The Royal Family of the Black Iron Prison

One of the projects I’ve been quietly developing, with no real potential release date yet, was initially a series of shorts for Artifice Comics’ Obento project based around the idea of a world in which the Artifice heroes could not exist. This started with the premise of characters named Johnny Carter, Victoria Darling and Alfonse Saint Libatique as members of a band under the ever watchful gaze of numerous TV Eyes to the accompaniment of a big, sprawling Dog Man Star era Suede soundtrack.

The idea then evolved through a series of twists and turns, becoming not just a world where the Artifice heroes could not exist but a world where no heroes existed, a world of petty cruelties and unspoken abuses wrote large in headlines and met only with unblinking indifference. It became a world forged in parody of our own, its extravagances in reference only to the way we treat both animals and our peers. The Philip K. Dick coined term ‘Black Iron Prison‘, most frequently used in Valis as a phrase to describe the ignorance that surrounded the Earth on all sides, preventing understanding of gnostic truth, came into play and suddenly I found myself confronted with a world of terrible possibilities.

A school established itself upon this world, a king settled upon the throne and a secret regarding the world’s isolation was buried at the heart of its educational institution, and then characters appeared, two boys and two girls, and thus the story began.