Greg et les Pirates

Le nouveau et très excitant projet de Greg Rucka démarre aujourd’hui, il s’agit d’un web comic intitulé Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, et dont la première page de cette œuvre dessinée par Rick Burchett est enfin disponible. On découvre l’héroïne de cette série, Seneca Sabre poursuivie par des soldats menaçants, ambiance Steampunk, Western et Piraterie pour un double rendez-vous hebdomadaire (tous les lundi et jeudi), à l’abordage ! (et oui, je suis une flibustière qui s’ignore…)

Swords are cool. People fighting with swords are cool. Airships are cool. Cowboys are cool. Pirates are cool. Clockwork men are cool. Smart, savvy, witty women are very cool. Laconic gunslingers? Totally cool. Steampunk? Frosty.

That’s what Lady Sabre & the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether is, that’s what it’s about. The adventures of the Lady Seneca Sabre and those she meets along the way as she travels the Sphere. Who she fights, who she foils, who she befriends. It’s about adventure and romance and excitement and, to paraphrase the great Zaphod Beeblebrox, “really wild things.”

And most of all, what it’s supposed to be? It’s supposed to be fun.

You remember fun, right? That thing that most print comics seems to have forgotten in their desperate attempt to cling to readers, continuity, and a market that has outstripped and overtaken them? The thing that comes from enjoying a good story where you want to know what happens next and the characters are cool and the villains are villainous and the heroes are heroic because they’re heroes?

Now don’t get us wrong. We’re all for tugging the heartstrings and bringing tears to the eyes. That’s part of a good story, too, and – perhaps paradoxically – those emotions can also be fun. And we aim to play the heartstrings, to move you as much as to entertain you, to make you care about the people in this world we’ve created.

Oh, you want to know about the world? Here’s all you need.

The world, as our characters know it, is called the Sphere, an open, empty sky dotted with Lands, those pieces of terrain that somehow seem to float above it all. The Lands vary in sizes – some of them quite small, barely a city block perhaps, and others the size of continents. Did we say an empty sky? Well, not quite. The Aether – invisible, ineffable – permeates everything, everywhere. Between Lands, its properties change, allowing Aether Ships, effectively sailing vessels, to travel the vast open spaces. Where Aether meets Land, it is more diffuse, weaker, but no less unknown.

There are four Major Powers in the Sphere, roughly analogous to the European Powers from the Age of Enlightenment. Science marches on, its progress slowed somewhat in the face of Magick. Speculation is rife about the connections between the Aether and wizardy and witchcraft.

The Aether is not calm, nor is it complacent. Aether Storms arise in the vast spaces between Lands, treacherous and unpredictable to sailors and Landlubbers alike. Once every hundred years or so, Great Storms descend, and where they make Landfall, they have the ability to remake entire Lands, erasing in one moment what centuries, even aeons, have created. Whole civilizations have vanished from the Sphere at the touch of a Great Storm.

And where one Land is vanished, the Sages speculate, another comes into existence….