Pirates of the Coal Sack #27

Dec 29, 2023

Whoo boy! That one got away from me. In retrospect I should’ve structured this as two issues, but instead it’s another mammoth.

I didn’t get to show as much of Porto Alegre as I wanted; there simply wasn’t anything for the landing party to do in the city. The cover gives a little taste of how I visualized it.

The crew hasn’t been in cloak this long without a break since they discovered the impact it has on them. Cummings’ problems aren’t the only ones on the ship, just the only ones we got to see – besides Jordan and Darling and the captain. The new chums now know why staying in cloak all the time is a bad idea.

Pay close attention to the timestamps in the second half of the story. (Phoenix time is UTC +5; Porto Alegre is UTC -3). I did a lot of work on the battle going on in the background, and that timing drove when things had to happen, in particular when the planetary shields went up and when the ships in orbit moved out to intercept the incoming enemy fleet. The fight’s not over yet, but I spelled out what’s happening more clearly in the Lore article on the Battle of Earth. For the real lore-junkies there, there’s about a hundred and fifty ships identified.

I hope all of the landing party got to show their stuff. Butcher’s was easy to miss, since the whole point is that his victims don’t realize he’s convincing them to make poor decisions, and Leigh was basically there in case things went wrong. From the crew’s viewpoint, ideally it would’ve been Leigh with Morrighan when Morrighan got stunned, but Bowlin came through. There’ll be some consequences of that for her.

There are more than a few Easter eggs among the Sisters’ artifacts. Don’t take them any more literally than you would quotes from Buckaroo Banzai on signage aboard the Enterprise-D. But then again…