Book One, page 65

bravo1102 on Aug. 28, 2017

… and so the term “okay” entered the antediluvian lexicon. After the end of the Ice Age it was lost until rediscovered thousands of years later in the mid 19th Century where by the magic of time travel it had come from to begin with. Or not. Magical time travel is a one way street. Magically one can only go into the future and then only return right back to when one came from. Period. All attempts at anything else and the time traveler has never been heard from again. Certain death? Alternate universe? Or stuck someplace other?

As for information from the future, targeting a specific era is problematic at best. So one can't go to next Tuesday and come back. One would more likely end up that Tuesday 50, 500 or even 5000 years in the future. So sorceresses rely on their intuition regarding the near future and remain content to travel to the far future. As yet, knowledge of that far future has not dirtied up the time stream, simply because no one has yet found any evidence that any of the time travel thus far is remembered or even recorded anywhere. So in this universe history is extremely resistant to being changed. Whatever is brought from the future will inevitably disappear from the record until all the relevant technological developments are properly made. One can bring back a submachine gun from AD 1940 and make approximate replacements for the powder and ammunition but machining replacement parts is next to impossible. Even with magic the metallurgy and machine tolerances required cannot be duplicated. In the real world even a 18th century gunsmith would have trouble duplicating the springs and catches required of a 20th century firearm. And bullet primers would be a complete mystery.

I once read a great story where World War II scientists came across a 1990 era cruise missile. It was described in great detail how they just could not fathom the technology involved in back engineering it. Carbon fiber and composites? Printed circuits? The same is true going back in time. Medieval metallurgy and machine making had trouble enough making early hand gonnes and bombards let alone duplicating a 20th century automatic weapon. It would take years of work duplicating each and every step by step development just to make a near equivalent to the 19th century Gatling gun as Sir Boss did in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Technology is all built up of little pieces discovered along many interconnecting paths. If the connections are not there you won't end up with the bit of technology you want. You'll end up with the Archimedes steam engine toy or a wonderful geared device to measure the heavens, not the industrial revolution or mechanical clocks. Just look at how long it took to figure out longitude.

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And so the decision is made. In the original edition this was the last page put together without aid of a comic page making program and with little to no idea about paneling and page set-up. Fonts and word balloons were an unknown. The first versions even used little boxes on the bottom of each panel like Prince Valiant and that does not allow for dialogue or much in the way of characterization. I wanted a typical comic flow to the action as opposed to an illustrated novel. I never liked lots of narration in a comic or a movie. Blocks of text are for novels not a visual medium.