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

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.

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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.