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Welcome to the "Nuclear Dragons" Take-Out Page

- Today's Buzz - Hel-Moon Buzz - Kitty-Clysm Buzz - Nuck-Drags Buzz - D-Brig Buzz - Stuff to Do - D-Brig Ordering Information - Thus ends 'The Thrice-Cursed Godly Glories' trilogy - "Goddess Gambit" available from Phantacea Publications"The 1000 Days of Disbelief" is too -- as three e-books to boot - Start page proper - Quick Lynx - Phantacea Publications available in print and digitally -

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Helios on the Moon

- 2014 Print Edition -

Covers for Helios on Moon print edition, artwork by Ricardo Sandoval, 2014

Artwork by Ricardo Sandoval, 2014; back cover text is here; back cover characters, unobscured, are here; excerpts from the novel are here; additional lynx re 'Hel-Moon' are here; ordering lynx are here and here

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What might have been, will be for sure in 2014

Two versions of Rhadamanthys Revealed, art by Verne Andru, 1980-2013

Cover(s) by Verne Andru, 1980-2013; text by Jim McPherson, 2014

BTW, pHz-1 #12 only exists in script form; Kitty-Clysm is pH-Webworld shorthand for "Cataclysm Catalyst";

Double-click to enlarge images in this panel here

 

Phantacea Revisited 2: Cataclysm Catalyst

Cataclysm Catalyst front and back cover in black and white, art by Verne Andru

Coming in the Spring of 2014, the third graphic novel from Phantacea Publications extracts another complete story sequence from Phantacea 1-7 and Phantacea Phase One #1. Artwork by Dave Sim, Ian Fry, Sean Newton, Verne Andrusiek, and Ian Bateson

Double-click to enlarge in a separate window

What was once, will be again

Helios on the Moon, bw versions of front cover for pH-3, art by Richard Sandoval, 1978

Thirty-six years after its original release, Jim McPherson completes his Launch 1980 project to novelize all the Phantacea comic books with the release of "Helios on the Moon"

pH-3 artwork by Richard Sandoval, 1978; rollover adjustments made by Jim McPherson, 2013

Double-click to enlarge images in this panel here
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Phantacea Seven

- The unpublished comic now novelized -

pages 1 and 2, artwork by Ian Bateson, 1980

At long last, the second entry in the Launch 1980 epic fantasy has arrived

Check out the expanded Availability Listings for places you can order or buy Phantacea Publications in person

Images in this row double-click to enlarge here

Look out below!

Full covers for Nuclear Dragons, art by Ian Bateson, 2013; text by Jim McPherson

Nuclear Dragons are here!

- A phantacea Mythos Mosaic Novel -

Jim McPherson continues his ongoing project to novelize the entire Phantacea comic book series

Double-click on image to enlarge in a separate window

Dedicated webpage can be found here; back cover text here; lynx to excerpts from the book start here and here; check out material that didn't make it here and related excerpts from its scheduled follow-up, 2014's "Helios on the Moon", here; its Auctorial Preamble is reprinted here, here and here

Centauri Island

- The web-serial enlarged radically -

pages 3 and 4, artwork by Ian Bateson, 1980

Ian Bateson's unpublished artwork from Phantacea Seven provides the basis for the first full-length phantacea Mythos Mosaic Novel since "Goddess Gambit".

Ian Bateson's breathtaking wraparound cover for the novel utilizes his own dragons from pH-7. Those from the unfinished cover for the Phantacea Phase One project can be seen here and here.

Images in this row double-click to enlarge here and here

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Phantacea Revisited 1

B/w first and last pages from DB graphic novel

Check out the expanded Availability Listings for places you can order or buy Phantacea Publications in person

Guess what isn't coming soon any more?

Text reads Graphic Novel coming soon or here

As for how to order "Phantacea Revisited #1: The Damnation Brigade" by credit card, that will be coming soon to this very spot.

To order from the publisher, click here or go straight to here.

Postage is extra. Please be aware that as yet Phantacea Publications can only accept certified cheques or money orders.

The Damnation Brigade Graphic Novel

artwork by Ian Bateson and Vince Marchesano

Artwork never seen before in print; almost all of pH-5 available for the first time since 1980

Images in this row double-click to enlarge here

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No wonder they call themselves the Damnation Brigade

Variations of DB cover, artwork by Ian Bateson, 2012, collage by Jim McPherson, 2012

Now available from Phantacea Publications

Images in this row are double-clickable from here, here, and, to a lesser degree, here.

Search all the Phantacea Sites

Contribute to the all-new pHantaBlog

Download a free PDF of Mythos Mag #1 while you're at it

Two Damnation Brigade Collages, 2009, 2012

Get hold of "Phantacea Revisited 1: The Damnation Brigade", a graphic novel collecting the DB-storyline from pH 1-5, as well as Phantacea Phase One #s 1 & 2 (unpublished) now available for ordering from Phantacea Publications

The Phantacea Revisited Project

D-Brig covers

Collecting the Phantacea Comic Books 1977-1980, 1987, Rv1:DB contains material from pH #s 1-5 + pHz1 #s 1 & 2.

This will be the first time in the better part of 30 years that material from pH-5 has been available except from online traders.

 

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Here Ends 'The Thrice-Cursed Godly Glories'

Eyemouth over cover for Gambit sedonic eyes"For the Dead to Thrive, the Living must Die!"

So proclaims Nergal Vetala, the Blood Queen of Hadd.

When her soldier falls out of the sky she's not only back in the pink again – as in arterial – she reckons she's found the perfect foil through which to play, and win, a Trigregos Gambit.

She might be right as well.

For more on the actual celestial phenomena upon which the eye-collages were based, click here. There's additional information re the Sedonic Eye here and here. The complete cover for Phase One #1 is here whereas yet another variation of it is here.The left eye double-click is the full cover for "Goddess Gambit", artwork by Verne Andru 2011/2. The right eye double-click is of Ian Bateson's enduring, 1986/7 Sedonic Eye as prepared by Jim McPherson, 2011. Gambit's main webpage is here.

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"Goddess Gambit"

Now available from Phantacea Publications

One of the decades-lost Trigregos Talismans does turn up — in the most unlikeliest of places.

Should her soldier successfully claim it; should it lead him between-space to the other two, which it surely will; should he find and thereafter keep all three; he will not only become her champion, he will become the Trigregos Titan.

Soon, though, it's not just one goddess willing to make a play for all three. Neither is it just devils chasing them.

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Strips and recompilations taken from Verne Andru's cover for Goddess Gambit, 2012

Would-be devil-slayers; devil-eaters such as forever-fickle fays and their earthborn cousins, the Indescribables of Tal's Forbidden Forest, the Grey Land of Twilight, the New Valhallan Bloodlands and Satanwyck, Sedon's Temple ...

Devil-hating, demon-loving Hecate-Hellions; Athenan War Witches; long-lived Utopians; recurring deviants; Outer Earth supranormals; Godbadians, Sraddhites, even Janna Fangfingers, a survivor if there was one ...

Altogether alive mortal men and women; many of the Hidden Headworld's seemingly immortal, practical deities; and/or the still ambulatory dead, howsoever they're animated ...

All - the She-Sphinx, All of Incain, among them - are willing to risk everything they have, or have left, to gain possession of the thrice-cursed godly glories.

Like Vetala herself; like Freespirit Nihila, whoever she is; they should know better.

... another 20-second teaser for "Goddess Gambit", now available from Phantacea Publications

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Front cover for Death's Head Hellion, Jim McPherson 2010Front cover for Contagion Collectors, Jim McPherson 2010

"Forever & 40 Days — The Genesis of PHANTACEA", a graphic novel with additional features written by Jim McPherson, "Feeling Theocidal" (Book One of 'The Thrice Cursed Godly Glories'), "The War of the Apocalyptics" (the opening entry in the Launch 1980 story cycle), the three mini-novels, "The Death's Head Hellion", "Contagion Collectors" and "Janna Fangfingers", that comprise "The 1000 Days of Disbelief" (Book Two of 'The Thrice Cursed Godly Glories'), the trilogy's concluding novel, "Goddess Gambit", the graphic novel "Phantacea Revisited 1: The Damnation Brigade", "Nuclear Dragons"(the second, full-length entry in the Launch 1980 story cycle), plus the latest graphic novel, "Phantacea Revisited 2: Cataclysm Catalyst", and "Helios on the Moon", the culminating entry in the Launch 1980 story cycle, should be available at your favourite book stops.

If they're not, kindly direct local librarians and neighbourhood booksellers to www.phantacea.com in order to start rectifying that sad situation. Either that or, if you're feeling even more proactive, click here, copy the link, paste it into an email and send it to them, along with everyone else you reckon could use a double dose of anheroic fantasy. It will certainly be appreciated.

Help build the buzz. The more books sell, the faster the PHANTACEA Mythos spreads.


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Covers for Feeling Theocidal and Forever andForty DaysTwo Ian  Bateson covers of the same scene

Individual copies of "Feeling Theocidal", "The War of the Apocalyptics", the three mini-novels comprising "The Thousand Days of Disbelief" ("The Death's Head Hellion", "Contagion Collectors" and "Janna Fangfingers") and "Goddess Gambit" can be ordered from amazon.com and its affiliates, including amazon.ca and amazon.co.uk, as well as from Barnes & Noble.

Libraries, bookstores and bookseller collectives can place bulk orders through Ingram Books, Ingram International, Baker & Taylor, Coutts Information Services, and a large number of other distributors worldwide.

E-books for Kindle, Kindle Fire, I-pad, I-phone and other applications can be ordered through amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and other amazon affiliates worldwide. An interactive e-book containing the entirety of "Feeling Theocidal", as built specifically for Adobe Reader, is available direct from the publisher. (Certified cheques or money orders only, please.) E-books on other platforms are also available. Check you favourite online bookseller for the latest list and ordering instructions for Phantacea Publications.

BookFinder.com lists the latest releases from Phantacea Publications along with a goodly number of additional booksellers carrying them. Also listed therein are almost all of the PHANTACEA Mythos print and e-publications, including the graphic novel and some of the comic books.

Another interesting option for the curious is Chegg, which has a rent-a-book program. Thus far its search engine shows no results for phantacea (any style or permutation thereof) but it does recognize Jim McPherson (a variety of them) and the titles of many releases from Phantacea Publications.

As for the Whole Earth (other than the Hidden Continent of Sedon's Head, at least as far as I can say and always assuming it's still around in what be its 61st century), well, this page contains a list of a few other websites where you can probably order the novels in a variety of currencies and with credit cards.

Of course you can always email or send me your order(s) via surface mail. No matter where you live or what currency you prefer to use, I'll figure out a way to fill your order(s) myself. Just be aware that I can only accept certified cheques or money orders. Plus, I'll have to charge an additional 12% to cover Canadian and provincial goods and sales taxes as well as Canada Post rates for shipping.

I do use bubble mailers, though.


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| pH-Webworld's Welcoming Page | Internal Search Engine | Main Menu | Online PHANTACEA Primer | Ongoing PHANTACEA Features | pHantaBlog | Information for ordering by credit card | Information for ordering by certified cheque or money order | Serial Synopses | Contact | pH-Webworld Miscellanea | Lynx to additional websites featuring Jim McPherson's PHANTACEA Mythos | Bottom of Page Lynx |

Jim McPherson's Phantacea Mythos Online

Phantacea Publications logo

Nuclear Take-Outs

Phantacea correct, as in still valid, removals from "Nuclear Dragons", the second (unless it's the third or fourth) installment of the Launch 1980 story cycle

Publisher's pastiche for artist, dragons by Ian Bateson

Double-click the mock-up to enlarge in a separte window; the actual cover is here

| Jim McPherson's mockup cover for Nuke-Drags | Ian Bateson's Actual Cover for Nuke-Drags | Max in 1968 mourns fate of Trigon friends and family members | Big Max: Can't be Sedon St Synne or thought-daughter Strife | Kinesis on Gypsium, the Trigon Spartae and plenty else | Psycho reflects on coincidental births and deaths in past | KOC Background for the Ages | Aortic Amphitrite: Lemurians, All, Mantels | Master Morgan Abyss, the Idiot Twins, Thanatoids gain fertility | Afrite Bulb shut off | Anthean Euthenics | Quick Lynx | Phantacea Publications available in print and digitally |

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Nuclear Take-Out Service

Look out below!

- Nuclear Dragons are here -

Actual cover for Nuclear Dragons, artwork by Ian Bateson, 1980/2013

Double-click to enlarge; back cover text is here; mock-up is here; Ian Bateson's 6-page, original sequence for pH-7 is here
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In October 1968, OJ 'Big Max' Maxwell mourns the recent loss of the Zeross elders, reflects on his still ongoing days as Abe Ryne's right hand man and the dangerously non-supra supranormal, the soon-to-become-history Kadmon Heliopolis.

Big Max was a close friend of the now missing Angelo and Megaera Zeros. He’d worked with their equally missing eldest son Demonites for years in AMERICA (‘The Alliance of Man for the Extermination of Resisting International Criminal Associations’) and for more than a decade before that. He was so tight to the Zerosses in particular that he happily acted as best man at the wedding of their youngest, Oriani, to the patriarch the year before.

Dem’s Dim, Demonites’ putative bastard, was Dmetri Diomad. His presumed mother was the then four years’ late, still lamented Roxanne nee Heliopolis Kinesis – the mother, when she was not quite sixteen, of Romaine Kinesis. In 1968 Diomad was only fifteen himself. Nevertheless, on behalf of the Ryne-funded, as well as Ryne-named, AMERICA, he’d been spying on the relatively recently revitalized Black Rose of Anarchy for almost three years.

Despite his close ties to the Zeross-Kinesis-Heliopolis clans – the ‘Malanthean Minoans’ or, equally often, the ‘Etocretan Extremists’ of this day and decade – Maxwell had absolutely no use for Kadmon Heliopolis and his cronies, the so-called Trigon Spartae. He quite rightly regarded the then twenty-eight year old son of Agenor Heliopolis (Hot Rox’s much older brother) and Argiope nee Zeross (Angie’s youngest sister), both of whom had died during the war, as ideological threats to worldwide prosperity, not to mention comparative stability.

In Max’s view, Kadmon was much more than just the daring, but essentially unstable, leader of the modern day Black Rose. He was an undeclared – and until now unsanctioned – supranormal. The Great Man had left him alone for so many years simply because he seemed to have no extraordinary, as in metafunctional, abilities. As far as Max was concerned that’s what made him so dangerous.

Kadmon did everything too damn well.
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Big Max realizes his suspicions re those responsible for what happened to the Cosmic Express after lift-off from Centauri Island have to be wrong.

Max was loyal to Alfredo Sentalli, but Rom Kinesis was his friend. They had saved each other’s life and that tended to bond people. Even though the Fatman signed their cheques, the security forces were his, body and soul. The majority of the scientific and research staff were hired by Kinesis and, though Samarand was the nominal head of Project Centauri, most would support Rom over the aloof and officious, apparent Asian.

There may be devils – properly spelt and capitalized as Devas, he now apprehended – on the island. One of them may well be Hiyati Samarand as well. Maxwell didn’t think they were a distinct race, though, let alone divine Shining Ones: the gods and goddesses of not just ancient civilizations. On the contrary, he was almost one hundred percent convinced the Untouchables were devil-ray victims.

That should point to Sedon – once Satan – St Synne or Faceless Strife. Except it didn’t. It couldn’t.

However, the old corpse, St Synne, was at Stanford University in Palo Alto California and the Countess, now sickly, perhaps even terminally so, was still confined to her in-house prison in Budapest – though again, suspiciously, Prince Peashooter (Günter von Alptraum) had reportedly visited her recently. Besides, St Synne was something like a hundred and four years old now. Reputedly as senile as he was, hopefully, sterile, his body was kept functioning by an elaborate life support system.

(Like major components of the Cosmic Express and the UNES Liberty, currently upstairs orbiting the moon, it was based on the designs of Jesus Mandam. Also like the Express and the Liberty, the Alliance of Man built said system expressly to keep him going. The old fossil’s granddaughter, Tereza D’Angelo, and her husband, Simon Lancz, bright lights the pair of them, kept it going at their base in Stanford, California. As to why anyone anywhere would want to do either, Max didn’t ask mostly because he already knew no one would deign to answer him; not forthrightly, that was for sure.)

That didn’t necessarily eliminate St Synne; it might even indicate Simon was the mastermind behind the Express’s destruction. He was Signal System’s Strategos after all. Besides, (some said) the genes were there. During the late Thirties and the early years of the war, Donar Lancz, Simon’s supposed father, was deservedly known as the Teutonic Terror.

A one-time Godling, the elder Lancz was a fervid follower of Adolph Hitler. For awhile he was even put in charge of the Fuehrer’s ‘Superman Project’ and, as such, sponsored Satan St Synne’s development of the original devil-ray. (No wonder he also called it the ‘devaray’.) Maxwell had the honour of decommissioning Lancz permanently. Simon, the younger Lancz, knew all this and might harbour delusions of avenging his father.

Except for the usual one thing ...

After Max assassinated the elder Lancz, he took the infant Simon with him to England and, with the help of his adoptive parents, Jock Maxwell and Bunnie Galvin, virtually raised the boy. Quite rightly, Simon regarded Big Max as the closest thing he had to a real father. Truth told, at least according to Simon’s definite mother, Freya by then Lancz (Valfreja born Faust but always Volsung), first love Max (as Viktor Richter) was his father.

Although he was thinking Untouchables, he couldn’t discount the possibility that there was another Strife in action. As he had been recollecting earlier that day, Ramona Avar Ryne was revealed to be Strife in 1960 and again in 1970. She never admitted it but there wasn’t much doubt – she’d been caught, as the joke went, red-haired both times; bloody red-handed or, put better, bloody stump-handed in 1970.

In the still secret annals of supranormals, most believed Strife was an Anthean witch. Many also suspected she was St Synne’s daughter, his lover, or both. Mind you, some of the same people said the same thing about his ex, Aranyani Nightingale. He was inclined to agree with them, too – though his understandable and barely suppressed hatred of the Ryne Witch undoubtedly impacted, negatively, his well-practised, properly professional, impartiality.

He had seen Aran briefly a year ago in Houston. She looked damn good – Antheans always did – but he hadn’t talked to her. He left that to Dolph Dulles. (Sean Smythe, Max’s predecessor as the island’s Security Chief, was Dolph’s uncle.) She’d been in Tibet, he told him afterwards; at the same place she hid during the sixteen years between 1939 and 1955. She called it Shangri-La, not either Shambolic or Shambhala. She also called it Big Shelter, the domain of Anthea, and claimed the majority of the Superior Sisterhood’s elders dwelled there as well.

Maxwell looked up Shangri-La in reference books and discovered it was some sort of fictional utopia made famous by James Hilton in his 1933 novel ‘Lost Horizon’. Turned out the fiction was, however, based on Shambhala, which was actually more of a fantasy. Or mythology, put more considerately, going back multiple centuries — to Marco Polo and his futile quest for Prester John, if not before.

Somewhere in the confines of his dimmest mental recesses was another name, ‘Brigadoon’. It referred a fabulous city that supposedly appeared only once a century. During his youth, Jock Maxwell proudly proclaimed it part of Scottish folklore. That made it unimpeachable, as in there was nothing Tibetan about it; let alone of a drunkards’ fable or folktale. Be that as it may preposterously be, it or something like it might be the place into which Aran vanished for all those years at a time.

In this respect he recalled the failed efforts of young Kadmon Heliopolis and his so-called Spartae, as they referred to themselves. (In their native Greek, Spartae meant Dragon’s Teeth whereas Kad was called ‘El Draco’, meaning the dragon, albeit not in Greek.) Max and most of the others in the know back then usually spoke of them as the Olympians, a reference to a codename their equally anarchistic parents and companions, among them Rom’s parents, assumed during World War Two when they helped liberate their homeland.

Funded by the Alliance of Man, they had tried to locate this Himalayan Hideaway of the secretive Sisterhood of Anthea, under any name. That then latest of futile quests had begun in the early Sixties, some six years before Kadmon and his followers reformed the Black Rose and were eventually wiped out by AMERICA on Trigon. (Another of their nicknames, ‘Malanthean’, meant Bad or Evil Flower.)

Apparently the only way into the Sisterhood’s Big Shelter was via Anthean Agates. These tiny, fingernail-sized gemstones were the source of most of the Sisters’ extraordinary but not definitively supranormal abilities. Not all of them were actual agates; in fact, as near as he could determine, not any of them were agates. Not surprisingly, they were made up mostly of Gypsium. Which of course also meant they weren’t magical, just unknowable. Yawn!

Max’s memory was hazy when it came to Ants – was hazy, period – but it seemed to him that he knew a lot more about them prior to the events of ‘65 than he did subsequently, as in now. He was pretty sure witches could use their agates to control men’s minds, to redact their memories as well. Even more remarkably, they could ‘step’ (as in teleport) between-space on them, which was how they accessed this Shelter of theirs; hence also why witch-stones were also called stepping stones.

Thinking about them now, he couldn’t shake the conviction that he along with a lot of others, including Ryne, Sentalli, Kinesis and, conceivably, the long gone Malanthean Olympians, had been manipulated by Antheans for most of their lives. Although members of the Superior Sisterhood, or those of any of its various offshoots, hadn’t been much in evidence over the last fifteen years, someone had blasted the Cosmic Express out of existence.

While that should point away from the life-loving Sisters, there were such things as mad witches: Maenads, as they were generally identified. If, as his lifelong paranoia was signalling, Strife – regardless of who she was, the maddest of the mad witches – and Steltsar were back, then all that was about to change. While not supras themselves, Ants were never far from supra-doings. He fully expected to wake up one day soon and find a Sister in bed beside him.

In some respects, provided it wasn’t Aran, Ray or Strife herself, he couldn’t wait. Ants spent most of their lives spookily good-looking.

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Romaine Kinesis reminisces about Gypsium, Al Molorchus and many another character he knew on Aegean Trigon while growing up there.

Although he didn’t get it to teleport him again until 1965, he studied it with a passion. Gypsium rewarded him by making him smarter. By mid-’60, he and his now platonic pal, Alastor Molorchus, were working for New Century Enterprises (initially in Tokyo then on Centauri Island).

In ’65, after witnessing Harry, Demonites and Kadmon travelling through the dark grey universal substance of Samsara, as he learned interspace was properly known, at least by some, he conceived of the notion of using Gypsium for space travel. As fate or flux would have it, he wasn’t the only one.
If 1948 was the best year of his life, 1968 was the worst. Taking their inspiration from an old-time horror movie entitled ‘The Fly’, the authors of which must have known something about Gypsium, he and Al Molorchus had already mastered teleporting inanimate objects from one cubicle to another. Privately he’d even managed to transfer himself the same way.

They were now working on a kind of Gypsium ray that would send an object through this Samsara – also a Hindu and/or Buddhist term for the eternal cycle of mundane reality – from one point in the same room to another. On the 21st of October, the very day that Aegean Trigon sank, unless it vapourized, on the other side of the world, he prepared to try the same thing with living creatures.

Even though he intended to start with laboratory mice, Molorchus balked. To ease his co-worker’s egalitarian, scrupulous discomfiture, for the first time Kinesis showed him how he could teleport himself from cubicle to cubicle. Molorchus got so little-boy-excited he piss-pants-insisted on trying the same thing himself. ‘Be careful what you wish for, Al’ belatedly as well tragically comes to mind.

Whether it was some kind of malfunction in the machinery or a bollixing backlash from Trigon vanishing halfway around the planet, Molorchus never wholly made it to the other cubicle. Sure, one of his arms did, but the rest of him was lost between-space – the term most everyone used instead of Samsara, which sounded hoity-toity. Kinesis became so despondent he almost gave up his research entirely.

A couple of months thereafter Big Max visited Centauri Island looking for work. He brought with him news Trigon ‘sinking’, thus causing the deaths of Heliopolis, Hyperenor and the other Teeth. He also let drop his suspicions that Loxus Ryne had inadvertently killed Rom’s latter day good-as-foster parents, by Ryne’s own in-laws, Angelo and Megaera Zeross, as well as their eldest son, Demonites.

(Which explained why he was no longer gainfully employed by either Abe Ryne or AMERICA. In a world with, for him, too few of them left, the Zerosses had been his friends whereas Ryne was mainly his benefactor. It was easier to quit than seek revenge for crimes he couldn’t even prove; not beyond a shadow of a doubt.)

Having ‘officially’ lost his real parents, along with Europa Heliopolis in 1960; having just lost his lifelong companion in Molorchus; Kinesis took Max’s revelations, as well his unverifiable suspicions, very badly. The Fatman despaired for his prized scientist. He hired medical and psychiatric experts to help Rom out of his funk.

In this regard, two of the best and most experienced were Dolores Rivera and her older brother, Raphael D’Angelo. Both were senior citizens by then but they brought with them Headmistress Virginia Mannering (fifty and an exact, to the day, if perhaps not the hour, contemporary of his mother Roxanne) along with Papa Rafe’s wife, Sophia nee St Synne. Sainted Sophia (ludicrously aka Mama Sofa) characteristically, though somewhat simplistically, tried to convert him to Roman Catholicism. It didn’t take.

Kinesis like all those on Trigon was brought up with a healthy disrespect for organized religion. But her prayers were useful. More useful was Headmistress, who’d spent a good percentage of the War Years with them on Trigon. She prescribed exercise as the best way to clear his troubled mind. Despite being sixteen years older than he was, she was such a superior outdoorsman that his competitive spirit was re-enkindled.

She sent for her various charges: Ryne’s two sets of twins, Jane and James, then eighteen; Erech and Anhita, 11; her protégée, Hiliarti nee Schroff Zeross, at thirty-two the same age as Rom; and Hil’s children by Demonites: Angelica, 12, and Baalbek, another eleven year old. Although he shunned her advances, Kinesis took to Demonites’s stunning widow immediately and virtually adopted her kids. Realizing that appealing to his suppressed paternal instincts was a good thing, Virginia coaxed Rom into helping her instruct the young folks.

So successful was he that he began to take on more and more students. Four of them (Nehrini Purandar, Alexandra Gagarin, Elizabeth Dre’Ath, and a Portuguese by the name of Sango Belzem) eventually became cosmicaptains; Anhita Avar-Ryne and both of Hiliarti’s children cosmicompanions. Belzem even earned a doctorate under his tutelage.

Although his work still suffered, he gradually regained his confidence. Belzem took up a lot of the slack left by Molorchus and, by ’75, his Gypsium ray was perfected. The next year he could teleport ordinary cars – driver, passengers and all – over fairly long, though still perceptible distances.

It wasn’t until Avatar Sol came along in ’78 that he developed a guidance system that wasn’t limited by eyesight. Although Big Max occasionally called him Lon or Ti – he did look a lot like Chthlonius ‘Tiger’ Tiecher, one of the by then ten years’ dead Trigon Spartae; even had a similar sense of irony and bizarre humour – Kinesis found Sol a marvel; more, an inspiration!

Sol had an intimate understanding of the decades old discoveries of Jesus Mandam. This alarmed Maxwell. He feared Sol might be a supranormal – perhaps even Mandam’s son – though, as he’d long thought at least in the case of the real Ti Tiecher, it was more likely he was related to Yehudi Cohen.

When Max and Headmistress Mannering explained to him what a supranormal was, Rom pooh-pooped the whole notion. Supras were fantastical, Rom believed and said. Gypsium was nothing of the sort.

Since there weren’t any supras left to dissuade him, Max was reduced to telling him stories of the so-called Supra Wars. He even asserted that both Rom’s parents were supranormals. Roxanne, codenamed Slipper, was Gypsium-gifted whereas, in many respects, Alex, codenamed Pluman, was his wife’s opposite. His powers were Solidium-based. In fact, insisted Max, it was Alex using Solidium who must have neutralized the brain-like boulder in 1948.

He already knew about Solidium from Hiyati Samarand so Kinesis was inclined to accept Max at his word. He still didn’t go along with supras – Solidium was a semi-natural substance not even as rare as Gyps – but there had to be a logical reason why the boulder hadn’t worked again in ‘48. In any case, Sentalli shared Rom’s opinion that, supra or not, Colonel Sol was the answer to their prayers. Max kept his peace and shut up.

With Sol on the scene, work on the Cosmic Express and its Gypsium propellant progressed at almost breakneck speed. By the summer of 1980 the Express was built and ready to go. Then, a number of things happened that gave Kinesis second thoughts. First of all, he learned of the thought beams coming from the Moon, a known repository of Gypsium.

Avatar Sol was more disturbed by this information than most of them. More than once Max recorded him phoning the mainland. He spoke to those he contacted in a strange, nearly indecipherable language. When Max played him a wiretap of one of Sol’s conversations, Kinesis recognized it as a virtually forgotten gypsy dialect, a variety of the Romany that father Alexandros and his sister, Aunt Meg, the Zerosses’ mother, taught him as a child.

What particularly worried Max was that Sol only spoke to four other people, all men, one of whom called himself Shelter.

Next, Demios Sarpedon began flying onto Centauri Island on an almost weekly basis. Although not one himself, back in the early Fifties Sarpedon was associated with various bands of supranormals. He even had a codename, two of them in fact: ‘Blackguard’ and, the one he preferred, ‘The Ace of Spades’. With him showing up on Centauri regularly, Max unburdened himself of what little he could remember of the Antediluvian Sisterhood of Flowery Anthea.

Demios, he told Rom, was married to Morgianna nee Nauroz Somata, the Antheans’ Mother Superior from roughly ‘52 until ‘65. Again, strictly speaking, not a supra, she was as day-white as her unusually tall, broad-shouldered and strong-looking husband was midnight-black. Superior Sarpedon was also known as the White Witch in the very early Fifties.

Max told him about Strife and a gaggle of female supras including Sorciere, Wilderwitch, Soanso, Electra (aka Electrocretan, the flat-out gorgeous Laodice Atreides Hent, a Summoning Child who, like his mother Roxanne and Kad’s mother Argiope, was brought up on Trigon), Fisherwoman, Max’s wife Aranyani Nightingale, and the perpetually seven year old trickster he called Hush.

He claimed that Roxanne-Slipper and some of the other women Kinesis knew or got to know fairly well in the years after supras ceased being a factor in ’55 – Dolores D’Angelo Rivera aka Sister Sorrow, Europa, Hiliarti, Ramona, Laodice and Virginia (Ginny) – belonged to the Sisterhood or one of its branches.

He further expressed his suspicions that, yes, Sol was Ti Tiecher, unaged after a decade, and that the four he spoke to were the rest of the Spartae. Along with Kadmon, of whom there was no sign, and until their presumed deaths, they were considered the most dangerous men alive.

Although there was no outward indication they were supranormals, Max thought they probably were at least close to being ones. They just did everything too well. He also ventured that, like Sol-Tiecher, they were altered by plastic surgery or wore Anthean agates to make them seem to be younger than they should be.

Unless – and here was a particularly unnerving notion, Max said at the time – they were clones grown by the second Moses Callion in the early Fifties from DNA strands taken from the pre-teen Spartae and now matured. It was the first time Kinesis had heard about Callion Clones.

As if all that speculation wasn’t mind-boggling enough, Max traced Sol’s phone calls to four very indicative places. Before he moved to Soviet Central Asia to begin work on the UNES Liberty, Shelter was based in the Ukraine, in the same super-secret, otherwise nameless Science City north of Kiev where Günter von Alptraum also resided. Von Alp the Younger was the only one with definite access to Jesus Mandam’s papers yet Colonel Sol seemed to know all about Mandam’s discoveries.

The one called Sasquatch, a dead giveaway as far as Max was concerned – had to be Rathegar Pelorus – operated initially out of Amsterdam, the site of Bruce Dre’Ath’s branch of the Ryne-funded Academy of Man. He apparently was on the move a lot, as was the one called Styx, though some of the calls he received were in Johannesburg. South Africa was the suspected headquarters of the new WORLD.

The fourth one’s codename was Sharpshooter, another dead giveaway said Max – had to be Thaddeus Hyperenor, the son of the infamous Silver Arrow Assassins (the thirty-five years dead Sagitta, Artemis Zeross, and Sagittarius, Nester Hyperenor). He operated out of Stanford University, the very place where Sedon St Synne survived on life support – hence Max often referring to him as either the ‘old fossil’ or ‘old corpse’ – and where Simon and Tereza D’Angelo Lancz lived.

Simon, calling himself ‘Strategos’, was also the founder of Signal System, which Kinesis had only heard about vaguely. No question about it, said Max, these were the Spartae and, because of their S-Names, had to have something to do with the elder St Synne, the old corpse the twenty-seven years dead King Conqueror regarded as his father more so than Magister Joseph Mandam, a very early-on casualty of the Supra Wars.

Kinesis didn’t buy into any of it until he was experimenting with Gypsium one day in the early autumn. He was learning how to point his Gyps-Beam at various locales and use it to look through Samsara into that place. Outside the island’s main hotel, the lone building that still stood from the Forties, he focused in on Sentalli’s private office-cum-suite.

As usual the Fatman was accompanied by his son Yataghan, but there were three others in the room with him. He couldn’t hear them, hadn’t perfected audio – still hadn’t – but he recognized Demios and one of the others immediately. It was Aristotle Zeross, Kid Ringo, Ringleader.

Although, from Max, he’d heard rumours Harry was still around, he’d thought his cousin dead since ‘65. Supposedly Rings was responsible for the cancer that killed his sister, Oriani, Loxus Ryne’s fourth wife and the mother of his last set of twins, Pauline and Megan, a couple of years earlier.

The third person caught his particular attention. She was a little girl, no more than seven – undoubtedly this Hush, the trickster Max often talked about with some awe. Here he had Ringleader and the trickster, masters of Gypsium both, in one place along with his boss, the Fatman’s son, and the Ace of Spades, a known associate of supranormals from the Fifties who seemed to come and go as he pleased.

Demios made no bones about being the husband of Morgianna hence Sarpedon – once the Sisterhood’s Mother Superior, conceivably the mistress of Big Shelter – and Max sometimes oddly referred to this Hush as her ‘little mother’. She had a last name, too, this trickster. It was Mannering, the same as Ginny’s (Headmistress Mannering), the very woman who’d helped brink him back from the pit of abysmal despair after Alastor Molorchus’s death in October 1968.

Then there was the man who bizarrely, but perhaps indicatively, called himself ‘Shelter’ — Max was sure he was Echion ‘Itch’ Sangati. As much as he detested reading questions meant to disguise statements for dullards, Rom was full of them himself. Had he and the rest of the Spartae been in Big Shelter from ’68 to ’78? Was Trigon Big Shelter moved elsewhere, perhaps to the Soviet Union, a dozen years ago? And didn’t Trigon have three peaks, the same as Centauri Island? (That last, at least, was indisputable.)

A jumble of disjointed memories flooded back to him that September day. His naming of Gyps in ’48, the wedding of Belifi­cent and Harry in ’60, Harry’s reappearance after nearly five years in late ’64, Demonites talking about supras shortly thereafter; his own epiphany, the day he started thinking about Gypsium as a teleportive fuel, gateway to the stars, Al’s death three years later; Headmistress, Hiliarti, the kids, his reaffirmation of his life’s work — most of all the little girl.

He’d seen her in ’48, perhaps even earlier, again in ’60 and ’65, maybe in ’68, likely in ’70, and probably any number of other times both before and since. He suddenly became very scared of where he was and what he was doing.

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The Magnificent Psycho reflecting on KOC's background on Xmas Day 1955

Gloriel, as most folks called her, was born on the same day, Good Friday, and in the same Roman hospital, as Aranyani, his sister by Mother Eden. On the same day his aunt, Mary Magdalene, Cousin Jess’s mother and heavily pregnant with her third child  died on a ship off the Cyprus coast en route to Rome.

Then again, the Magdalene, as she preferred to Aunt Mary could have been with twins, which Rynes were prone to having. She was one with his father, his father had him and Davy with Eden, and the Magdalene already had one set with her husband, Magister Joseph Mandam.

Old Joe and Barsine, Jesse’s supposed twin even though they look nothing alike, were dead and gone, or at least gone, by the time Donar Lancz’s Herminones kidnapped Saul from the States and began beating him into becoming the Magnificent Psycho in the middle of 1940.


Perhaps even more remarkably, Aires and Thalassa were homeless and mostly mindless street urchins found on the same fateful Good Friday by Papa Rafe, Raphael D’Angelo, while rushing to the hospital where wife Sophia born St Synne was giving birth.

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KOC, Strife, Crystal St Synne and way too much more

The Crimefighters’ leader since the death of Maxwell ‘Maxius Skullian’ Dre’Ath – the year before at the hands of Kinsecto, the self-proclaimed solitary Apocalyptic, that of Pestilence – was Andrew Dulles, Mr Automatic. One of the Crimefighters’ many Misters, Automatic was sometimes called ‘Android’ or ‘Droid’ for his rigid, virtually religious, as in fanatical, adherence to the West’s anti-communist botulism.

Perhaps ironically, Dulles was killed by Mandasoma Plantagenet. Like him an American by birth, and a former member of the Society of Saints, she was married to the greatest Soviet supra of them all, Boris Gagarin, aka the Sleeping Giant. (Droid Dulles married Septuplewoman Barb Black, who thereby became Dulles. She was Dolph Dulles’s mother whereas Mandasoma’s sister, Emeralda also born Planta­genet, married Alfredo Sentalli and by him became Yataghan raised Montressor’s mother.)

Another Mister, Mesmer Hent as Mr Attraction, took Automatic’s place as leader of the Crimefighters. (Some consider Hent the luckiest man in the world since he, a dour Dutchman, married the electrifying Laodice Atreides, aka at first Electrocretan, the most drop dead gorgeous of the Olympian – more properly Etocretan – Summoning Children.)

Hent was a little more tolerant of the USSR, the USA’s wartime ally. His leadership was short-lived, however. His otherwise notably long, distinguished career in the Saints and Crimefighters ended before ’48 was out; ended by none other than Faceless Strife, it almost went without saying.

No doubt out of deference to the lovely Lao (as Solenoid, one of her female followers at the time) Strife uncharacteristically spared his life. That didn’t stop her from using her miracle key to steal, then transfer his abilities to Soanso (Connie Lindquist’s mother), another of her cohorts in the so-called Sinister Sisterhood. (Many, including the late Mr Automatic, believed Strife and her ‘sisters’ were Soviet puppets but the truth was they were mostly freelance operators working for the Conqueror.)

Steltsar was thought destroyed by Old Man Power, Corona’s estranged husband, during the Siberian Supra-Secret battles more so than war. On New Years Day 1949, Crystal was reunited with her mother. But the ongoing rivalry between Eastern and Western supranormals didn’t stop; not even close. If allowed to continue festering, it would inevitably result in revealing the existence of supras to the world at large.

That scared the be Jesus out of the principals behind the scenes. So it was, in mid-1949, a few months before Wilderwitch abolished Strife for the first time, the high commands of newly-formed NATO and the future Warsaw Pact ordered the UK-sponsored Crimefighters. and the Soviet Supra Supreme to cease activities. Contrarily, amongst supra-kind that event marked the beginning of their own Cold War.

Unlike the seemingly never ending larger one, their truce lasted barely two years.
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Jesus Mandam was understood to be the son of two long-dead Godlings: Magister Joseph Mandam and Mary Magdalene nee Ryne. As such, Mary being the patriarch’s twin sister, he was Loxus Ryne’s nephew. Conceived during the Godling Guild’s fateful excursion to the Himalayas in 1920, he had been born on Christmas Day that year.

Throughout his childhood and into his teens, young Mandam gained the reputation of a prodigy, brilliant in every way and wise far beyond his years. When his parents died separately, albeit in the usual ever-so-mysterious ways, Sedon St Synne as much as adopted him. During the late Thirties Mandam accompanied St Synne on his Godling-like wanderings throughout Africa and Asia. They both vanished in the Himalayas in 1939.

Although St Synne, by then calling himself Satan St Synne, returned to prominence in 1943, Jess still hadn’t been seen since ’39. Someone else had, though.

Starting around 1943, an anonymous, non-aligned, highly intelligent and powerfully built supra, one who seemed to have a brain-like boulder for a head and dressed in silver armour, a veritable second skin, began to make his presence known. This was the Conqueror. It wasn’t until some eight years later, at the christening of Jane and James Plantagenet-Ryne in 1951, that Mandam revealed himself to be this selfsame Conqueror. — albeit, by then, the self-anointed King Conqueror.

His hubris proved as quickly never-sated as it was ever-unabated. How can one top kingship? Easily. Just as Jesus Christ declared his intention to save mankind from itself when he turned thirty, so too, now thirty himself, did Jesus Mandam. His mission, he propounded from his thus rendered perilous pulpit, was to save supranormalkind not only from itself but from the rest of mankind as well. As if to cement the link between them, he announced that the King Conqueror was dead. Henceforth, he should be considered the Conquering Christ.

Loxus Ryne was horrified. Supras didn’t need a saviour; especially one who wanted the ‘S’ capitalized. They needed to stay out of sight until (as Xuthroditic prophecies foretold) demons and monsters returned to Earth. But, like it or not, supras were going get one. That it was Jess (the Great Man never called him Jesus), his own nephew, wasn’t what horrified the patriarch the most. Jesus Christ claimed to be the Son of God; Jesus Mandam was the stepson of Sedon St Synne and St Synne, quite rightly it seemed to Ryne, once called himself Satan.

Mandam swore he was acting independently. He further vowed he would reconcile Soviet supras with those of the West, Japan, China, the rest of Asia, Africa and everywhere else you’d care to mention. By leading supranormals into the public eye he would end the overall Cold War, restore balance between nations, and allow all of humanity to prosper. In short, his seemed the usual sputtering of a messianic maniac blinded by his own vision. He even promised to lead supras to their own paradise, a panacea on Planet Earth.

In order to meet this menace, Ryne tried to re-form the King’s Own Crimefighters. Unfortunately, many former Crimefighters were taken in by Mandam. Mr Brilliant (Immanuel Dark, the perennial Number Two who felt that he, not Pluman, Alexandros Kinesis, should have taken over as leader of the Crimefighters when Mr Attraction lost his powers), led the majority of them to set up the King Conquerors.

In early ’52, Strife came out of the woodwork again. Remnants of her one-time Sinister Sisterhood, so tightly allied with the Soviet Supra Supreme in the late Forties, became the Queen Conquerors. Saul Ryne, the Magnificent Psycho, set up the Supranormal Defence League. Using purloined records from the Alliance of Man, he actively recruited supras; most of whom, thanks to amnaesthetics, were no longer aware of their extraordinary abilities.

Twin David – Mr Mental, though he preferred Cerebrus (Wilderwitch called him Metal Mental; thought it was funny) – remained loyal to their father. With the always leftist-leaning Pluman now part of the SDL along with wife Roxanne aka Slipper, the Witch and other stalwarts, such as lover Jervis Murray and the four surviving and still supranormal D’Angelos (Sea Goddess, Airealist, Klarion, and the teenage Radiant Rider), the senior Ryne didn’t have anywhere else to turn.

Codename Cerebrus became the new, albeit largely ineffectual leader of the Crimefighters. He was only twenty-two.

Before the first six months of ‘52 were up, Faceless Strife, apparently pregnant, vanished yet again. The Morrigan or White Witch, Morgianna Sarpedon, the newly-minted Mother Superior of the Anthean Sisterhood, took it as a personal victory and a vindication of her recently reconstituted, aggressively-inclined and therefore highly controversial Athenan Sisterhood.

Around the same time, the original Slimy Man (Anjou Plantagenet, the lone brother of Mandasoma Gabardine, Emeralda Sentalli, Barbara Ryne, and Polyanna Mayhew), the forever-fishifying Fisherwoman, and, among others, Oannes Atlantean, the quisling mate of Thalassa D’Angelo, lost their lives attempting to discredit the Defence League. Nevertheless, though still keeping its existence a secret, the SDL grew rapidly.

Set back at every turn, Mandam decided to call together the leadership of the SDL in September 1952. He also invited the principals of the King and the Queen Conquerors, the Alliance of Man, the Soviet Supra Supreme, and the few supranormals who still supported Cerebrus’s KOC. They settled upon Vancouver Canada as the site of their clandestine summit meeting.

At the Autumnal Equinox, in the Hotel Vancouver, more than fifty supras gathered. It was a major league event; made even more so when Sedon St Synne, by then seventy-seven and whom many had thought dead since ’46, showed up. What should have been a deadly serious discussion on the future of supranormals turned into a mass orgy. Nine months later, truly terrible horror began in earnest. Someone, presumably Mandam himself, went on a rampage; killing as many of the consequential babies born boys as he could find.

By then the SDL had been brought so irredeemably thoroughly into disrepute that it disbanded as much in disgust as disgrace. The Rynes (Loxus, his second wife, Barbara nee Plantagenet – angry at what she regarded as the wilful murder of brother Anjou – Cerebrus and even Psycho) proved it was a front for The Rache, a group of unrepentant Nazis and Japanese supremacists led by a renewed Steltsar and the Baphomet Headsman.

As arguably part of that process, in February ’53, Mr Brilliant was eradicated by Gloriel D’Angelo, Radiant Rider. Unaccountably no longer part of Dr Dark, he went to what passed as his death still believing supras should rule the world. (The oft-scoffed-at theory that Summoning Children were born two-in-one, a normal side and supra side, thus regained currency amongst those still remarkably few privy to the existence of supranormals in the first place.)

Gloriel had been raped by Brilliant at the (Autumnal Equinox) summit of ’52. As a result of that Bacchanalia, she – like Superior Sarpedon, Corona Power, Blind Sundown’s wife Sorciere (Solace Sunrise, who was raised as Sundown’s stepsister), the three Plantagenet women still alive, and numerous others – was pregnant. More damnably, Brilliant killed her eldest surviving sibling, Gabriel aka Klarion, a few months thereafter.

Revenge was entirely uncharacteristic for the Rainbow. Even acting in self-defence Gloriel had never killed before. However, her father, Raphael, had been the Avenging Angel and firmly believed in divine retribution. As if that wasn’t enough, her maternal grandfather, Sedon St Synne, though not implicated in The Rache, was now in Spandau Prison, at last paying for his many undeniable war crimes. Consequently, her heritage did nothing to preclude the possibility that she acted more than just reflexively.

With The Rache on the run, the odourous SDL dispersed, and even Stalin’s Supra Supreme howling for heads, the Athenan Sisterhood and KOC, supported by the Alliance of Man, were well on their way to neutralizing still-resistant King and Queen Conquerors, including Jesus Mandam.

They had to hurry, though. Two of the Crimefighters’ own were doing more than just neutralizing supras. They were executing them.
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A few days after the summer solstice of 1953, someone killed Solace Sundown and kidnapped her barely-born, never-named son. Solace nee Sunrise was another of those born as a result of the Summoning of ’20. After the birth of her first three sons, all dead by ’53, she became one of the most impressive supranormals ever recorded. (Sorry, as she was nicknamed, was no slouch prior to the birth of her first son, John Sundown Junior, on or about her twentieth birthday, either.)

Her codename was Sorciere, hence Sorry, which simply meant ‘witch’ in her French Métis tongue. Not an Anthean as such – Antheans had daughters, not sons – she was nevertheless an unlikely apprentice of Superior Sorrow (Dolores Rivera, Gloriel’s aunt and Morgianna’s predecessor as the Sisterhood’s primate; hence another reason for her nickname).

She was best friends with the ill-fated Fisherwoman, one of Magister Mandam’s early on (pre-War) favourites, and the long missing Barsine Mandam, who was raised by selfsame Joseph and wife Mary Magdalene as Jesse’s twin even though they looked nothing alike. (Fish, who told everyone who asked that her real name was Scylla Nereid, later acknowledged that she and Wilderwitch were sisters in more than just Flowery Anthea. By contrast the Witch never admitted have a name other than Wilderwitch or one of its variants.)

A mortal enemy of Faceless Strife, Sorciere was one of the first recorded Athenan War Witches. Somewhat incongruously, she claimed she received her training alongside Fish, who was slightly older than her, when they were both teenagers. That meant that, even though they were both well-acquainted with Morgianna Sarpedon, they earned their War Witch chops years prior to Morg ostensibly reviving the Sisterhood in order to deal with Strife.

(When pressed about where she and Fish got their training, Sorciere took Fish’s fishing line and fishified, as in clammed up.)

Sorry’s husband/stepbrother, Blind Johnny Sundown, was arguably the most physically powerful member of the King Crimefighters. He did not take her murder lightly. Together with his mount, the last of the raven­deer (according to not just him), he went renegade. Shortly after Christmas that year, he and Raven’s Head showed up on Centauri Island, a still a-building but already artificially connected – and thus singular – landform in the Hawaiian island chain.

They were badly burned, apparently by radiation. Were it not for their so-called Cosmic Aura they would have surely died from exposure to whatever left them so nastily crisped. Perhaps appreciably, the story Sundown told Alfredo Sentalli, who’d learned of the Supra Wars years previously, and others there then who’d been similarly apprised was disjointed; virtually incomprehensible. Although they recovered and lived for another two years, what truly happened to them was never completely revealed.

What could, to a comparatively large measure, be confirmed was that the very first explosion of a (presumably) Soviet hydrogen bomb not only damn near wiped them out, it did wipe out Jesus Mandam (the Conquering Christ). And not just him, ether-either (as OMP might say). Also thus rendered vapour, as well as history (as Abe Ryne might say), were Steltsar (the Nazi Nightmare) and the living leftovers of The Rache, including the first Headsman (who was by then calling himself Baphomet, Donar Lancz’s old codename).

The explosion took place on Salvation Island, a thankfully otherwise deserted lump of land in the South Seas, hundreds of miles away from anywhere else. More outrageously, Johnny – as just about everyone addressed him, much to his annoyance – actually believed that Mandam detonated the H-Bomb himself.

He further claimed that Mary Magdalene’s Baby Jesus – not even Magister Mandam called his only acknowledged son anything except Jess or Jesse – had thereby triumphed over Satan. That Sundown insisted he didn’t mean Satan St Synne; that he was referring to the Great Antagonist Himself, none other than the Demon King of Hell Itself; was only one more reason to discount his preposterous story.

Preposterous, that is, until the Americans, French, Russians, you name it, independently confirmed an H-Bomb had gone off on Salvation Island on or about Christmas Day 1953.

Pass forward almost seven years, to April 1960 and the Worldwide Order with the Right to Life and Death. WORLD’s first known act was the murder of Treblewoman Joan Smith (the last female Psychic Sibling), the kidnapping of Belificent nee D’Angelo and Aristotle ‘Kid Ringo’ Zeross after their wedding, and the subsequent murder of Bel when Alfredo Sentalli refused to help pay her ransom.

Bel’s murder was recorded by WORLD. The film clearly showed Faceless Strife garroting her with a riding crop. Shortly thereafter Strife was apprehended, for the first time, at Bel’s funeral and revealed to be none other than Ramona Avar Ryne, the patriarch’s third wife and mother of his third set of twins. (Somewhat suggestively, Aranyani was the only one of the Great Man’s nine acknowledged children not born a twin.) Seemingly, however, Ray’s memory was as blank as Strife’s face.

Given that Strife was obviously an Anthean face-dancer, a mistress of illusions and other forms of mind-control, there was a lot of hence reasonable, if unmentionable, doubt as to whether Ray was acting on her volition or even that she had killed Belificent. As a result of (mostly) Ryne Senior’s intervention, she was never convicted of Strife’s crimes. Instead, also at the Great Man’s behest, she was confined to a ‘benign’ asylum for the criminally insane within driving distance of the Houston, Texas, Academy of Man.

Pass forward again.

Harry Zeross – as aka Rings or Ringleader Two, the last of the supranormals – vanished shortly after Bel’s funeral. The ones Maxwell dubbed the Olympians (Harry’s much older brother Demonites Zeross; Kadmon Heliopolis, the man who nailed Strife-Ramona; and his so-called Trigon Spartae, including Lon Tiecher) began working for the Alliance of Man.

Their task, which they never accomplished, was to find the Anthean Shelter wherein the real Strife, if she wasn’t Ramona, presumably was hiding. The parents of Romaine Kinesis (Alexandros and Roxanne), together with Hot Rox’s niece and Kad’s half-sister, Europa Heliopolis, disappeared in Egypt later in 1960.

Big Max Maxwell married Ryne’s daughter, Aranyani Nightingale, in the summer of ‘61. Sedon St Synne was confined to a life support system built by the Alliance in Palo Alto, California. The patriarch formed the Alliance of Man for the Extermination of Resisting International Criminal Associations, which he also named, about then as well. As AMERICA’s field leader, it became Max’s duty to track down and abolish WORLD.

Yet another Steltsar may or may not have been around in 1960, but he was reputably in charge of WORLD by ‘62. In February ‘65, the Olympians proved that the real leader of the Worldwide Order was Hadrian Dis L’Orca, the father of its current nominal head, Salvatore, and as good as killed him. (Hadrian died on a forced trek down the slopes of Mt Everest.)

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Aortic Amphitrite, Lemurian Quarter Queen of Shenon (Witch Isle) on All, Mantels, the Idiot Twins, the Phantom Freighter and much more

With the exception of those aware of Sedon’s Head, no one would ever know where the phantom freighter came from.

Before Sedon raised the Cathonic Dome out of his own essence in order to protect it from the Genesea, as devazurs thought of the Biblical Flood caused by Xuthros Hor, the now hidden continent was the vast archipelago of Lemuria. Long before devilish Shining Ones came to the then Whole Earth, the literally thousands of different islands dotting the hence nowhere near empty North Pacific Ocean was Eden’s zoo — Eden being the advanced civilization centered on, as it is commonly recalled on the Outer Earth, sunken Atlantis.

The Bible, as endlessly revised and, therefore, indisputably unreliable as it is, remains the earliest surviving record of its existence. It even listed the ten post-Atlantis patriarchs of the Whole Earth’s so-called Golden Age. The extraordinary long lives ascribed to these patriarchs were accurate. What wasn’t bang on were the names. They weren’t the ones they themselves generally used. Adam, for example, was Alorus Ptah. Xuthros Hor was Noah.

Lemuria was Eden’s zoo because here was where Edenites (Atlanteans) dumped their genetic experiments. Many of these consequential fabrications were still extant, even flourishing. These included the likes of Klizarod’s Saurs, the Emperor Chame­leon’s Lizarados, real wyrms (European dragons), wyverns and Chinese dragons (as opposed to the mainly tellurian, arti­ficial ones in the phantom freighter off Incain), the Ange­lycs of the Mystic Mountains (Sedon’s Crown), the Simian Sapiens of Goatwood (Sedon’s Beard), and other at least semi-sentient species scattered throughout the Headworld.

The most abundant of these beings were once the Lemurians themselves. They thrived in the marshes and swampland that dominated so many of the archipelago’s myriad atolls, islets, and proper-sized islands. North Pacific land didn’t rise up during the Genesea; its waters flooded out to help drown the rest of the planet. Due to Sedon raising the Cathonic Zone (out his own essence) over the resultant basin, they never to returned. As a result the seas or gaps between previously separated landforms mostly dried up.

Sedonic terraforming and, yes, being subsequently hunted as fair game for nearly five millennia also played approaching genocidal havoc with their population. Today indigenous Lemurians were comparatively few in number and these mostly confined to coastal areas peripheral to landmasses in the Interior Ocean of Akadan. Despite all of the above, though, they continued to regard the Head as their rightful domain. More, they continued to plot to reassert their hegemony over its humanoid and other sentient races, particularly the three predominant tribes of thoroughly despised devils.

Lemurians were frog folk, non-celluloid Creatures of the Black Lagoon. They were also a matriarchy. In fact, only their females were amphibious; their males were strictly water-breathers used primarily as breeding stock. Their current queen was Aortic Amphitrite. Nearing her sixtieth birthday (there were Simultaneous Summonings on the Inner as well as the Outer Earth), she had long been associated with All of Incain, the closest thing the Whole Earth had to First Weir’s autonomous, probably more than just semi-sentient Mother Machine.

All the self-proclaimed Invincible was essentially a mandroid, an artificial entity brought into exis­tence hundreds of years prior the Great Flood. Her male equivalent was the Giza Sphinx. Ptah (actually the second Adam so named in the Bible) initially constructed them to imprison earthborn (Chthonic) daemons, notably their undying royalty, Demon King Daemonicus and Primeval Lilith, their Demon Queen of the Night and the (arguable) mother of Anti-Patriarch Cain, slayer of Abel. It was only much later that they proved capable of ingesting skyborn (Cathonic) Master Devas.

Both sphinxes existed mostly interspatially, in the dark-grey confines of the Universal Substance of Samsara. The Outer Earth’s long immobile male (once, truthfully, known as Andy the Androsphinx) had been moribund for centuries before the Genesea. All (Ginny the Gynosphinx), though, could transport others between-space through the Cathonic Zone all the way to and from her male counterpart (and former lover).

But, as Queen Amphitrite was well aware, All could do much more. For one thing she manufactured her own man­tels – tellurian mandroids, as they were commonly called beneath the Dome. For another she could ener­gize her mandroids with Master Devas she kept other­wise impri­soned. And that was exactly what All had done with Crystal­lion: Preserved what human bits were salvageable and thereafter re­con­­structed her to house none other than an idiot: one of the Atomic Twins, either Tammuz or Osiraq.

(Twins sounded better than two-thirds of the Atomic Triplets. Antique Illuminaries named the third one, also male, Novadev. He’d been cathonitized – catasterized, rendered a star in the night’s sky above Sedon Head – circa 2500 Year of the Dome, 1500 BC according to the most common method of counting the centuries in Christian countries out there.)

While Novadev almost singlehandedly caused the end of the so-called Goddess Cultures on the Outer Earth (where Hot Stuff was worshipped as a Great Goddess – Methandra derived from Mediterranean Athena, according to many – from about 2000 YD/BC), his brood brothers’ fate was intrinsically tied into the saga of the Death’s Head Hellion.

And, as it happened, the end of the Thanatoids’ attempt to conquer the entire Head.

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Master Morgan Abyss, the Idiot Twins, Thanatoids sleep their way to fertility

What provoked the Moloch Sedon to be relocate Sedon’s Horn (Lathakra), for the second time (to off the east coast of Sedon’s Ponytail, the Cattail Peninsula), did not have anything to do with the Death’s Head Hellion. Subsequently, however, it did have a great deal to do with the Thanatoids’ retaliatory efforts to conquer the entirety of the Head. It was when they threatened the Weirdom of Cabalarkon in 4825 YD that its acclaimed-by-consensus ruler, Master Morgan Abyss, the aforementioned demon-loving, devil-hating Hellion, struck back.

Master Morgan’s bordering on apocalyptic counterpunch probably didn’t inspire the Twentieth Century design of the SS’s ‘Totenkopfring’. Said Schutzstaffel ­– a paramilitary force founded in 1925 (pre Nazi Germany) as a personal bodyguard for Adolf Hitler – didn’t come into existence until exactly 1100 years after her death either above Cabalarkon or, some said, far beneath it in Absudyl (Minius), the Subterranean Land of the Mandroids.

The SS would have approved of what she caused the Atomic Twins to do, though. In blowing themselves up, they killed tens of thousands living, breathing, fully conscious beings; destroyed a huge swathe of the Upper Head known as the Elysian Fields, rendered it thereafter the radioactive Ghostlands; and thusly ensured their everlasting infamy as the Idiot Twins.

It could have been far worse. By absorbing the brunt of the binary blast themselves the Thanatoids of Lathakra earned the eternal gratitude of the rest of the Head.

And it only cost them a thousand year sleep – from which they awoke fertile!
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Afrite Bulb shut down

Another Lovely Lady – one who, though eleven years younger than Mnemosyne, became her apprentice, good friend, and eventual sister-in-law – was Roxanne Heliopolis Kinesis. She (Kadmon’s paternal aunt and the mother of Romaine Kinesis, who was currently en route to the Liberty, as well as by Demonites Zeross, Harry’s much older and very much dead brother, of a missing Cosmicaptain, Dmetri Diomad) hadn’t been seen since vanishing in Egypt, along with Rom’s father, Alexandros, and Mnemosyne’s daughter, Kadmon’s half-sister, Europa, in 1960.
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Anthean Euthenics

That Celeste Mannering, Pandora’s probable mother, and her Nubian, her father-in-law, made certain to ‘Summon’ as many Godlings as they could get hold of in 59/1920 was nevertheless no surprise. Generally speaking life-loving Anthean witches didn’t last much longer than regular humans who took really, really good care of themselves. They certainly didn’t live anywhere near as long as their sometimes allies, the Utopians of Weir on Earth. But they were very good at setting up and maintaining euthenics-style breeding programs. Many members of the worldwide Godling Guild were its products.

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2012 ad for Phantacea Publicationsb/w version of 2012 ad for Goddess GambitPage and Panel Backgrounds

Both the red and pink background images for this page are variations of 'Rendering Reddening', a collage prepared out of some of the Vetala artwork Verne Andru has done over the years for phantacea; an enlargement of original can be found here

Notes for some of the other background collages found on this page be found (and seen) here, here and here; as for why Durer's 4 Horsemen are reminiscent of Thrygragos Lazareme and his firstborn Unities, that's here

Double-click on the two ads in this panel for enlargements;

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Phantacea Publications in Print

- The 'Launch 1980' story cycle - 'The Thrice-Cursed Godly Glories' Fantasy Trilogy - The '1000 Days' Mini-Novels - The phantacea Graphic Novels -

The 'Launch 1980' Story Cycle

The War of the Apocalyptics

Front cover of War Pox, artwork by Ian Bateson, 2009

Published in 2009; main webpage is here; ordering lynx are here;

Nuclear Dragons

Nuclear Dragons front cover, artwork by Ian Bateson, 2013

Published in 2013; main webpage is here; ordering lynx are here;

Helios on the Moon

Front cover for Helios on the Moon, artwork by Ricardo Sandoval, 2014

Published in 2014; main webpage is here; ordering lynx are here;

The 'Launch 1980' story cycle comprises three complete, multi-character mosaic novels, "The War of the Apocalyptics", "Nuclear Dragons" and "Helios on the Moon", as well as parts of two others, "Janna Fangfingers" and "Goddess Gambit". Together they represent creator/writer Jim McPherson's long running, but now concluded, project to novelize the Phantacea comic book series.

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'The Thrice-Cursed Godly Glories' Epic Fantasy

Feeling Theocidal

Front Cover for Feel Theo, artwork by Verne Andru, 2008

Published in 2008; main webpage is here; ordering lynx are here

The 1000 Days of Disbelief

Front cover of The Thousand Days of Disbelief, collage prepared by Jim McPherson, 2010

Published as three mini-novels, 2010/11; main webpage is here; ordering lynx for individual mini-novels are here

Goddess Gambit

Front cover for Goddess Gambit by Verne Andru, 2012

Published in 2012; main webpage is here; ordering lynx are here

Circa the Year of Dome 2000, Anvil the Artificer, a then otherwise unnamed, highborn Lazaremist later called Tvasitar Smithmonger, dedicated the first three devic talismans, or power foci, that he forged out of molten Brainrock to the Trigregos Sisters.

The long lost, possibly even dead, simultaneous mothers of devakind hated their offspring for abandoning them on the far-off planetary Utopia of New Weir. Not surprisingly, their fearsome talismans could be used to kill Master Devas (devils).

For most of twenty-five hundred years, they belonged to the recurring deviant, Chrysaor Attis, time after time proven a devaslayer. On Thrygragon, Mithramas Day 4376 YD, he turned them over to his Great God of a half-father, Thrygragos Varuna Mithras, to use against his two brothers, Unmoving Byron and Little Star Lazareme, in hopes of usurping their adherents and claiming them as his own.

Hundreds of years later, these selfsame thrice-cursed Godly Glories helped turn the devil-worshippers of Sedon's Head against their seemingly immortal, if not necessarily undying gods. Now, five hundred years after the 1000 Days of Disbelief, they've been relocated.

The highest born, surviving devic goddesses want them for themselves; want to thereby become incarnations of the Trigregos Sisters on the Hidden Continent. An Outer Earthling, one who has literally fallen out of the sky after the launching of the Cosmic Express, gets to them first ...

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The '1000 Days' Mini-Novels

The Death's Head Hellion

- Sedonplay -

Front cover for The Death's Head Hellion, collage prepared by Jim McPherson, 2010

Published in 2010; main web presence is here; Character Companion starts here; ordering lynx are here;

Contagion Collectors

- Sedon Plague -

Front cover for Contagion Collectors, collage prepared by Jim McPherson, 2010

Published in 2010; main web presence is here; Character Companion starts here; ordering lynx are here;

Janna Fangfingers

- Sedon Purge -

Front cover for Janna Fangfingers, collage prepared by Jim McPherson, 2011

Published in 2011; two storylines recounted side-by-side, the titular one narrated by the Legendarian in 5980, the other indirectly leading into the 'Launch 1980' story cycle; main web presence is here; Character Companion starts here; ordering lynx are here;

In the Year of the Dome 4825, Morgan Abyss, the Melusine Master of the Utopian Weirdom of Cabalarkon, seizes control of Primeval Lilith, the ageless, seemingly unkillable Demon Queen of the Night. The eldritch earthborn is the real half-mother of the invariably mortal Sed-sons but, once she has hold of her, aka Lethal Lily, Master Morgan proceeds to trap the Moloch Sedon Himself.

In the midst of the bitter, century-long expansion of the Lathakran Empire, the Hidden Headworld's three tribes of devil-gods are forced to unite in an effort to release their All-Father. Unfortunately for them, they're initially unaware Master Morg, the Death's Head Hellion herself, has also got hold of the Trigregos Talismans, devic power foci that can actually kill devils, and Sedon's thought-father Cabalarkon, the Undying Utopian she'll happily slay if they dare attack her Weirdom.

Utopians from Weir have never given up seeking to wipe devils off not just the face of the Inner Earth, but off the planet itself. Their techno and biomages, under the direction of the Weirdom of Cabalarkon's extremely long-lived High Illuminary, Quoits Tethys, have determined there is only one sure way to do that -- namely, to infect the devils' Inner Earth worshippers with fatal plagues brought in from the Outer Earth.

Come All-Death Day there are more Dead Things Walking than Living Beings Talking. Believe it or not, that's the good news.

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phantacea Graphic Novels

Forever and Forty Days

- The Genesis of Phantacea -

Front cover of Forever and Forty Days; artwork by Ian Fry and Ian Bateson, ca 1990

Published in 1990; main webpage is here; ordering lynx are here

The Damnation Brigade

- Phantacea Revisited 1 -

Front cover of The Damnation Brigade, artwork by Ian Bateson, retouching by Chris Chuckry 2012

Published in 2013; main webpage is here; ordering lynx are here

Cataclysm Catalyst

- Phantacea Revisited 2 -

Front cover for Cataclysm Catalyst, artwork by Verne Andru, 2013

Published in 2014, main webpage is here; ordering lynx are here

Kadmon Heliopolis had one life. It ended in October 1968. The Male Entity has had many lives. In his fifth, he and his female counterpart, often known as Miracle Memory, engendered more so than created the Moloch Sedon. They believe him to be the Devil Incarnate. They've been attempting to kill him ever since. Too bad it's invariably he, Heliosophos (Helios called Sophos the Wise), who gets killed instead.

On the then still Whole Earth circa the Year 4000 BCE, one of their descendants, Xuthros Hor, the tenth patriarch of Golden Age Humanity, puts into action a thought-foolproof, albeit mass murderous, plan to succeed where the Dual Entities have always failed. He unleashes the Genesea. The Devil takes a bath.

Fifty-nine hundred and eighty years later, New Century Enterprises launches the Cosmic Express from Centauri Island. It never reaches Outer Space; not all of it anyhow. As a stunning consequence of its apparent destruction, ten extraordinary supranormals are reunited, bodies, souls and minds, after a quarter century in what they've come to consider Limbo. They name themselves the Damnation Brigade. And so it appears they are -- if perhaps not so much damned as doomed.

At least one person survives the launching of the Cosmic Express. He literally falls out of the sky -- on the Hidden Continent of Sedon's Head. An old lady saves him. Except this old lady lives in a golden pagoda, rides vultures and has a third eye. She also doesn't stay old long. He becomes her willing soldier, acquires the three Sacred Objects and goes on a rampage, against his own people, those that live.

Meanwhile, Centauri Island, the launch site of the Cosmic Express, comes under attack from Hell's Horsemen. Only it's not horses they ride. It's Atomic Firedrakes!

 

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Webpage last updated: Winter 2013/14

There may be no cure for aphantasia (defined as 'having a blind or absent mind's eye') but there certainly is for aphantacea ('a'='without', like the 'an' in 'anheroic')

Ordering Information for PHANTACEA Mythos comic books, graphic novels, standalone novels, mini-novels and e-booksSun-moon-kissing logo first seen on back cover of Helios on the Moon, 2015; photo by Jim McPherson, 2014

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