In the sword and sorcery nightmare, the mages won, Jason is a prisoner, and his love’s life hangs in the gulf between what the magi demand and what Jason can give.
In the sci-fi nightmare, fish aliens and talking cats are drowning the world. Jason Byron and his love are scheming for a way to escape the planet before they are pulled under the waves.
In Our Dreams Awake is the story of both nightmares spinning out of control. What horrible dream is Jason trying to wake up to?
***
In Our Dreams Awake comes from co-creators John McGuire and Egg Embry. The third issue of this 4-issue mini-series features two dreams, the first illustrated by Edgar Salazar with the second by Rolands Kalniņš. With covers by Jose Garcia and Rolands Kalniņš, this is a comic written for fans of love stories, dreampunk, steampunk, and cyberpunk, this series promises an engaging mystery with amazing artwork. This story is about love and loss and asking the big questions:
Who am I?
Where do I belong?
Who do I love?
***
IN THE FANTASY DREAM, Jason and Laura must face the consequences of their defiance of the Magi laws. In the aftermath, Jason reaches out to his one-time friend to perform one more magical ritual for him.
IN THE CYBERPUNK FUTURE DREAM, Jason Byron finds himself in the hospital, as much a prisoner as a patient. But his final plan to escape the planet with his love is still in motion… if one of his enemies doesn’t finish him first.
Who can say what dreams may come? Each Jason Byron works for an unseen love. Their guiding light is making their worlds better for those who hold their hearts. But can these dreampunks make their dreams come true?
***
After two successful Kickstarters, we have been working hard to get this issue ready for public consumption. We hope you’ll join us on another great comic book adventure!
This is a reminder that we are in the last week of the Kickstarter Campaign for Issue #3 of In Our Dreams Awake. At 11:59 PM on Friday night, we’ll reach the end of the road for this one. We’ve hit our initial goal of $500 and are moving toward $1000!
If you haven’t done so already, go to the Kickstarter Page and check out the project:
I’m not necessarily one to find/look for meaning in signs in my life. Oh, I’m not immune to it and have my own superstitions, but I don’t spend too much time considering it. However, whether I believe in them or not, there are little things in our everyday world which sometimes lay out a message you might be on the right track. Small reminders, universal beats to help subtly (or perhaps not-so-subtly) guide you. Maybe it’s something which has seeped out of your subconcious to help create the eventual path in the first place.
As close in on the end of the Kickstarter for Issue #3, I went looking through the old emails for the project, trying to find the little bit and pieces that I had long forgotten in the past 15+ years. The back and forth in the earliest of days between Egg and myself as we worked the story, bouncing ideas off each other, trying only to improve on the building blocks of the story each time. Those moments of inspiration where we began discovering things about the characters and what their goals may or may not be.
Sort of a…
Without the Marvel Part
***
Some of the things in the very original breakdown:
The first outline was for a 9-issue story. Talk about being overly ambitious on what we might be able to do all those years ago (remind me one day to tell you the 60 issue story I have for Moon Knight – if only Marvel would call!).
Jason Byron was originally an important man. He was not a simple artist just trying to live his life, but instead was going to be a Lord or Duke of some sort.
In the Cyberpunk story there was going to be something much more similar to the movie Office Space in regards to his job. I have no idea how that was going to work. Definitely no gangs. And no angry cats. No Drowned London.
Jason would have much more of a comprehension of what was going on between the Dream worlds very early in the process. As seen in issue 1, these two worlds are tied together by him, but as things begin to spiral a bit, those worlds can start to bleed over.
There was an assassination attempt on Fantasy Jason. I totally didn’t remember that one at all.
As opposed to splitting issues between the two Dreams, we’d spend the full issue in one before switching over to the other. At least early on that would mean no “flip-book” feel to things. I mean, we obviously had 9 issues to fill, so why not really deconstruct this story!
The biggest one was the quote from Henry David Thoreau. Egg discovered it somewhere and suddenly we had a proper title for the story.
At Christmas that year, I received a series of writing themed gifts. One of them were Post-It notes with the Edgar Allan Poe quote on it. It almost felt like they’d read our emails.
I was listening to Van Halen, and suddenly realized the lyrics for “Love Walks In” feels like they are describing Jason Byron’s whole problem…
Love Walks In – Van Halen
Contact is all it takes To change your life to lose your place in time Contact! Asleep or awake Coming around you may wake up to find Questions deep within your eyes, Things you’ve never realized
CHORUS
So when you sense a change Nothing feels the same All your dreams are strange, love comes walkin’ in Some kind of alien Wait for the opening Then simply pulls a string Another world, some other time You lay your sanity on the line Familiar faces familiar sights Reach back remember with all your might Ohh there she stands in a silken gown Silver lights shining down
CHORUS
Love comes walkin’ in Sleep and dream is all I crave I travel far across the Milky Way To my master I become a slave Til we meet again some other day Where silence speaks as loud as war And the earth returns to what it was before
CHORUS
Love comes walkin’ in
***
At the end of the day, the story is one we felt compelled to tell. In our email echange, Egg asked me a key question about the story:
“Is this a story of hope or failure?”
And I like my response, because even through all the tweaks and changes to the very first kernel of an idea, I think we’ve kept to this singular guiding light:
“The story, at its core, is probably a little of both (failure and hope). Hope that our lives can be brighter than they are but also failure in the risk of not living in reality. Plus, there’s the issue of what reality is truly. Is it what we perceive, or is it what others perceive?”
***
Remember there is only two and half days left to back the project! And thank you for all the support up until now!
In Our Dreams Awake #3 is currently Live on Kickstarter!
***
As a comic book writer, we are doing the best we can to take the thoughts and images in our head and describe it in a way where the artist can have some idea of what we originally meant to show up on the page. The amazing thing about artists, though, is they take that mess of words and somehow (through magic is the only way I can figure) create an image (or series of images) which end up being a way better version of whatever I had in my head to start. Those are some of the best days, when you open up your email to get a new page and it leaves you speechless. Where you want to go back to your script to see how in the world they made it so much better.
The Team Pencils – Edgar Salazar Inks – Genaro Olavarrieta Colors – Javi Laparra Letters – Alexander Lugo Writer – John McGuire
Concept This panel represents a bit of the calm before the storm. At the end of last issue, Fantasy Jason spotted this very same spacecraft in his (illegal) telescope. Now he finds himself commissioned to draw it. In so many ways, this is exactly what his curious mind truly wants to do. Somewhere inside him is a person who wants to see the strangeness in the world.
The very truth of things which cannot be obscured by those in charge.
Here we are with our artist sitting on top of a hill, trying to draw this literal alien craft as the workers go about disassembling it. He’s not sure whether this thing will be studied or destroyed, so it may be his pictures will be all there is left for anyone to know this machine existed.
The Script
Page 17 Panel 1
Jason has paint on his clothes, face, and has various sketches, scroll casings, and papers lying all around him. He has a sense of wonder and awe at what he is witness to. Magus move past him with pieces of the ship.
For this panel, the time is 13:00.
Caption – Early Afternoon.
Peter (caption) – It will eventually be dismantled, so we need accurate records.
Breakdown
Edgar and Genaro did a great job here really nailing this moment. The butterfly fluttering just above Jason provides a very relaxing moment in the midst of the overall craziness which is not only occurring in that moment, but really has been occurring since the day before (Issue 1) and is a bridge to what awaits our hero throughout the remainder of Issue 2.
He placed the papers on the ground beside him, so the reader can see that he has been hard at work for a little while already. And he has an in progress piece on the easel to his left.
On top of that, Javi’s colors are perfect here. The greens, browns, and blues put the characters and the reader at a sort of ease (hopefully).
And while I haven’t shown your the entire page here, the overall feel is much the same as Jason pours himself into this project. Maybe even forgetting for a moment that this craft from his dreams is actually real and true.
Lost in the moment. Lost in the painting.
***
The Kickstarter for Issue #3 is still going. Click the link below and check it out!
We’re still in the midst of the Kickstarter for Issue #3 of In Our Dreams Awake. If you haven’t had the chance to venture over to the page, be sure to do so. With this being the penultimate issue, things are beginning to spiral out of control for our Jason Byron.
In the process of trying to promote the Kickstarter, I’ve been talking to people about the book, telling tales about how we came up with the story, and it occurred to me that I had a very interesting story where one of our Backers directly influenced our comic.
If you have read issue #2 of In Our Dreams Awake, you may have noticed a few felines who have made their prescence known in the cyberpunk future beginning with this fellow:
But there is a secret story behind how Kiku-San, Hater of Carbon-Based Life Forms appearance in the comic book. For our issue #1 Kickstarter, we had a Reward level to Get Drawn Into the Comic! It is obviously on the higher end of cost ($200), but I’d seen other campaigns have similar levels – so it was worth a shot. Lucky for us we actually had two people select that level (the other is also a part of the Parliament scene – not the Crab Person!). So, we began to coordinate with them (get their information and image over to Rolands so that he could work his magic).
However, they threw us a curve ball. It seemed that they didn’t want their likeness to appear in the comic, but instead wanted to see their cat (or cats if possible). We weren’t expecting that, but Egg is not one to ignore a possibility. He immediately agreed, and then set to work on figuring out how to incorporate the felines.
***
As an aside, there are two things you should know about Egg Embry. He is not an animal person. Unless it is a comic book about frogs, he doesn’t want anything to do with them. He tolerates them when he is over at other people’s homes, but they are not for him.
The second thing you should know is that if there is an animal in the house, they all want to be best friends with Egg. I don’t know if there is a memo that the animals pass around. Or if maybe they can sense it on him, but they all make it their mission to break down his stern exterior.
***
Egg decided that the cats were going to be antagonists for dear Jason and Mikey. That they not only had a paw in the trade but seemingly were in control of which gangs did what and where. And if Jason did not agree, they were more than willing to get their fur dirty.
What amused me the most in reading the script for the Cyberpunk portion of the issue, was that if you’ve ever dealt with a cat, they can be extremely stubborn about how they deal with humans. You get on their bad side, and they have no use for you. You get on their good side… and the love will flow.
Sadly, Jason must take after Egg and not be a cat person!
Be sure that the cats also make an appearance in Issue 3 as well.
***
There is a post-script to this story. When trying to decide on what Rolands cover was going to look like, Egg landed on an homage to an Amazing Spider-Man Annual (#5). But then he had Rolands not only add the Backers other cats to the cover, as well as his wife’s departed furry friend (Rajah). He also put my two cats at the time (Westley and Inigo) who have since both passed over the Rainbow Bridge. But it feels amazingly fitting that they are immortalized on a comic book that they sat beside me and “helped” me write.
It’s why I’m always amazed by collaborating with other people… the end result will always be infinitely stronger than you could imagine.
***
If you would like to help keep the story (the Dream) going for us, consider supporting In Our Dreams Awake on Kickstarter. And if you’ve already backed us, thank you for helping to make our Dreams come true!
Be sure to check out the current Kickstarter for In Our Dreams Awake #3, LIVE on Kickstarter!
Taken as a whole, a comic book represents the input of multiple people, multiple perspectives, and multiple skill sets before the final product is created. I’ve said many times in the past that one of the reasons I love the format is exactly for that reason. You get to feed off of the creatives who you work with. And what begins as one thing can become something completely different in execution (and making the overall comic that much better).
In Our Dreams Awake #1 – Page 7, Panels 7 & 8 The Team Pencils – Edgar Salazar Inks – Genaro Olavarrieta Letters – Egg Embry Writer – John McGuire
Concept
Panel 7
This pair of panels represent the end of a larger conversation within the issue. So much of this world that Jason Byron lives (dreams?) in is dictated by the mages who control everything. They ensure the chaos technology threatens to bring to the people can never exist again. They are Order.
And to go against that would mean going against everything they stand for… and that way lies madness.
So what do we see? We see that Edgar made a choice to not allow for any other colors within these two panels, but instead presented them as a pair of black and white moments. Two men, representing opposite beliefs about their world, are separated by the small table.
Panel 8
The Script
Page 7 Panel 7 Annoyed by Peter’s accusation, Jason pushes himself away from the table as if to get up. Jason – I know all of this, Peter. Peter – So ask me your question again.
Page 7 Panel 8 Same shot as Panel 7 (Jason is still sitting). Jason pauses. No words are needed.
Breakdown
As you can see from the script, I actually made a slight mistake between the two panels. In Panel 7, Jason is frustrated/annoyed and pushes himself away from the table. Edgar followed that showing him standing up. His body language is very tense. However, when we come to Panel 8, I note that “Jason is still sitting”…
No, John, he is not.
But Edgar went with it, and I think it actually works in this visual context because of the artist’s choice to make these mirror images of each other (in regards to the black and white). Where Jason was angry in the previous moment, he has sat back down. But instead of either of them furthering the conversation, the darkness envelops them instead pointing two the very ideas that they stand for can not exist alongside one another.
It even mocks the prompt from Peter in Panel 7: “So ask me your question again.” Panel 8 answers that prompt with silence. There is no need to push the issue any longer.
There are no shades of gray here in this place.
But perhaps there is another world for Jason to find peace? One he can visit while he dreams?
***
The Dream turns to Nightmare in Issue #3. On Kickstarter NOW!
I’ve been writing about it for the better part of the last month, but we are finally LIVE on Kickstarter.
For those who may be unfamiliar to Kickstarter, it is a platform that allows creators to take their work (in this case a comic book) and effectively get people to back the project by saying they want to buy the product. We do this through a number of different reward levels… some of which will just be the new issue of In Our Dreams Awake #3, others will include both issues, digital options, as well as a chance to get signed novels or signed comics from Egg Embry and my back catalogue.
I hope you will join us for the campaign!
Cover by Jose Garcia
***
In Our Dreams Awake #3: A Cyberpunk/Fantasy Adventure
John McGuire – Writer/Creator
Egg Embry – Writer/Creator
Edgar Salazar – Artist
Rolands Kalninš – Artist, Colorist, Letterer
Genaro Olavarrieta – Inker
Javier Laparra – Inker
Alexander Lugo – Letterer
Jose Garcia – Fantasy Cover Artist
Rolands Kalninš – Cyberpunk Cover Artist
The Kickstarter campaign ends on Friday, November 7, 2025.
***
The Pitch:
In the sword and sorcery nightmare, the mages won, Jason is a prisoner, and his love’s life hangs in the gulf between what the magi demand and what Jason can give.
In the sci-fi nightmare, fish aliens and talking cats are drowning the world. Jason Byron and his love are scheming for a way to escape the planet before they are pulled under the waves.
In Our Dreams Awake is the story of both nightmares spinning out of control. What horrible dream is Jason trying to wake up to?
The Story:
IN THE FANTASY DREAM, Jason and Laura must face the consequences of their defiance of the Magi laws. In the aftermath, Jason reaches out to his one-time friend to perform one more magical ritual for him.
IN THE CYBERPUNK FUTURE DREAM, Jason Byron finds himself in the hospital, as much a prisoner as a patient. But his final plan to escape the planet with his love is still in motion… if one of his enemies doesn’t finish him first.
Who can say what dreams may come? Jason Byron’s guiding light is making their world better for those who hold their heart. But their actions have turned the dreams to nightmares. Can these dreampunks reclaim the dream?
Cyberpunk Variant – Art by Rolands Kalninš
John’s Thoughts:
In Our Dreams Awake began with an idea of having a man dream two different lives. Egg and I then took that to the comic book pages by having two separate artists work on the two different dreams… the two different versions of one story that we were telling.
Issue 1 started things off with us learning a bit about Jason in both his Dreams. A painter who dreams of the unknown, doing his best to keep his contraband technology a secret. A Gang Boss who dreams of a way off a drowned world, doing his best to keep his forbidden love a secret.
Issue 2 furthers Jason’s war with the fish aliens and introduces a feline prescence to their Parliament. Meanwhile in the fantasy world, an unorthodox request from Peter threatens to be the undoing of both Jason and Laura.
Issue 3 escalates that to the next level. Secrets begin to unwind and the consequences will change both his worlds completely.
The Rewards:
The Kickstarter is for the third issue in what will be a four-issue series. Issue 3 is completely done and issue 4 is nearly complete.
We have the options of either the pdf ($5) or print version ($10) to send to you. We have a variant cover by Rolands Kalninš with its homage to the 6 Million Dollar Man ($15). If you missed the first or second issue, never fear, you can get all the digital comics ($8) or the print versions ($25).
On the higher end, we have an opportunity to get drawn into the Cyberpunk world as a potential member of Jason’s Gang ($250). The last person opted to instead have their cats featured in the comic which inspired Egg to add them as full antagonists (as seen in issues 2 and 3)!
Finally, we have a number of add-ons ranging from Signed Copies of The Gilded Age Graphic novel, to the Dreamr by the Apocalypse RPG Zine ($10-$20 each).
The Verdict:
In my completely and totally unbiased opinion, why are you still here reading this? Go and back this amazing project!
Back this if you like Dreams, Painters, Cats, Blowing Stuff Up, Aliens, a drowned London, magic, spaceships, and probably a dozen other cool things I’m forgetting about (oooh, Crab people!).
***
I’d like to thank you for taking the time to check out our project. A lot of passion went into telling this story, and we hope you will join us on the ride!
Well, I’ve spent the past couple of days cleaning out my inbox. Too many emails sit in there that I’ve marked as Unread because eventually I need to come back to them and glean… whatever it was I was supposed to glean from them. Instead, all it has done is grow the unreads in my box to over 2000 (which may shock some and others may be virtually patting me on the head thinking 2000 is such a small number).
In the process, I’ve fallen down a couple of rabbit holes…
You see, I want to be a writer.
Well, let me expand on that. I am a writer, but I want to be more than I currently am. I’m not looking for Steven King level fame and fortune. I just want to have the ability to do the thing I love doing and have it pay for itself (or maybe a little extra).
But, like many things in life, I’m never as dedicated as I would like to be. I believe I have the necessary talent, but I’m not sure I have all the drive I need to have. When I’m good and dedicated to sitting down at the desk and putting words on the page, I can string the days together and before too long I look up and the story is on its way to being written.
But there are the other days, too. The days when I come home from work with all the promise and hope in the world. That night is going to be the one where I knock out 10 pages and then work on a short story as well. I’m going to get so ahead on blog posts that I won’t have to think about any of it until the new year.
Then it is 2 in the morning and past time to go to bed and I’m wondering where the time went. No words magically appeared on the screen. Instead, internet rabbit holes or video games were played to unwind or maybe I started watching the new Alien Earth show… the result is the same: nothing got done.
However, in cleaning out my emails I have stumbled across older works, unfinished stories, ideas from over ten years ago. I have not read the words in just as long, so to say that I have the freshest eyes I could possibly have for the writing, that’s where I am.
And it is good. This chapter or two of a story which never went anywhere is written pretty well. Sure, I can see some things I would edit, but there are some nice sequences in there that I’m not 100% I actually wrote it.
I say all that not to try to brag about something that was clearly soooo good that I never bothered showing it to anyone else, but I say it more as a reminder to myself. Yes, there are going to be nights where the words don’t flow as easily. There will be days when I am editing those very same words and think “This guy can’t even write”. There will be days that I beat myself up over not having written.
And all of those are very valid.
But there are also going to be those days where pure magic occurs. When the story is so set in my mind that it becomes a bit of a struggle to keep my fingers ahead of my thoughts. The days when editing will feel like someone who knows what they were doing with the prose will shine through. The days where I accomplished more than I had ever thought I could.
Is there a morale to the story? Is it keep trying because eventually you will get there? Is it, you are going to have difficult days and nights, but you must take each of them in the same flow as your characters and just get through the best you can? Or is it that we’re never as bad as we think we are and sometimes we might be as good as we would hope we are?
I don’t have the email anymore where I first pitched Egg the basic idea behind In Our Dreams Awake. I basically remember that I had hit upon this idea of someone having to live two different lives, one when they slept and one when they were awake. I know that it happened around the Winter of 2004-2005 in one of many of our daily emails back and forth to each other. Those emails served as both catch-up on the day/week and a dumping ground for us to share potential writing ideas.
You see, the goal with Egg and I always was to find a way to write comic books. During college, there were many, many, many weekends the two of us would journey from one comic shop to another looking for back issues. And during those trips, we’d talk about story ideas. They ranged from some take on whatever Marvel or DC or Image might be doing at the time all the way to our own comic ideas featuring our own characters. But this was in the days before something like Kickstarter existed, back in the days when we were going to have to find a way to do things on the “cheap”.
Egg’s always been good about looking at potential story ideas and breaking them down into a format that might be a little different. And that email about In Our Dreams Awake sent his mind going.
I know/remember a few things about this time:
Egg found the title from a quote by Thoreau.
Egg pitched the idea of the two of us writing portions of the story. One of us would take one dream and the other would write the other.
Egg found both the artists to do what would become a 4 issue mini-series: Edgar Salazar (pencils) and Genaro Olavarrieta (inks) for my “fantasy world” dream and an another <redacted> artist for “futuristic world”.
We started on the scripts for issue 1. And then the pages started rolling in… this was working… we were going to have a comic book!
We quickly got scripts going for all 4 of the issues, as Edgar and Genaro were rocketing through their work. I learned how to color on the computer (which is a story for another time). Egg’s artist was turning in good stuff. The tone felt great… all we needed to do was find a home for the comic.
We approached Image at either Chicago Con (I think that was the one), I think we sent it off to a couple of other places, but nothing ever came of it. I was working with the Terminus Media guys at the time and had learned enough to know how to get the book printed, but we realized we probably needed to have a complete book before going down that path.
No matter what, things felt good, we were on our way to having nearly 2 full issues completed. I’d done the colors for issue #1. Egg was lettering issue #1.
This thing was going to work.
And then Egg’s artist fell off the face of the Earth.
He’d done around 20ish pages out of the 48 or so we’d need to finish things up. But when I say he fell off the face of the Earth, I mean it. We couldn’t find him. He didn’t return email. I think Myspace was a bust (remember Myspace?). None of the channels we had to get ahold of him worked.
Months went by, which became a year, which became two years. Edgar and Genaro finished their pages and moved on, but we felt hamstrung by this artist. It was weird that one of the original reasons for doing the comic with two artists was that it would half the load. We thought there was a chance that if an artist disappeared (or ghosted us) that it would be relatively early in the process. We never imagined he would have done enough for nearly 2 issues.
We brainstormed possible ways to salvage this project. Egg came up with an idea to split his dream in two with the already finished pages and then get a new artist (potentially himself) to do the last 24 pages. We toyed with some other thoughts, but time went on, and like so many things…
In Our Dreams Awake passed into legend…
It nagged at me. Tugged at the back of my mind. Every year I’d look through my files and see the pages and think about what could have been. I wrote the Gilded Age comic and The Dark That Follows novel and still, it was there. Egg moved on to RPGs and writing for so many websites that I can’t even keep up with his output these days.
When we were first working on the comic, Egg found the Thoreau quote, and it fit perfectly. But randomly during that same Christmas, my mom got me post-its with quotes on them. And while they didn’t have the In Our Dreams Awake quote, they did feature one from Poe that seemed made for our comic:
Things had lined up perfectly until they didn’t.
Then March 2020 happened, and the world changed. We had time on our hands. And In Our Dreams popped up in my dreams again. I reached out to Egg. Told him I wanted to make a go of it. That we knew so much more than we had nearly 2 decades earlier. The biggest obstacle was always having product, but in this case, we had 1/2 the story already done. There was only one hurdle to go: we needed to reach out to Egg’s artist and see if we could use those pages or if we were going to start over.
And after many weeks, we decided to go with someone new.
The thing was, I’m a part of a couple of Facebook Groups where artists post their work looking for their next gigs, so I’d been saving posts of anyone who caught my eye. So when we decided to move on, I shared all the potentials with Egg, and very quickly we identified Rolands Kalniņš as the person who could bring the sci-fi/cyberpunk dream to life. And Rolands has done that and more. And all of a sudden, we had issue 1 ready to go.
All of a sudden… after 17 years…
The Kickstarter for issue #3 launches two weeks from now, but we’d love it if you’d sign up for the Notification Page just so that Kickstarter will send you an email when the project goes live. You can find that page here.
I requested that we see The Long Walk this weekend and then had to explain to Courtney exactly what the movie might be about.
“It’s a post-apocalyptic world where there is basically a Long Walk that 50 young men volunteer for… and they walk until there is one person left who wins the prize. Oh, and Mark Hamill is a bad guy in it.”
Talk about pretty much going in blind.
While it is about that. I mean, that’s the plot of the movie… that’s also not what the movie is about. I had some questions of my own mostly centered on how the movie would actually be structured. I thought it could make a ton of use out of Flashbacks for either just the main character or perhaps a handful of the other characters. That would help break up what would likely be monotonous walking. They could show some montage that helped show exactly how America got into the state it currently was. Heck, there could be a lot of build up before they even began the walk.
Nope. We pretty much jump right into things from the beginning. And from there we walk.
The thing is it was never monotonous. It was never boring. There was never a point in the 108-minute movie where I wanted them to get to something more exciting.
It was riveting.
Because it was always about the characters. About the bonds these characters make during the course of this horrendous event they all are participating in. Ray and Pete and Art and Hank… our Four Musketeers… they are all real. Each of them trying to joke a bit at the beginning of the Walk to calm their own nerves. Each of them aware that the odds of any one of them actually winning the damn thing was nearly impossible.
“Want to want with me for a while?”
Each death is brutally shown. You might think that is because it is a horror movie and so they need to show the gore, but it is just another way to draw the viewer into the same moments as the characters. It reinforces the realization that there is only one winner.
Watching the movie, I’m rooting for multiple characters… hoping that someway, somehow that maybe they can pull a Hunger Games and two or more could potentially win the damn Walk. I’m rooting against the “bad guy” walkers while also not really wanting them to get their Ticket punched. I’m in agony over some of the characters we only get to meet once or twice before they die.
In fact, the only character I’m actively rooting against is the Major (Mark Hamill in a glorious scene chewing role).
“Want to walk with me for a while?”
The core of the movie is the friendship that develops between Ray and Pete. Two people who would have never met one another in any other circumstance find themselves competing against one another. Two people that should only look out for themselves. Two people who should hope that others around them make a mistake which get them killed.
They are better people than I would be.
Instead, we are moved by Pete’s speech talking about how they are friends even if they’ve only known each other for a couple of days. It’s a friendship that calls to mind tales of war. They are going through the shit together. And even if they both know that only one of them could ever possibly make it out of this Hell alive, they’re in the process of creating a bond very few people could ever understand.
Coming out of the theater, I was floored by what I’d just witnessed. I thought going into it would be a solid to good movie. What I realized instead that this might very well be one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. To have something hit as hard as The Long Walk does while making you feel the characters’ exhaustion. Courtney and I talked about it for the next hour at least, just in amazement at how they pulled it all off.
Our last game started at 10PM and had 9 players in a set up where we got to determine which Indy game we all wanted to play. There were 7 on the initial sheet, but with 9 players a few of them wouldn’t really work. The game I would have voted for was Little Fears which sounded interesting (and something that I need to keep on my radar down the road), but it was immediately vetoed by someone. Instead the consensus was Geiger Counter.
Geiger Counter is a narrative-based game where you build your characters for a Horror movie. It can be anything within that genre – from slasher at the summer camp to something came from space to in space no one can hear you scream… and so on. While it took a little while to actually get the hang of what we were trying to do, it became apparent that the movie we were making was not a serious one. No, it would likely have more in common with The Room than it would with Event Horizon.
Knowing that meant I could lean into it. The goal was to not only create some cool moments, but try and get the other players to laugh as much as possible.
Oh, what was the plot of our movie? We were space pirates going to assisted living stations, conning them into coming on the ship, and the ripping them off. The problem is that there was something wrong with these old people. They might be vampires. They might be figments of one of our crew members. They might just really like spaghetti. Who really knows.
This Summer OLD is spelled S.P.A.C.E.
After the game ended and I made it home, it was nearly 3 in the morning. After a quick look at the Sunday schedule, we decided that 11:30 was the target time and went to bed.
Day Three
Buffy Cast Panel
I think I’ve only been at one Buffy Panel ever. Normally it seems like it’s one of the ones that fill up and the line is around the building two or three times. Apparently those days are over. This one had Emma Caulfield (Anya) and Marc Blucas (Riley), and my biggest takeaways were:
Emma and Marc were asked about how an Anya and Riley spinoff might look, and in their discussions it came up that Anya would go through some kind of military training just quoting all the various 80s movie lines from Terminator, Rambo, etc. and Riley getting frustrated at her antics but also impressed how hard she was trying.
The actors both were kind of excited by this concept, but Emma “messed it up” by noting that she wasn’t sure about some kind of love connection with Riley… though she thought that Marc Blucas was an attractive person, she just didn’t see him that way. For the rest of the panel, he’d occasionally bring it back up, and I think she legit felt bad about saying it.
Marc was a basketball player for Wake Forrest back in the 90s. Totally did not know that. He was wearing a hat with his high school logo on it (which happened to be a Yellow Jacket) so he had to let people know it wasn’t a Ga. Tech hat.
Emma wasn’t necessarily happy with her character’s death. She noted she had asked for it, but noted that there wasn’t a lot of time in subsequent episodes for mourning. Though that was kind of the show’s M.O., death happened and life kept moving.
All in all a great panel, and it did make me want to look up if she’d said anything else about the end of her time on the show.
Back to the Future Panel
After years of opting not to sit in a line for an hour or two before a panel, Courtney and I opted to “snipe” the panel after the people waiting in line were let into the room. With this one there were about 10 or so rows left at the back, so we slid in about 10 minutes into the panel.
Side comment – I never understand why they don’t start loading the people into the room earlier. There have been so many panels we’ve been in the long line for and because they don’t start loading until 10 minutes beforehand sometimes, we miss part of the panel. As soon as a panel ends, they rush everyone out… I just don’t understand the logic behind it.
I’m assuming they noted that the panel needed to end 30 minutes early in those initial minutes while people were still filing in, but it meant that we only got about 20 minutes with Christopher Lloyd (Doc Brown), James Tolkan (Mr. Strickland), and Claudia Wells (Jennifer). I wish I had more to report on this panel, but it sort of seemed like Christopher Lloyd and James Tolkan had reached their limit on convention questions. Most of the answers weren’t much more than basic answers.
I do appreciate Tolkan leaving us with a “Slackers!” quote.
Agents of Shield Panel
Another pair of Dragon Con newbies, Chloe Bennet (Daisy Johnson) and Jeff Ward (Deke Shaw) were hilarious up there. I walked out saying to Courtney, “I’m not sure if I learned anything about Agents of Shield, but my cheeks hurt from laughing so much”. Listen, I don’t know who needs to hear this, but get these two a podcast or something where they just act silly around each other.
Things I learned:
Chloe and Jeff are Lip Synching professionals. They don’t like it when amateurs try and join into their Reindeer Games.
Chloe has no idea what Jedd’s One Piece character’s “Chop Chop” power might be, but thinks it might have something to do with salads.
Jeff was thrown off by a fan asking if his character on One Piece, Buggy the Clown, was basically who he was in real life (attitude and personality).
Chloe is double jointed. Which Jeff delighted in telling the audience that they needed to watch 1996’s The Arrival with Charlie Sheen and see how their legs bend backwards… because that’s what Chloe’s look like as well.
Another excellent panel!
After that Courtney sat in on a Handmaid’s Tale/Apocalypse Panel, but I missed it while retrieving something we’d stored in a friend’s hotel. Once that was done, sadly, so was our 2025 Dragon Con. Overall, we had a ton of fun, and are considering trying to get a room downtown next year to maybe try and hit a couple of the later activities (and save me some driving each day).
