YVELGUICHETART.COM - STARR Blog

Welcome to new verance City: INtro

Tue, 01 Jan 2030 05:00:00 GMT

Welcome to New Verance City™, a city where the past isn’t just a memory — it’s a physical place you can accidentally walk into.

Beneath the neon and rain operates the Coda Network, a sprawling black market where thieves and hawkers deal in salvaged tech and ancient contraband. But Coda isn’t just a criminal enterprise. Without knowing it, their everyday smuggling is a city‑wide ritual — a reflection of a hidden cult called The Chantry.

The Chantry’s only members are The Acolytes. They believe they are orchestrating the return of the Ancients through the alignment of Vein Core Relics — rare, reality‑warping artifacts. When Cores get too close, reality breaks down. Pockets of New Verance become “Rollback Zones,” frozen in past decades. Ordinary citizens walk through them and never notice anything wrong. Their memories simply adjust.

The Acolytes want to force a world‑ending Convergence. The rigid Inventors Guild wants to lock away any technology they can’t control.

Caught between them are our three unlikely heroes.

Midnight Penn – A private conservator and secret heir to an ancient bloodline. Her memories of that legacy have been erased, but when a series of targeted thefts hits her shop, she realizes the city is assembling something catastrophic. She doesn’t chase power; she chases containment.

Evany Rae – A self‑taught engineer and former Coda street vendor. She dreamed of inventing a new sport, but after the Guild rejected her, she kept her prototype bat for protection. By jury‑rigging a broken Vein Core into the bat, she created STARR — a reality‑bending weapon that forces ancient magic to obey human engineering.

Emma Rae – Evany’s twin sister. Emma can rebuild her own memories into physical holograms that overlap with the real world. The cost is devastating: the deeper she searches for clues about their missing parents, the more her present‑day memories are violently erased. A faceless stranger haunts her most precious memories, evicting her whenever she gets too close to the truth.

New Verance is bleeding through time. The past is breaking in. And three people who never asked to be heroes are the only ones who can stop it.

-YGA

Art from the Remidy Saga and why it matters To New Verance NoW

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Bringing my Remidy Saga art from 1988-90 back to life in the streets of New Verance.

Why? Because New Verance has a strange relationship with its own past.
In the world of Evany Starr & Midnight Penn, the city of 2030 is never separated cleanly from everything that came before it.

The city remembers what people loved and hated even if they forgot. That's what helps make this interesting. The people of New Verance living in 2030 in ESMP don't necessarily look at remnants as supernatural anomalies. When the past converges with the present, it doesn't necessarily announce itself as what it is. A street, storefront, advertisement, vehicle, record player, or simple boombox from another era can appear perfectly ordinary to anyone walking through an affected sector. The people inside the Rollback Zones don't necessarily recognize that these things shouldn't exist there, they simply accept them as part of the world around them. A thirty year-old might feel a strange familiarity toward something preserved from a forty-year-old Rollback and not question it, meanwhile a nineteen-year-old with no personal memory or attachment to it sees the same object as completely normal too. The anomaly has effectively replaced the expectation of what should be there.

But New Verance is enormous, and it is compromised in ways the rest of the world outside it doesn't understand. Rollback Zones can exist across pockets of the city without outsiders ever realizing what they're seeing. A foreign traveler, someone watching a broadcast, or a person seeing New Verance through a video feed may simply conclude that the city's people have an unusual attachment to older technology and media. They may think New Verancers are nostalgic, eccentric, or simply reluctant to throw anything away.

Imagine you're the strange traveler who just flew in town. You might walk through a sector of New Verance and encounter an old movie advertisement - something you would have expected to only see when the movie originally came out. An old comic displayed on a wall. A vinyl record or CD advertisement still occupying a storefront window. A forgotten film character staring down from a billboard. A piece of entertainment history that should have been swallowed by time but somehow remained. The city lives this way now and it is normal as rain to its regular inhabitants.

Convergence Rollbacks created through the actions of Coda and its Chantry unwittingly preserve pieces of the past that some people still enjoy.
Its not just the bigger monumental things. Sometimes it's a small old house on a modern city block. Sometimes it's a storefront, or a whole street corner. Sometimes it's something as insignificant as an old advertisement that should have disappeared decades ago because no one is buying outdated brands. You'll see it in a movie poster. A comic-book advertisement. A train-car advertisement. A billboard. A CD or DVD cover. A magazine cover. A piece of promotional art.

This is nostalgia in physical form.

And that's where the Remidy Saga comes back into the picture. Its now part of New Verance's modern culture. Its even dated back exactly to 1988 when I started drawing them.
The Rollbacks preserved it. Years later, movies and sequels are made, anime adaptations created, toys and statues, spin-offs and remakes exist etc. It is still living and breathing thing when it probably shouldn't be, most likely because it was carried forward by decades of readers who wanted to be a part of what they saw, some have been attached for most of their lives.
And now, when you see it in the background of Evany Starr & Midnight Penn, you're not just seeing old fond drawings of mine.
You're seeing something New Verance was allowed to remember and it flourished from its past.

Why I'm using my teenage artwork?
Some of the artwork you're going to see below from the Remidy Saga was drawn when I was still a teenager. It isn't being presented the way I secretly drew Evany Starr & Midnight Penn decades ago with character sketches from dreams. Not this. See, much of it belongs to another long period of my life where the work went untouched but still found a way to open doors for me. Yet it always existed as another creative universe waiting to be finished and that's precisely why I like it for this.

Within New Verance, that distinction becomes part of the backdrop.
The artwork (and the ones I choose to redraw) will come to exist as something that belonged to an older generation of entertainment, a comic, character, advertisement, action figures, poster, cover, wall mural, graffiti, any remnants of sports and pop culture that once had its own life. A world within a world.

I had characters, stories, places, conflicts and entire little worlds living in sketchbooks and on loose pages. One of those early projects was the Remidy Saga. Here are the only two covers I ever drew for it. A part one and part two cover.

This is just a quick scrape from the top of the pile. As an inspired teenager I was creating for 4 years nonstop, so the material to pull from to show is deep. They can include something that existed in mind for a few weeks, a few months, maybe a few years and then disappear from thought, never to be used or completed. Except now I've found a way to change that forever and this way none of it has to be forced.

If you dont recognize them yet these final entries below have grown more special because I'm already using them. They have found a place in the GN as lore in-world and in the greater reader facing world at large. Its the website welcome popup. In the GN, not existing as entertainment templates of the past but as characters, icons and real world tech.

I needed something for ESMP that could do some heavy lifting while writing character backgrounds and developing the rationale behind my protagonists. But they also serve another purpose. The Inventor's Guild has a long standing history of taking ideas that were once considered fictional, determining what is actually possible, and turning those ideas into viable technology for military, industrial, and everyday users. And wherever the Guild builds something useful, the Coda is never far behind copying it, stealing it, adapting it, or finding a way to turn it toward their own purposes.

That larger relationship is part of what these old drawings help me continue developing as I build the backstory of New Verance. There is much more to say about how these final 2 ideas find their way into the Guild, Coda, and the lives of the characters but I'll save that for their own dedicated posts.

A Little Slower, But Still Moving Forward

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 13:59:45 GMT

I’ve come to that point in the year when an official job has crept back into the picture and stood tall enough in front of me that I have to respond.

That project is still my responsibility, and I need to see my part of it through.
It’s also a reminder that there is a regular life happening behind all the artistry. Responsibilities, bills, dependents, and expenses don’t disappear just because there is something else I love doing. In some ways, I can’t be who I am without those responsibilities and the parts of life I’ve chosen. The things I love are often dependent on what I do, how well I do it, and whether I can keep everything else in balance.
For the first time, I chose to give myself the opportunity to jump into my own lane for half a year—to get a better view of what I wanted to do on my own and to finally start working through a plan for the STARRFALL comic series that has been locked away in my head for almost three decades.

I’m glad I did.

STARRFALL is nowhere near the beginning or launch stage yet, and I’m not drawing the first issue at this point. The project is still very much in its early writing and concept-development phase. It is taking time because the universe I’m building draws from ideas that are older than this blog, older than this website, and in some cases older than my professional career.
A lot of these pieces existed long before I became a professional artist, and some have continued developing long after.

The earliest pieces of Evany Starr & Midnight Penn were seeded through a series of dreams that came to me in 2003. The following year, in 2004, I even attempted to write the first issue and began developing the original concept for the bionic bat that I eventually dubbed S.T.A.R.R. within the story.
So when I talk about building this universe, I’m not starting from an empty page. I’m digging through nearly three decades of ideas, images, characters, fragments, concepts and don't forget the music - figuring out what still belongs there and how all of it fits together. That takes time.

And now, for the first time in about eight months, my professional work has stepped back into the picture.

As many of you may already know, I’m currently the artist on Hero Tomorrow Comics’ Punchline and Vaude Villains vs. Violante. I’ve been handling the pen-and-ink duties on those books since 2024, and I’m now working on my third issue. That work matters to me, too, and I want to give it the attention it deserves.

So I’m not taking a break from this blog, and I’m not stepping away from STARRFALL.
I’m simply slowing the pace down.

I have a sketchbook filling up with ideas and dozens of notes and docs scripting my story. I have detailed story beats and issue outlines developed through Issue 1-9 and rough outlines for 10-12. So there will still be new artwork coming, the worldbuilding continues, character material, behind-the-scenes development, and pieces of New Verance making their way onto the site. MASK ATLAS still gets an update at least once or twice a month. I just won’t be pushing updates everywhere at the same frequency while I balance the comic project with my professional work and everything else life requires.

If you’ve been following along, here's a big thank you!

This project has been sitting with me for a very long time. I’m grateful that I finally gave myself the chance to start bringing it out into the open.
It may be moving a little slower now.
But it’s still moving.

-YGA

CHaracter intro 3: Evany Rae

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Meet Evany Rae
Some people inherit greatness.
Evany Rae tries to build it.

Evany Rae is the older twin sister of Emma Rae and one of the central protagonists of Evany Starr & Midnight Penn: STARRFALL. Resourceful, fiercely protective, and endlessly determined, she's an engineering prodigy who believes every problem has a solution - you just haven't built it yet.
Growing up as an orphan in New Verance wasn't easy, but Evany refused to let circumstance define her. Alongside Emma, she found purpose both in the city's orphan baseball league and as a standout player for the Red Owls Ball Club, where her competitive spirit and quick instincts made her just as comfortable swinging a bat as she was taking apart a machine.

When life demanded more than baseball could offer, the twins found themselves surviving inside New Verance's underground Coda network. Working under Ledger, one of the city's Broker Delegates working for the Chantry, Evany learned to navigate black-market engineering spaces where damaged technology was stripped down, rebuilt, and repurposed. While others repaired machines, Evany quietly taught herself how to create them.
Hidden away inside one of those Coda engineering labs, she built her most ambitious project:
S.T.A.R.R. The Stabilized Twin-Chamber Active Reactive Rod.

Originally conceived as the centerpiece of an entirely new competitive sport, STARR was never intended to be a weapon. It was a demonstration of engineering, precision, and imagination—a vision Evany hoped would earn her a place within the prestigious Inventors Guild of New Verance.
She submitted her designs. Presented her prototype. And was rejected.

For most people, that would have been the end of the story.
For Evany... it was only the beginning.

As events beyond her control begin pulling the sisters into a much larger mystery, the invention she once dreamed would change sports may become the very thing that helps protect the people she loves most. Everything changes the day Evany and Emma cross paths with the mysterious relic curator known as Midnight Penn. Neither of them realizes it yet... but that meeting will alter the course of all three of their lives.

"It wasn't supposed to be a weapon. It was supposed to be a game."

Character Snapshot
Name: Evany Rae
Role: Engineer • Protector • Inventor
Strengths: Engineering, athletics, problem solving
Known For: Creation of the STARR Bat prototype
Former Affiliation: Coda street operative
Closest Bond: Her younger twin sister, Emma
Defining Trait: If something doesn't exist, she'll build it.

How does a generic baseball bat compare to STARR you ask? There's a huge difference and they're not in the same ballpark anymore.

Evany's First Blueprint Spec For STARR MK-I

Evany's INVENTORS GUILD APPLICATION PACKET: STARR MK-I BLUEPRINT PG #04

New Category: Sounds of New Verance

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:44:48 GMT

Sounds of New Verance or, New Verance Sounds

I've added a new music category to the blog called Sounds of New Verance, starting with this post.

For years, I've held back the music side of my creativity without really letting it evolve. Sitting on my hard drives and scattered across different corners of the internet are more than 40 original instrumental compositions that very few people have ever heard. I always felt they were waiting for the right moment, the right atmosphere, or the right story to finally give them purpose.

While building the world of New Verance, I discovered something unexpected.

When I revisited my old music library, I realized that many of the themes from this universe needed were already there. Long before Evany Starr & Midnight Penn existed, I had unknowingly written pieces that carried the moods, emotions, and atmosphere of this world. Hidden inside those beats and compositions were stories just waiting to be discovered.

One of my goals with this series is to show how the New Verance Sound was born from the Sony and Microsoft music platforms of the late '90s and early 2000s the tools that first sparked my passion for composing. Those early experiments have become part of the creative DNA of this universe.
As you explore the music, you'll discover that I've repurposed, mashed together, sampled, and reimagined many of those original compositions into modern covers and remixes. Those new interpretations will be waiting for listeners over on Suno-- https://suno.com/@carthagemini.

In fact, you can already hear one example. The Mask Atlas landing page theme is woven into the twins' first release, Rollback City. Around here, nothing goes to waste.

Alongside those instrumental pieces, I'll also be sharing original songs written specifically for the world of New Verance. These tracks allow the characters to speak in their own voices, sharing their histories, struggles, and personalities through music. Whether it's a city anthem, a Mask Atlas theme, a baseball team anthem, a character theme, or even a battle theme, each song becomes another piece of New Verance's culture and ultimately part of the graphic novel's original soundtrack.

The complete collection of instrumental tracks, theme songs, and vocal music will be hosted off-site on Suno, organized into their own playlists. Here on the blog, I'll occasionally feature selected songs in video form, paired with artwork inspired by the graphic novel and other related projects.

The Sounds of New Verance, along with these promotional videos, are another way to expand the world beyond the printed page while introducing it across my social media channels. As the collection grows, the videos will eventually find a permanent home on a dedicated YouTube channel, where the music can continue to evolve alongside the graphic novel.

– YGA

STARRBLOG LORE 3: THE RESEARCHER'S DESK

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

If someone this meticulous left his workbench before putting everything away... what could have been important enough to pull him away? The tablet offers our best clue. It's still running, while everything else remains exactly where it was—as though the investigation simply paused mid-thought.

Researcher's Desk

Someone was working here.
Someone expected to come back.
Or perhaps someone found the answer they were looking for and left knowing exactly where the trail would lead.

The Researcher, one of 6 Acolytes of the Chantry - is not simply a collector of old knowledge, he helps preserve and create it. Alongside the Architect (another Acolyte), he has spent years restoring lost texts, translating ancient records, and publishing modern editions for Chantry study. Many of the volumes stacked across his shelves are their own work, field journals turned reference books and forgotten histories given new life. Unlike most Acolytes, he commands no Delegates of his own. Instead, trusted sources are loaned to him by his peers because his investigations serve them all. His research underpins much of the Chantry's understanding of relics, resonance, and the world they believe is unfolding. Unlike many scholars, he prefers to verify his findings firsthand. Thorough practical, and often working in the field, he is just as likely to be examining an artifact as reading about one.

The shelves themselves tell a story. Studies of Vein Cores and Resonance and Rollback phenomena sit beside restored accounts of ancient artifacts. Discussions of the Lattice sit beside historical surveys and field manuals. Some volumes build upon one another. Others seem to argue quietly across the shelf, offering different interpretations of the same old mysteries. Some of these books were recovered from forgotten archives, old scrolls and manuscripts. Others were written here, assembled from years of investigation and careful translation. The Chantry preserves history—but it also continues the conversation.

The desk itself reveals an equally practical side of its owner. Resting atop an older, occult-looking volume are two exposed Vein Core relics, carefully laid out for study rather than display. Beside them sits an intricate magnifier, its layered lenses positioned for close examination. Someone wasn't simply cataloging artifacts here. They were comparing, measuring, and looking for details hidden beneath the surface. The open notebook, the resonance logs, and the field samples scattered across the workspace suggest the same thing: observation from every angle before reaching a conclusion.

Today's focus is on 3 of the books and the notepad:

Book 1: 𝐕𝐞𝐢𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐬 - Composition, Reaction, Interaction
Vein Cores are the remnants of an ancient system. They don't just sit there—they interact with the Lattice, the underlying structure that keeps reality stable. When two cores come close, they try to synchronize. That's not a design flaw; it's a feature of the original system. But the system was never meant to be triggered by people who don't understand what they're handling.

The book breaks down:

What cores are made of (composition)
How they respond to proximity, pressure, and certain people (reaction)
What happens when they interact with other cores, the environment, or the Lattice itself (interaction)

It's clinical. Analytical. Written by someone who treats ancient relics as problems to be solved, not secrets to be worshipped.
But if you read carefully—between the lines, in the margins—you'll find the warnings. The Researcher didn't just document the mechanics. He documented what happens when someone gets it wrong
.
What you need to know: The book exists because the Researcher has spent years trying to understand a system that doesn't come with instructions. His findings are a map—but the territory is still dangerous.

Book 2: 𝐁𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐖𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 - Rituals, Lineages, and the True Calling

Where Vein Core Studies is clinical, Blood Wakes is esoteric.
If one explains the mechanics, the other preserves the ritual.
Believed to have been compiled over generations by Acolytes of the Chantry, Blood Wakes predates what modern followers now refer to as the Red Awakening. It is less a technical manual than a theological record—part instruction, part warning—describing how Vein Cores were once joined with specially prepared vessels.
The text explains that a Vein Core is not itself a weapon, but a condensed reservoir of ancient resonance. Only when housed within a compatible frame—whether an engineered receptacle, ceremonial relic, or lineage-bound artifact—can its stored resonance be directed into a useful form.
Ancient craftsmen carved these housings with precise resonance pathways that matched the unique structure encoded within each core. The resulting object became an extension of both its bearer and the Lattice itself, capable of extraordinary defensive or offensive function depending on its intended design.
Most surviving frames are inert. Without a compatible Vein Core they are little more than beautifully engineered relics. Likewise, an unmounted Vein Core remains unstable potential—power without purpose.
The final chapters describe the Blood Wake, a rare awakening in which certain lineage-bound vessels recognize both their rightful bearer and the Vein Core housed within them. Modern Acolytes attempt to reproduce this event through what they call the Red Awakening, believing the ritual itself grants power. Whether they are restoring an ancient process or misinterpreting it remains uncertain.

What you need to know: This is the book the Acolytes don't talk about publicly. The Researcher and Architect preserved it because they believe history shouldn't be erased—even the parts that contradict their own doctrine.

𝐑𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐏𝐡𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐚 - Temporal Displacement Zones — Observed Effects
Rollback Zones are locations where parts of the city appear to have slipped out of sync with the present. Streets, storefronts, and technology may reflect earlier decades despite showing no signs of preservation or reconstruction.
Most people never question these inconsistencies. Acolytes believe the phenomenon subtly influences perception, encouraging observers to accept the environment as normal rather than recognize it as impossible.
Whether Rollback Zones are remnants of past events or evidence of something still unfolding remains unknown.
Researcher's Annotation"Rollback is often described as reality moving backward. This interpretation is misleading. The evidence suggests reality is not reversing—it is remembering."

Notepad and Tablet:
The notebook records more than observations—it captures an investigation in progress. Every note references the same event: the Library Incident. The accompanying tablet is fixed on a single resonance return, while nearby Vein Cores appear unusually active, suggesting the Researcher was comparing multiple sources in real time.
His interest may never have been the twins themselves.
Instead, they may have represented the first observable proof that resonance disturbances could be tracked across the city.
If Rollback Zones are echoes left behind by changing resonance states, then perhaps the tablet wasn't searching for people at all...
...it was learning to follow the city's memory.

Character Intro p2: Meet Emma Sun RAE

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:44:51 GMT

Emma Sun Rae is the younger twin sister of Evany Rae and one half of the emotional heart of Evany Starr & Midnight Penn. Quiet, compassionate, and endlessly curious, she's the kind of person who would rather search for answers than run from them even when those answers begin changing reality itself.

Growing up as an orphan on the streets of New Verance, Emma and Evany found moments of normalcy wherever they could. The sisters spent their childhood playing in the city's orphan baseball league as members of the Red Owls, where Emma's optimism and love of the game offered a rare escape from the hardships waiting beyond the field.

But while Evany built things with her hands, Emma always seemed connected to something she couldn't explain. She doesn't simply remember the past. She steps into it voluntarily.

Fragments of forgotten moments can become real places she opens around her—memories so vivid they briefly exist again, pulling others into events that should have been lost forever. Every time it happens, Emma uncovers another piece of the truth... but the search comes at a cost.

The more she reaches into the past... the more the present begins to slip away.

Emma isn't trying to become a hero. She simply wants answers about her family, her city, and why something ancient seems to recognize her before she understands it herself.

Sometimes the greatest mysteries don't hide in forgotten places.

Sometimes... they're waiting inside someone's memory.

"The more she searches the past, the more she risks losing herself in the present."

STARRBLOG #6: NEW VERANCE CITY MEMORY ARCHIVE: MASK ATLAS ARG COMING SOON

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

MASK ATLAS game

New Verance City™ is calling through the static. You’ve reached the Memory Archive — a restricted resonance terminal where the city itself is trying to be remembered.

Mask Atlas is an investigative resonance simulator. Players operate a Lens Device to study New Verance™, learning to read its hidden patterns through Guild and Coda interpretations.

You operate a Lens Device to read the hidden resonance of New Verance City™. Every scan teaches you to understand the city a little better, until finding masks, uncovering lore, and building enclosures becomes second nature.
Every enclosure you lock changes something. The city will remember… or forget.
No heroes. No tutorials. Just you, the signal, and a living map that reacts to your choices.
Welcome, Operator.

Mask Atlas is designed to stand independently before the graphic novel launches. The Memory Archive terminal (newverancecityarchive.com) is live. Sign‑up there is coming soon; for now, subscribe on this blog. Use the form on this page to join the signal list as test notifications and launch updates go only to subscribers. This is an early preview, more to come. -YG

Open below for more

▼ Mask Atlas – Art Direction Update