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Templars of the Shifting Verse
It was actually during two conversations with two fairly religious friends that I got the idea for my comic. The first explained that he believed that all the pagan stuff was a real threat to the world and not - as I'd suggested - just a load of harmless hippies being quaint. It was so strange, as he was such a level headed guy and then to hear him say something like that was odd. I started to imagine the world as he did, where God was a real and the guiding hand was felt in aspects of life. I then started to think that if there were ultimate proof of divine power, would it give the church more or less influence on our lives. What if the divine power was different to how they'd interpreted it, would there be any need for them if God really did speak to people directly? The second conversation was with what I like to call a "soft-scripture" Christian. He said that the Bible shouldn't be taken literally because they're an interpretation of events that have been translated a hundred times and lost much of the original nuance. He believed that science and religion could be reconciled if you didn't take scripture literally. For example, the world being created in seven days could easily be seven stages, and you could attribute each one to a stage of creation in the big bang series of events. He also told me that Islam was historically and incredibly scientific religion that believed that to know the workings of the world was to understand God. I thought about how both faiths have kind of gone awry from their starting points, and it would be interesting to have a character that had witnessed it happen. It's worth noting here that I'm an agnostic at my most ideal and atheist at my most rational, however, I do have a lot of religious friends and was raised in a Christian environment. Even when I decided that I wasn't convinced by religion I was still fascinated by it.
I created a sort of shaman like character called Urn Baron (later name swapped with Augustus) who had lived for a thousand years and was hunted by the church because they believed he held the answers to the mysteries they toiled over. Then I read a lot of superhero comics and thought the idea of having classical adventure heroes loitering around a Champion's Hall while the world outside was all TV and motorcars was kind of funny. So the first script was written as a sort of comedy. I was writing it and my girlfriend at the time was to draw it.
Then I decided to throw it all out of the window because we broke up.
Then I went outside and picked it up again and decided to do it myself. This time creating something a little more sincere.