The Ascending Man Chronicles began its conceptual life in early 1987 as a futuristic superhero comicbook series called Solar Centurions which was initiated by aspiring writer/artist Rick Reeves and aspiring writers Randy Cook and Eddie Patterson.
I met these three gents in my hometown of Stockton, CA at the newly-opened comicbook shop Words and Pastimes, where Rick was manager and Randy and Eddie were frequent customers. After seeing some samples of my artwork, Rick told me about the Solar Centurions project and asked me to help draw it — a rather remarkable development, considering how cringeworthy my art was at the time. He and the others brought me up to speed, and I proceeded to offer my visual interpretations of the various characters they had envisioned, starting with the three leads: the flamboyant Bart Resdon, a.k.a. Zenith, a character Rick conceived in high school; the diminutive crystalline scientist Onyx; and the team's boss, The Blue Man (no relation to the musical group, natch!). One of my early contributions was changing the name of one of the characters from The Solar Knight to The Stellar Knight, which in turn led to a story development featuring an assortment of characters called Stellar Centurions.
Over the next few years Randy and Eddie drifted away from our little circle, but Rick and I continued to spend many an afternoon and evening at local eateries developing the story and characters further, him scribbling story notes and me reading them and offering input or revisions, both of us sketching costume and character ideas.
In 1991 we began work on the first complete book of the series, by now titled The Ascending Man Chronicles. It was to be a sprawling science fiction adventure/mystery/drama with time travel and a dash of mysticism (and even a bit of Lovecraft!) mixed in. The book was self-published and sold in 1992 through our recently-opened comicbook shop, California Comics in Modesto. The response was good but, unfortunately, we didn't have sufficient momentum or money to continue past the first book, and we ended up selling the shop a few years afterwards.
By 1996 Rick had elected to return to his home state of Texas and left the Ascending Man project in my care, telling me to do with it whatever I saw fit. The book languished for a few years until I realized that nobody else was going to do anything with it if I didn't. So I began re-examining and tweaking the various character designs — Bart's '92 outfit in particular was rather dated — and made copies of the reams of story notes and sketches we had done over the years, compiling them into a "reference book" to guide me in crafting a complete story history and outline (something Rick had never quite gotten around to doing).
I set out to render the story as three 48-page chapters which would be published as a single graphic novel, with the goal of a Summer 2005 release through the on-demand printing service Trafford Publishing. Since I was only able to complete the first chapter of the story in time, though, I opted to publish it as Volume One so as to establish the title and characters. My intention is to conclude the story with Volume Two, on which I am currently working.
Stick around — the future is coming. And it will change you!
— Frank Stone
I met these three gents in my hometown of Stockton, CA at the newly-opened comicbook shop Words and Pastimes, where Rick was manager and Randy and Eddie were frequent customers. After seeing some samples of my artwork, Rick told me about the Solar Centurions project and asked me to help draw it — a rather remarkable development, considering how cringeworthy my art was at the time. He and the others brought me up to speed, and I proceeded to offer my visual interpretations of the various characters they had envisioned, starting with the three leads: the flamboyant Bart Resdon, a.k.a. Zenith, a character Rick conceived in high school; the diminutive crystalline scientist Onyx; and the team's boss, The Blue Man (no relation to the musical group, natch!). One of my early contributions was changing the name of one of the characters from The Solar Knight to The Stellar Knight, which in turn led to a story development featuring an assortment of characters called Stellar Centurions.
Over the next few years Randy and Eddie drifted away from our little circle, but Rick and I continued to spend many an afternoon and evening at local eateries developing the story and characters further, him scribbling story notes and me reading them and offering input or revisions, both of us sketching costume and character ideas.
In 1991 we began work on the first complete book of the series, by now titled The Ascending Man Chronicles. It was to be a sprawling science fiction adventure/mystery/drama with time travel and a dash of mysticism (and even a bit of Lovecraft!) mixed in. The book was self-published and sold in 1992 through our recently-opened comicbook shop, California Comics in Modesto. The response was good but, unfortunately, we didn't have sufficient momentum or money to continue past the first book, and we ended up selling the shop a few years afterwards.
By 1996 Rick had elected to return to his home state of Texas and left the Ascending Man project in my care, telling me to do with it whatever I saw fit. The book languished for a few years until I realized that nobody else was going to do anything with it if I didn't. So I began re-examining and tweaking the various character designs — Bart's '92 outfit in particular was rather dated — and made copies of the reams of story notes and sketches we had done over the years, compiling them into a "reference book" to guide me in crafting a complete story history and outline (something Rick had never quite gotten around to doing).
I set out to render the story as three 48-page chapters which would be published as a single graphic novel, with the goal of a Summer 2005 release through the on-demand printing service Trafford Publishing. Since I was only able to complete the first chapter of the story in time, though, I opted to publish it as Volume One so as to establish the title and characters. My intention is to conclude the story with Volume Two, on which I am currently working.
Stick around — the future is coming. And it will change you!
— Frank Stone
