I hardly know what to say about young Christopher Badell. Maybe I simply know too much to effectively cull it. His Sentinels of the Multiverse shit is brilliant - whether in its original form, an RPG, or a wargame somehow. He's a very generous person and, dare I say it, maybe even a buddy or pal - acting as midwife to games from others like Spirit Island or COMPILE is a completely separate skill which he also possesses. It gets rude after a certain point. Did he get extra points at character creation? Gotta be. That's before we even get into this last couple years, which has certain things in common with the Hero's Journey. Anywho, here he is:
Concerning Comics That Do Not Exist
Hello! I’m Christopher. Jerry asked me to write something for this space, and I said yes immediately, because when a man who deploys the word “concomitant” recreationally invites you to write for his website, you do not negotiate. You say yes and then you panic quietly at home, which is where I am now.
Some context. Fifteen years ago, at the show called PAX Prime by The Ancients, I put a card game called Sentinels of the Multiverse in front of Jerry, which was a bigger deal to me than I let on at the time. That game was my first game, and it was based entirely on a comic book publisher that does not exist. This is still my job today, and it is the thing I want to talk to you about: I tell comic book stories, professionally, from comic books that do not exist.
I want to be precise here, because precision matters when describing a body of work that has no body. When I say these comics are fictional, I do not mean “fictional” in the way most comics are fictional — men do not fly, a radioactive spider bite confers at most a rash, or, I guess, death. I mean the comics themselves are fictional. There are no comics. You cannot read them. You cannot own them. Adam Rebottaro, my co-creator, has drawn thousands of covers and panels and splash pages from these comics, and every one of them depicts a moment from an issue that was never printed, because it was never written, because it does not exist. I cannot stress this enough, and yet stressing it is somehow most of my job.
Since 2010, Adam and I have been building Sentinel Comics, the publisher-that-never-was. The card game came out in 2011. Then more card games. Video games. A full roleplaying game.
And in 2017, we started a weekly podcast called The Letters Page, which functions as — you’re already there — the letters page of these comics. You know the letters page: the back matter where readers wrote in and an editor answered. We have now done this for hundreds of episodes, plus Interludes, Extrasodes, Editor’s Notes, and other formats whose names I am no longer confident I chose on purpose. Well over a million downloads. The fans built a wiki that documents the publication history of our nonexistent comics with a rigor that would shame several publishers of existent ones. There are multiple Discord servers devoted to all this. I am in exactly one of them. I used to be in more, but it was all too much for me.
Now, described from a certain remove, this is a scam. A man invents 75 years of publishing history so he can sell you nostalgia for it — nostalgia you cannot possess, because there is nothing to remember. If I read that pitch about someone else, I would assume he owned a boat and at least two nautical-themed blazers.
So why does it work? It is not because the premise is clever. Clever premises are worth about a week of anyone’s attention. It works — and this is the part that took me years to be able to say out loud — because it is genuine. All of it. Adam and I have had real arguments about continuity errors in issues no one has ever read. We once conducted a full continuity audit — an audit, of continuity, of nothing — because we had contradicted ourselves about the publication date of a comic that was never published, and it mattered to us, and it mattered to the people listening, and everyone involved understood that it mattered even though it also, in every sense a lawyer would recognize, did not exist. People send us real letters with real questions and we have answered them with real care for two-plus hours a week, every week, since 2017. When they find me at PAX, they don’t want to talk about the games. They want to talk about the stories.
They talk about characters made of card text and podcast audio and Adam’s art the way you’d talk about someone you know. The fact that there are no comic books has not prevented the existence of Sentinel Comics fans. People who have favorite runs. Favorite writers. Least favorite writers. The writers are all just me.
And then last year, I found out exactly how genuine, in the worst available way. Some of you know this story: the company changed hands, the rights went with it, and for a long, bad stretch I did not know if I would ever get to tell another Sentinel Comics story. Here is what I learned, and I offer it to you at no charge: you cannot lose something fake. Losing this hurt like losing something real. That was the whole answer, sitting there in the wreckage. This spring, through a series of complicated steps, it came home. Adam and I are back to making comics that don’t exist, together, and nothing has ever felt more real.
So that’s the secret of the fake comics empire, which turns out to be neither a secret nor an empire. Nothing about it was ever fake except the comics. The love is real. The craft is real. The debates about what happened in which volume of Tome of the Bizarre are extremely, exhaustingly real.
The comics were never real. Everything else always was. And the community that sprang uparound it is the proof.
Anyway, thanks for having me, Jerry. I’m going to go back to arguing with Adam about a hero’s first appearance in a comic book from November of 1988 that doesn’t exist. It’ll be the highlightof my week.
-Christopher
(Christopher Badell is the Editor-in-Chief of Sentinel Comics, a publisher that does not exist. He would like to stress this. He’s also the Chief Creative Officer of Greater Than Games, a very real tabletop game publisher that does exist. The line between those two entities is blurry.)
