Requiem Notes and Such:

The idea of this section is to kind of setup a running commentary on individual strips and such. Items that are dealt with in here, won’t necessarily be in chronological order compared to when the strips run, but will hopefully provide a little more insight into things. And of course, I hope to use this section as well to clarify a few things here and there in my own mind.
1. The Great Library.
Over the years I have been an off/on urban explorer specializing in abandoned buildings mainly. Due to my height (well, well over 6 feet tall) I always tended to avoid doing drains and tunnels all that much. Really too hard for me to move around in them that well. I’ve done a few over the years…but it was never high on my repeat list. In my mind though, the Paris Catacombs are the holy grail of tunnels. As crazy as it may sound to people, I would love to just pack a weeks worth of provisions or so and just go exploring.
What really triggered the idea of an entirely separate subculture for the Tunnelrunners and (what led to the Great Library) was an article I ran into a few years ago about officials essentially discovering an entire movie theatre in the Paris Catacombs. http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Guardian/0,4029,1299449,00.html or http://www.urban-resources.net/pages/perforating_mexicans_guardian.htm
Now the idea of this just floored me when I first heard about it…and quite frankly I always thought that the Parisian authorities should call the matter even …while they may have liberated some electricity, they also restored a number of caverns in the area that were in danger of caving in. At any rate, the idea of nearly a dozen such groups holding everything from art showings to film festivals under the streets of Paris triggered the idea. For all we know similar such things could be going on in numerous cities all over the world.
The other thing that was the trigger for it was H. P Lovecrafts “The Shadow out of Time” especially the libraries of the Great Race as the main protagonist discovered when he walked their ruins. There are a lot more things in the underlevels than just sewer lines and tunnels, you know
In the time of the comic, the Library is about 5 square miles of facilities, corridors, and archives. Most of the place was gutted out of the underlevels of several water treatment plants, old factories and the like. The pool was part of an old private club that was destroyed in a fire and never rebuilt.
The odd man out for the LIbrary is the Central Gallery (also known as “The Cylinder”). The Cylinder was a section that was discovered through excavation by the Tunnelrunners, and is a pre founding structure (part of the original ruins that the City of Erech was built on).
2. The Shower
Probably one of the most difficult sections to set up in a long time. For one thing, it doesn’t render in Carrara worth a dang, for another…you have steam, and animated water to deal with as well. The results are absolutely wonderful, even down to water splashing on the floor of the shower. You can get the setting here and it does a wonderful job. For all of you DAZ Studio users out there, I don’t know how well it shows up in it…I do know that it comes out great in P5, P6 and it should work well in Poser 4 (which it was originally built on) Last time I hear, you could get Poser 5 for 19.95 USD right now through http://contentparadise.com
Overall, if you decide that you want to step up from DAZ and get more seriously into it….it’s a dang good deal.
3. Secret Cities
The whole concept of The Secret Cities came about because of ant farms.
Years ago, I was looking at one in a science class and I started to wonder what would happen if they evolved into sentience. I watched them for a number of hours as they dug tunnels and stuff and began picturing them really big…and still digging tunnels and burrows,
Then, I wondered what would happen if they discovered that there were other intelligent beings out there as well. Would they continue to build? Only this time would they build like the other beings out there…in an attempt to understand the other creatures in their world?
That was how a large early chunk of the Threllichock culture came about. I kept picturing micro-cities spread throughout the empty areas of the world. Scaled down replicas of human cities…exact to the smallest detail…perfectly habitable…none of which were built by human hands. A totally alien psychology, based on the concept of a former hive mind that gained individuality. A society where memories had been passed down through duplicated neurons to cocooned young. A society where the concept of individuality or “singularity” has a very important meaning.
All this came to mind tonight as I was retexturing the secret cities setting for the transfer from Bryce over to Carrara. The preliminary shots of it as it is being redone look superb, and I can’t wait for it to reappear in it’s new wardrobe.
4.Filed under future events…
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg19225731.100
5. The Baghdad Battery
http://www.answers.com/topic/baghdad-battery
6. The Waterway to the Great Lakes
7. The meaning of the name “Khurshid”
http://www.behindthename.com/php/view.php?name=khurshid
8. Immortality and the Nature of the People.
Immortality in the current culture is accomplished through a medical treatment based on manipulation of chromosomes and the RAD51D molecule. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4947 is the first place I ever heard of it.
See also references on Methuselah at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah and listings about the Messulethe as well in Laura Knight-Jadczyk “Secret History of the World”. Thorongil is in part of Scythian descent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythia) from about two or three generations before his birth. The First Mariner was approaching his first century when he and his fellows landed on the shores (near where the city of Wolfe Bay is located now. Physically he was about 35 years old at the time.
In our world the tentative date for the first travelers crossing over into the universe that Erech was a part of was 150 B.C, a few years before the final sack of Carthage at the end of the Punic Wars. The Phoenicians that are mentioned throughout the comic are held to all have been descendants of Carthaginian citizens.

9. Where does all of this come from?
One of the intrinsic hypothesis’ in Requiem is the idea of ancient civilizations that at one time may have been more advanced than our own. Now, I’m not talking about some idea of ancient astronauts or that shit….but it is known that ancient peoples had techniques and technologies that have been lost that it took us centuries to rediscover. (The recent discovery that Damascene steel may well have been created using naturally occurring carbon nanotubes is a prime example)

The Baghdad battery is a prime example of this, you can also find others if you look at documents like the Bhagavad Sita as more than just a poem.

10. Thoughts on a synopsis.
The hardest part about putting together the synopsis for Requiem is making sure I get the integration between Tunnelrunners and Requiem correct. So much of the two comics intertwine and happen concurrently with each other that if I am not careful I could really bitch things up.
11. Character Art
The definitive Julia Wells
12. E-Bombs…and how to return civilization to the Stone Age…
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1281421.html
I ended up using this technology in Requiem a good while back…it may end up being time to revisit it here soon.

13. Population and Area Statistics for the City of Erech
Area
– City 369.4 km² (142.6 sq mi)
– Land 349.9 km² (135.1 sq mi)
– Water 19.6 km² (7.6 sq mi)
– Urban 4,660.7 km² (1,799.5 sq mi)
– Metro 11,989 km² (4,629 sq mi)
Population
– Density 4,201.8/km² (10,882.8/sq mi)
– Urban 5.823,244
Statistics for the City of Erech are directly based off of the demographic/area/population data for the city of Philadelphia in the year 2005.
14. The sailing comic….
The boy who made the trip from Sarbury Port to the City of Delusarnan was based off the real life story of then 14 year old, Subaru Takahashi. The kind sailed from Japan to San Francisco solo in a 30 foot sail boat.
The blurb I saw is located at http://www.topics-mag.com/edition01/yuko.htm and you can find it mentioned in other places as well. The return trip time and distance was taken and adapted from this voyage.
15. Quantum Physics and the universe as a computer…
The first place I heard of the theory was here
16. The City of Hamoukar.
The idea that human civilization was older than previously thought was always something that I personally suspected, and used as a partial basis for Requiem. An important proof of this was Hamoukar (located in the northern most region of Syria).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamoukar
http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/ham/
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/07/070116.hamoukar.shtml
and the Khabur River which was the watershed Hamoukar was located in…

(map obtained here. I copied it here because I didn’t want to be rude and steal their bandwidth.)
17. On the origin of the Alfarrin and why Hakon Blackaxe has blue skin.
One of the things that have been dealt with on an extended basis is the archaeological/paleontological thread that runs throughout the story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf
Back when I was a small child, my swedish grandfather told me many tales of Norse folklore, a number of which had to do with the alfer, alver or älvor I decided to use the term Alfarrin as a corrupted term. (kind of an example of linguistic drift if you would…taking it from 7000 years in to the future) Of the many tales that he told me, some of which were based of the Norwegian stories and some of them came from Sweden. I am convinced that a number of them were village specific (Like the tales he told me of Alfar of the forges, whose skin were a dusky blue/black)Thus you have the physical appearance of Hakon Blackaxe. As a people, I based the idea of the Alfarrin being in existence the same way I have dealt with the concept of “Trolls”:(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll) by basing them on the paleontological ideas put out by author and Finnish Paleontologist Björn Kirsten in his book Dance of the Tiger. In it, it was postulated that the stories of trolls were spawned by prehistoric encounters between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal man. I took that a step further and postulated that the Alfarrin are a now extinct human offshoot.
In the world of Requiem they still remain with (varying complexions of course), people like Marcus Vale, Vance Greylock, and Becky…plus a few half breeds like Cassie Greylock and the eastern ship captain Mary Donovan….but they are not all that common any more.
18. On the dead tree edition of Requiem.
It is coming…just not for a while.
One of the main barriers to it is the process of literally re rendering over a thousand pages of comic…all of which were originally done in web resolution. I still have the original source files backed up, but I don’t want to put the entire comic on hold while I do this. So, another computer is in the works right now. The idea being that I can do the rework of the story, while things are being continued.
The other barrier to this is the fact that some of the earlier comics make me utterly cringe. I know most comic people say that, but when you look at what I am doing now with the tools I have, compared to what I started out with…the difference is like night and day. So many of the early comics make me cringe…or were a product of me biting off more than I could chew…(Especially Daressa which screams for a do over)
This will hit print someday…but if it hits print, I want it to be something I can be proud of first.
Correction…the print edition is coming, and is in process right now.
19. A note on the back wall art.
When it comes to the comic, I am a bit obsessive. I’m probably one of the few people out there who would actually put together their own erotic artwork to cover the walls of an underground sex club (even though Jaison Stefaniak of DGN would more than likely do the same if need be)…especially with the ability to find free porn on the internet.
However, and it may be just me who thinks this, but most porn is not in the least bit erotic. This time was a bit of a balancing act when it came to the art work on that because, of course, not everybody has the same sense of what is erotic or not.
At any rate, Bed Study 1, Rope, and Joyride (Part 2) are all in existence out there some where. And I might be some day persuaded into revealing the location of them as well
However, since I am a nice guy…I do have a bit of fan service for those who are interested in such things. I do not normally do things like this…be grateful
As any artist will tell you though, there is a reason (and not erotic either) for doing nude studies…one of the main things that it helped me figure out was the skin shininess problem that is inherent in the import of figures from Poser 6 into Carrara. It’s fixable by changing one setting on the skin texture per each physical location…but it is still something that I wouldn’t have known about if it hadn’t of been for dropping a bunch of nude characters into Carrara with a variety of different light settings and just taking a look at things…which in the end seems to be the way a lot of problems get solved.
20. What was before Alexandria?
http://www.livescience.com/history/070724_before_alexandria.html
21. Another for the ancient city file
http://www.livescience.com/history/070809_origins_civilization.html
22. A take on levitation?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/06/nlevitate106.xml
23. Egyptian Glass making technology, and an industrial complex. Egyptian Technology ahead of it’s time.
24. Warp Drive, warp drive. Casimir Force and More on the Casimir Effect.
25. Microwaves and EMP used to defuse bombs. A possible idea for future usage. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227045.500-microwaves-could-defuse-bombs-from-afar.html
26. The NutriSmart system would put RFIDs into your food for enhanced information