The weird history of America: Virginia Dare

The first white settler ever born in colonial America was a young girl named Virginia Dare. Last seen by anyone in recorded history as just a baby, her name is put to record during the time period after her grandfather John White returned to England for supplies. Upon his return to her home in the Roanoke Colony, she and every other member of the one hundred plus member village were gone. 

Marvel 1602's Virginia Dare,
illustrated by Andy Kubert.

To this day, no one knows what happened to Virginia or any other member of the Roanoke Colony. Both the baby and the colony have entered popular culture as the first great mystery of American history. 

Over the 530 years since the Roanoke Colony vanished, Virginia has appeared across multiple media forms from Neil Gaiman's Marvel 1602 to the Adrian Paul SciFi Channel film Wraiths of Roanoke. She's portrayed as an often tragic figure, the tiny girl that doesn't really get a chance at life. Often she ends up the only survivor of her colony by some fate and is brought elsewhere to learn and grow. 

Yet as I look at her as a character from folklore, my immediate thought is very different. Why would the first white settler born in the nascent United States be good and pure? What if she's the literal representation of the corruptions of colonization? If Virginia Dare survived, why wouldn't she serve to show the inescapability of that corruption, or even become the bearer of it herself. 

This is the two hundred twenty-five year old woman that plays a central role in The Hidden War. She makes her debut next month on Patreon, in Book Two of that feature. I hope you'll come see. 

The Ultimate Crossover Pin-up Book!

We're just days away from my celebration of 90s independent comics in the form of Bad Girls: X-Over. And with that I've revisited a bunch of fun bits of 90s comic history over the last couple months. As a fan of several of the young and short universes of the time, the Ultraverse always stuck out to me. After the purchase of the line by Marvel, it was mostly gutted. But an interesting thing happened in the pages of two volumes of Dream Team, a book designed for superstar artists to draw great crossover shots between heroes and villains of both universes. Something strange happened though as they recruited talent...

That's the Fantastic Four versus Ultraverse's Sludge by artist Michael Allred, but it also features another character out of place in either universe. Allred's creator owned Madman made an appearance in this book and he wouldn't be alone! 

William (then Billy) Tucci gave us his own Shi posing with Shuriken and Psylocke: 

NaNoWriMo is upon us!

Dear readers, it is November. Outside of Election Day and Thanksgiving, the thing I know most about this month is the advent of National Novel Writing Month! Every year, tens of thousands of writers challenge themselves to produce 50,000 words in the thirty days of this month. 

This year I'm diving into a long in gestation project, a book called Century! The new novel will follow a family of heroes from the beginning of the 1900s to the end. Each arc will cover one year in each decade as the story of the Century family develops! It's big, epic and will help define the world of the Quadrant Universe more than any book before or since!

I'm writing this and most of the other posts this month well ahead of starting the project, but as you're reading this I should be knee deep in the opening of the book, set in 1901. And while you won't see the adventures of M.M. Century and his descendants for some time to come, be prepared for the next great epic in the history of the Quadrant Universe! 

And don't forget to get in on the Patreon, because I have two new series starting in just a few days!