Strip 4: Enter Sheila Tannin

I know I’ve already covered, at length, the fact that I didn’t anticipate the pacing difficulties when writing for comics, since I came from almost exclusively writing prose, but I will say that the excitement I feel at finally introducing new characters is SO MUCH GREATER than if this had happened, say, after six months or a year of updates, as I’d intended. It’s absurd to think that it took almost eight times longer than that for Captain Sheila Tannin to make her first full appearance (she was seen in bits and pieces way back in Part II, Strip 1).

There’s a lot going into her design that I’ll let you infer or find out later, but one bit I’ll focus on right now, since it’s really just fun trivia, is her hand cannon. I’d wanted a distinctive design for Tannin’s custom weapon of choice, but nothing had come to me in all the years I’d mulled over her character. The pieces didn’t fall into place until my honeymoon, where my wife and I toured the Musee de l’Armee in Paris and I was instantly fascinated with their massive collection of strange and ornate handguns. I recommend checking out some photos - a few of these don’t even need alterations to fit right in to a science fiction story.

Anyway, on the same trip, I started really getting into Thin Lizzy, and something about the title of the album Black Rose: a Rock Legend struck me as a fitting motif for Tannin’s weapon. And thus, the Black Rose was born. A pistol able to punch through heavy armor, and like all good mythical weapons, it can only effectively be used by its owner. Notice how there are no iron sights, and the thing under the barrel that looks like a laser sight also, conspicuously, resembles an eyeball. That’s because it is an eyeball - one of Tannin’s eyeballs, cloned, modified, and inserted into the gun so that she can see the exact trajectory of her shots. There is, of course, a shutter to protect from muzzle flare, but that’s a detail we may never even see in the comic. Anyway, this is our first of many examples of the invaders’ biotechnology at work. Gross and effective!

- J.S. Conner

April 5th 2020