi-chapter Axanar novella titled The Inverness Revision. And I myself wrote an Axanar short story “Why We Fight,” illustrated by the amazing MARK McCRARY.

But there’s one Axa-fan who has, in my opinion, topped us all. And yesterday was his birthday…Happy Birthday, TREY McELWAIN! Trey loves Axanar so much that, back in the summer 2017, Trey released a four-page (including cover) Axanar mini-comic book story titled “Trial by Fire.” Not an artist himself, he paid his friend DANIEL FU to illustrate it…and it turned out awesome!

Not content to simply sit on his laurels, though, Trey set out on a much more ambitious undertaking: to make an entire Axanar comic book SERIES! This would be no small feat, and not at all cheap (as starving artists like to eat, and Trey—not exactly in the top 1%—was paying Daniel out of his own pocket, not crowd-funding).

Trey put up a website, Axanar Comics, and began posting pages there as they were completed. Initially, this was supposed to be one per month, but three pages were completed quickly, and instead of waiting, Trey posted them all at once. Within two months, the cover and six additional pages were released, finishing part one. That was last July.

Unfortunately, about that time, Trey suffered a herniated disc in his upper cervical/spinal column. The doctors and physical therapy bills ate up most of his and his wife’s disposable income for several months. So for the past eight months, no new story pages have been released. But actually, that was good news for me! Let me ‘splain…

Reviewing the AXANAR reviewer!!! (editorial with three exclamation points!)

Last summer, shortly after an early version of the 90-minute AXANAR script was leaked, a detractor going by the name of Kate Stark (pretty sure that’s a pseudonym) wrote a 19-part, 30,000-word blog series essentially ripping the poor draft version of that script into tiny literary pieces…trampled under the feet of a very self-important and erudite reviewer.

Yep, 19 parts, 30,000 words. Don’t believe me? Just click here and then scroll down to the bottom and click “Older Posts.” Also, that’s just July. Remember to also scroll to the bottom right for the blogs from June!

So yeah, that happened. And the detractors, of course, were ecstatic. Not only was someone reviewing the Axanar script, but the reviewer seemed to be REALLY smart and really HATED it (like 30,000 words worth of utter disdain written so intelligently!). The high-fives and posted photos of pies were flowing like water over Niagara Falls on the detractor Facebook groups for quite a while.

But then…frustration. There was no new Axanar anything left to review and eviscerate. The 19-part blog series was all but forgotten.

Until last week, that is. I rescued blogger Kate Stark from endless months of boredom and obscurity by releasing the first-ever Axanar illustrated short story: “Why We fight.“ Finally, the reviewer’s poison pen—er, keyboard—could come out of hibernation once again!

This time the blog series was much shorter: only 7 parts and 6,000 words. (Just FYI, my short story itself was a total of 1,900 words. So, yeah…three times as long. FUN!)

Actually, it’s a very intelligent review (read part 1 here). You know it’s intelligent because the reviewer almost immediately compares my short story to one of Ernest Hemingway’s works (and of course, finds my story lacking). By the time you get to part 7, I’m being criticized for everything from bad character development to using too many question marks and exclamation points. Hey, that’s my thing!!! Isn’t it???

I wasn’t going to say anything, but then Kate Stark did something that changed my mind…

Continue reading “Reviewing the AXANAR reviewer!!! (editorial with three exclamation points!)”

Drawing AXANAR – an interview with “WHY WE FIGHT” artist MARK McCRARY

Last week, I premiered the first-ever AXANAR illustrated short story, “Why We Fight,” written by yours truly and illustrated by MARK McCRARY. I met Mark through another Mark, MARK LARGENT, with whom I co-wrote and co-produced the fan parody film Prelude to Ax’d-We-Are. Mark and Mark are buddies, and together they wrote and illustrated an awesome fan comic book about the final voyage of James T. Kirk entitled “Save What From Heaven Is with the Breezes Blown.”

You probably already know about me (and if you don’t, read some of my biography blogs here). But my illustrator Mark McCrary is still a mystery to most fans. Not anymore! I felt that Mark deserved a decent interview to finally tell the fan film world a little bit about himself.

And so, without further ado, the man who made my Axanar fan fiction story look totally amazing…

Continue reading “Drawing AXANAR – an interview with “WHY WE FIGHT” artist MARK McCRARY”

Coming next week: the first-ever AXANAR SHORT STORY written by…me!

Yes, folks, I wrote an Axanar short story…and you’ll get to read it in just one more week!

Inspiration hit last spring when another Axanar super-fan, Trey McElwain from Texas, announced that he would be releasing a three-page (plus cover) original Axanar comic book story. I interviewed Trey back in June (read it here) and was really excited to see the finished product…which would debut in July. But I also thought about how much fun it would be to write an Axanar comic book myself.

The first thing I needed to decide is what the story would be about. Space battles with Starfleet fighting the Klingons seemed obvious…perhaps too obvious. After all, Prelude to Axanar had already given us quite a bit of starship combat, and so had Trey’s Axanar comic book. I didn’t want to simply do more of the same.

To me, the most interesting aspects of the Axanar tapestry were the characters themselves and also the world of the Federation a short 20 years before Captain Kirk’s five-year mission. At the time, I hadn’t seen the script for the full Axanar feature or the two 15-minutes “mockumentary-style” fan films being planned. So I didn’t really know what I could and couldn’t do with the characters…even if I set the story during the events of Prelude.

So that left the world of 2245 and where the United Federation of Planets was at that point in its history. Yes, there was a four-year-long war with the Klingons going on. But for me, there was something even more significant, and it all came from a single line from Prelude…

Continue reading “Coming next week: the first-ever AXANAR SHORT STORY written by…me!”