This is what we called the “all in” promo. How Harold managed to compose and cram all those people in one piece and make it look so damn good is still a mystery to me, but it rocked all the same. He even got the justice statue in there. Crazy.
Well, as sad as I am to have to say it, this is the end of the line for those of you who have been faithful followers. The series, as it exists, has come to an end, Fallen Justice is complete. Would I change any of it? Sure, at least in theory. But I heard a wise man once say that while he’d love to go back and keep working on his stories until he felt they were perfect, if he did that he’d never get any of them actually published. You gotta set them down at some point and just be done, and Fallen Justice is definitely that.
We’ve run 18 months together, a little over 180 pages, and no telling how many annotations and comments back and forth. Through it all you guys have asked questions, posed theories, and generally kept me on my toes the whole time and I want to thank each and every one of you for that, because you made this story fun again, and that’s something it hadn’t been for me for quite some time. Making comics has always been something I love to do, but once you look at something like this every day for years on end, it starts to wear on you, even on the best of days. I needed the time away from it to get my own perspective, and I needed this experience to really get out how much it all meant to me, both in terms of story and the journey it took to make it.
Without question Fallen Justice is a story created in spite of more obstacles than I could count. It moved forward in the face of marriages, divorces, births, deaths, moves, new jobs, old jobs, and a thousand other things that could have killed it along the way, because it simply would not rest until it was done. And it wouldn’t let us rest either.
I’d like to personally take this opportunity to thank Chuck Moore, John Wilson, and Brant Fowler for seeing this through and being gracious enough to offer Fallen Justice a home on the web where people could enjoy it in a whole new and unique way. They could have just as easily said no, and that would have been the end of it, but they took the chance, and that’ll be forever appreciated from the bottom of my heart.
To Brant a special thanks, because he rocked through this thing with me, keeping me on task, and taking care of almost all the behind the scenes stuff that most folks never get the chance to see. If there’s a clockworks to the machine that is Comic Related, that’s Brant hands down. He’s a wizard in superfriends pajamas. 
And we love him.
I’ll also say thanks to Jason Berek-Lewis, Chuck Kennedy, and again to Brant Fowler, because it was largely due to these three guys that Fallen Justice and subsequently Dynagirl truly took form. Years ago the four of us formed what we affectionately named the League of Comic Storytellers, and it was the LCS that spurred me onward when I may well have given up, pushed me forward when I barely wanted to deal with every day life, and helped me stand again after many stumbles along the way. Having guys like these, that genuinely support what you’re doing and inspire you to keep going makes all the difference in the world.
This wouldn’t be complete without one last huge thanks for my friend and co-conspirator Harold Edge. He takes my scribbles and makes them look so much better than they have a right to. And to Steve Forbes, Ross Hughes, and Ken Jansens for helping us create something I’ll always be proud of. It was fun guys!
If you’d like to see what else we crammed into the oft mentioned Fallen Justice Collected Edition mosey on over to the Red Handed Store and pick you up a copy now! Supplies are getting limited and I’m not sure how much longer they’ll hold out so get em while you can.
In the event you’re one of those purists who has to have the individual issues those can also be had via the Indyplanet system right here. Keep in mind that while the single issues do contain the letters and comment pages in the back, they have none of the extra content included in the Collected Edition.
So is that it? For now, yeah. But I have it on good authority that you may well have not seen the last of Fallen Justice. Certain machinations are in the works to bring this story to a wider world via media of another form. More, I’ll leave for later, but these are exciting times my friends.
Thanks again for all your support, and be safe out there. No matter where you are, or what you do, make it count.
Cary
Great Story Cary! I enjoyed going through it with you. I am purchasing the series now! Oh there is an add for a kickstarter comic (to the left of my screen). For a project called the patriot. Its about a super hero that finds out he is going to die and decides that the best way to fix things before he does so is to kill all the bad guys. Uh isin’t that story call “Falling Justice” (without Dynagirl)? Dude, you may need to get your legal department involved…
Thank you for this very engaging story. I hope
dynagirl comes out have as good. See you there!
I have been reading Dynagirl and yesterday I thought I’d better take a look at the backstory. Today I have read through them. Good timing, since you finished posting these comics nine days ago.
Wow. I mean… wow. Just… what can I say? From reading Dynagirl, I already knew that both art and story would be top-notch. I was still amazed.
I think the Justice test was grossly unfair though. Ben had brain damage from the tumor. That means he was no longer the person he used to be. Maybe the Theta of a year ago would have passed the test with flying colours, but with brain mangled, he couldn’t. Unfair.
Also, all the collateral damage from this failed Justice test was horrible. The Justices set him up, knowing things could end this way. I refuse to call them heroes. Do you hear me, Justices? You are not heroes!
I’ve put a bit of thought into that whole brain damaged thing and I’m not sold on just how addled he really was, at least from a tumor eating his brain standpoint. Shaken to the core of his confidence…sure. Pissed off, scared out of his head…absolutely. And I fully agree I think the test was probably a bit harsh, at least based on human standards of what’s right and wrong. But then you gotta look at it from the larger perspective. You entrust these guys with power unlike anyone else around, make them for all intents and purposes gods among their people. Don’t you want that fail safe there, just in case you made the wrong choice, or at some point the absolute power corrupts absolutely? Earth is in a unique position with these aliens because of several factors that we’ll deal with down the road in Dynagirl, but they watch us closely because of these things.
Now for me personally, I do have days where I feel bad for Ben, but I fall back on what it means to be a hero, and I think that element of self-sacrifice truly has to be rooted in place to really define someone as a hero to the point we need our supers to be. If a guy wouldn’t die to save just one person let alone the whole world, he’s no real hero in my book. Ben made choices he thought were good ones, and I love the guy for going to his grave with them, maintaining his conviction that he was right no matter what went down, but in the end he was more selfish than heroic, and it cost him big time.
Honestly, in the end I think it’s the twisted way things turned out that left almost every single character in the book with unresolved feelings and doubts about everything, including how they themselves feel about being a hero. Dynagirl could have kept on with the hero game even with the kid had her faith not been so profoundly shaken. But that was the whole point. Ben changed the entire landscape with his actions, for good or for ill…I guess time will tell.
Glad you dug the story though!