EXODUS

STEVE COULSON +

EXODUS

Soon after, the Monsters arose.

They began to lay siege to cities on both the Atlantic and Pacific seaboard.

In 1954, The United States Navy detonated a dry-fuel nuclear device on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

Millions perished.

But scientists miscalculated the yield. The resulting explosion was 1,000 times more powerful than both Hiroshima & Nagasaki.

At first, mankind fought back, developing advanced defense systems using militarygrade technology.

But after a century of futile battle, the planet has been left devastated…

This message is a recording, broadcast on a continuous loop.

By the time you receive this, it will already be too late. We will all be gone.

It’s important that you understand, we cannot be saved.

There are monsters here, amongst the ruins of this extinct civilization.

There are monsters everywhere.

I repeat, this is not a distress signal.

Attempt no landing. or evacuation.

And this is my last testament.

I am Commander Maryamu Musa.

In 2056, The President announced a last-ditch initiative: Project Exodus.

It was a desperate attempt to find a habitable earth-like planet and to save as many of us as could be evacuated on massive ark ships.

A new start in a new Eden.

The technology we had developed to defend against the monsters had given us a head start, but at first, the challenge of interstellar travel seemed impossible to solve.

Then a group of engineers led by Ogilvy made their breakthrough in fusion technology.

They nicknamed it a “warp drive”. Because of course they did.

An exhaustive search of nearby stars had yielded several candidate exo-planets. Proxima Centauri b was chosen as our target.

We knew it was to be a one-way journey, a scouting mission to confirm suitability of the biosphere.

I was selected to lead a team gathered from across our nations - a spirit of co-operation rarely seen except in the face of global disaster

A hundred years of continuous war against the monsters had decimated our military, and our space programs were now dominated by women. I couldn’t have wished for a more capable crew.

The coastal cities had long been devastated, including Cape Canaveral, attacked in 2028.

So a spaceport was built in the middle of the Sahara, near Giza, the cradle of civilization.

Dry and inhospitable, it was the furthest point from the sea where we could still viably achieve escape velocity.

As we left Earth’s atmosphere, the President addressed the World, with a poem written by John Keats a hundred and fifty years before the coming of the leviathans.

“Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.”

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

We were to remain in hibernation chambers for the first 18 months of the voyage as we made our way to our target.

In dreams, the loved ones we’d left behind came to us, with the promise of being reunited on the new World.

As the family of Astronauts, their place in the lottery was secure, and an incentive for all of us aboard the TURING.

On occasion one of us would be woken from our induced slumber midjourney by the onboard AI, to perform some menial maintenance task.

How seldom that happened only served to remind us that we remained the small but necessary wetware component in a larger, more sophisticated machine.

Except for a deep sinkhole, a 1000-mile wide crater that showed signs of Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide.

We named it “Vallis McCarthy”.

Our first view of the planet yielded little hope- a neverending surface of rock, sand and thick cloud cover.

For the next five rotations, we waited for surface visibility to clear enough to identify a landing site close to the rim, but with little success.

So on the sixth rotation, we landed 25 clicks south of McCarthy, suited up in all-terrain protective suits and made way on foot.

As we walked together towards the rim, the demons we’d left behind continued to haunt us..

Nightmare visions in the dust clouds, diffused from the random particles by our own pareidolia. Of the Mighty Golgoth,. Of Nalka from the Silent Depths.

And of Douz’itrush, the destroyer of London.

We paused at the edge of the crater to survey the vista presented. Hidden below the storm clouds and sheltered by the sinkhole lay a lush valley.

And in the distance, a tower that seemed… geometric. Constructed, even.

When I was a child, my grandfather used to play an old worn 78 record over and over, so many times the words are still ingrained in my memory.

it was a children’s story, narrated by a famous Hollywood movie star. The story was about a sailor.

One day,, when the sailor was on shore leave, he fell down a hole and found himself in a strange land that looked “just like a page out of a story book..”

The land was ruled by an unjust king,. The sailor asked “Where does this King live?:

A wise talking owl replies “In yonder castle. But none can reach it.”

The sailor starts to sing “Well, trust in me my honored friend, I’ll bring your sadness to an end.”

And after a long trial, the sailor finally reaches the castle walls..

And I looked in…

He recounts “I shimmied up the turret and climbed a rainspout until I came to a huge window

what do you think I saw?

I think about that record - and of the sailor - more often than I should.

It’s how the mind protects you from the horror of reality. By distraction.

Because as I descended into the interior, a terrible truth unfolded, one unfit for any children’s storybook.

This place, this ancient pyramid. It’s not a tomb…

And

a

of

This message is a recording, broadcast on a continuous loop.

By the time you receive this, it will already be too late. We will all be gone.

It’s important that you understand, we cannot be saved.

There are monsters here, amongst the ruins of this extinct civilization.

There are monsters everywhere.

I repeat, this is not a distress signal.

Attempt no landing. or evacuation.

And this is my last testament.

I am Commander Maryamu Musa.

Welcome back to my growing mythology, a world where monsters roam unfettered.

If you’re a new reader, go check out my first story SUMMER ISLAND, which takes place 75 years before EXODUS.

That comic was created long, long ago, in a time when Artificial Image generation was in its infancy.

In other words, about four weeks ago.

That’s how fast things are moving right now. It’s like a technological adrenaline rush for creative storytelling.

Almost as soon as I had finished SUMMER ISLAND, the system I’d been using - Midjourneyreceived a significant upgrade, and I realized I could now generate really stunning imagery. It also took me about 48 hrs to realize I needed to rethink the way I created an AI comic.

EXODUS is the result, and was written and designed to show off the potential of this new technology for sequential stories. Every image in this comic book was initially generated by Midjourney’s integration of Stable Diffusion, then manipulated in Photoshop as needed, before final layout using Apple Keynote. All in all, EXODUS took about 4 weeks to produce in my spare time.

This story was developed using the “Marvel Method” originally developed by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (and rarely used these days). Lee would provide a bare bones plot synopsis to Kirby, who would then create all the amazing art. At the end, Lee would add the dialog and captions, fleshing out the narrative along the way.

So for this story, I had a basic plot in mind, when I began but as the images were generated, it went in completely new directions. Consequently, the story of Maryamu only came into focus towards the end. The speed that the technology works, iterating almost instantly around a written prompt allows you to create visual stories in a very different way, almost like improv jazz.

The debate around whether or not AI art is even art at all has only just begun, and I’m not sure this comic helps us get to the answer any quicker, but hopefully you enjoyed the trip to Proxima Centauri. I’d love to hear your thoughts

Prompt: “comic book panel of a beautiful African female NASA astronaut, cinematic interstellar movie, olivegreen and sepia and teal Tritone print on watercolor paper”

Prompt: “comic book panel of post-apocalyptic London street, overgrown with vegetation, olive-green and sepia and teal-blue Tritone print on watercolor paper”

Set

the same

this folk horror

a remote

townsfolk