Strip 1: The Martyr

Welcome back to Steel Salvation! It’s been a long time coming, and things are very different around here. For one thing, I’m now in charge of the lettering as well as the script and the overall direction of the comic, which gives me a whole new appreciation for the work that Alex Mattingly put in for Parts I and II. As you can imagine, there will be some rookie mistakes and rough edges to the lettering in these early strips, but I’ve enjoyed the flexibility that doing the lettering has given me, and it’s made for an overall more rewarding and hands-on process.

As for the art, this is the first of two strips by artist Rafael Cavalcanti, who also created the cover art for Part III. He had to abandon the project pretty early on to focus on another artistic field, but he’s got a gift for expressive faces, which really gives these two strips an emotional punch. We’re finally peeling back more of the layers behind Dy-Gar’s past, and seeing Treya Malik as more of a real person than an idealized figure. She had a lover, and she had a child - or perhaps more accurately, she *would have* had a child. I’m not sure if it’s common in all parts of the world to consider it bad luck to name a child before it’s born, but that was something my wife brought up to me when we were throwing around baby names for fun, and the idea stuck with me.

That gives us a possible explanation of why Kier was created, but what about the real Dy-Gar…?

- J.S. Conner

March 8th 2020