Final Project Idea Rundown

The comic opens up on a squad of soldiers in a trench on Mars. The atmosphere is dark, cloudy, and very cold.

The squad of soldiers is waiting for the cavalry to arrive before moving on, most carry gear and weapons specced for long range combat over the relatively unbroken red terrain.

The cavalry they are waiting for is an over flight meant to break the cloud cover, and for confirmation that the high accuracy ‘danger close’ artillery behind them is set up to provide high explosive cover fire.

The over flight consists of modified cargo haulers, VTOL craft, and the artillery consists of home brew magnetic accelerator canons, called ‘ground pounders’ for how their kickback strikes the earth, often leaving a very distinctive and deep footprint.

The soldier should talk about how they are waiting for their ‘angels’ to fly by and clear the air. They should look tentatively down their sights at the mist and fog outside the trench.

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The shot should then cut to a far view of the earth, from space, and should follow some massive pressure vessel style ships as they move through space. The vehicle is a highly shielded pressure vessel; it should cross between earth and mars, impacting on mars’ southern ice cap.

The shot cuts to a long view of the Martian terrain and to a very small settlement somewhere on mars. The terrain should become greener, and the shot should cut to a handset of instruments reading that the atmosphere is within some kind of tolerance to earth standard.

The shot cuts back to space, this time on a colony ship, going one way to mars. The ship is a colony ship containing earth’s best and brightest, scientists, engineers, survivalists, and teachers. Everyone needed to start humanity again on a new world. (this would make a nice shot to say that and in the same shot show it winking next to a distant star.)

Wording should focus on leaving earth and its problems behind.

Fast forward 100ish years, communications with earth cut off. Nearby comm satellites are burned out in a manner consistent with high radiation exposure, long range sensors pick up a massive radiation spike in atmosphere.

Mars is now alone, cut to a shot of mars alone in the void. More time passes, mars moves on but society on mars continues to be marred by the fact that they are alone. Memorials to earth and peace are everywhere in the cities, citizens still mourn long lost branches of the family tree from earth.

More time passes, pole-ward settlements and small cities start to go dark. Before anyone can really put it all together the southern third of the planet, along with better than 500,000 new martians have gone dark. (shot of the planet again, but with lights seen from space dark on the bottom third)

Stories from survivors and refugees from the dark regions begin to filter in, stories of things, devils, waking up and coming from the icepack initially used to terraform mars’ atmosphere.

The martian farmers, some of mars’s best and brightest who have all gone out to try and feed themselves and the slowly growing cities, come together and decide to take back what has been lost. Farmers start to pick up and refine their old trades from before they became farmers, chemists, mechies, nukies, physicists, electricians and electrical engineers all start warming up the old family trade, using knowledge carefully passed down from the original settlers, and they bend it to making war.

Armor and weapons are made, and the young and restless from farms planet wide move south to be part of the movement to take mars back, to counter the ice-devil’s advance on all fronts.

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Back to trench.

Headed to recapture all but last 8^th of planet surface, which is be held for the icemen. The farmers and the generals they selected from among them to lead this assault have no wish to commit genocide on an alien race.

Should show the VTOL moving across the sky above them, with the clouds retreating and mist clearing up in front of them, slowly revealing the massive form of one of the ‘Ice devils’.

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And that should cover the first segment of the story. I’m sorry if it isn’t entirely clear and if the images I suggest are too closely linked with the plot I’ve made for you to easily separate them. The images and story are too closely linked in my mind to make either of them much clearer.