Biosfear started out as a setting. The next question was how to present that setting - preferably without having to write an 800-page encyclopedia of the Biosfear world.

Characters and action illuminate setting. But for something of this scope one character, or even a team of them, wasn’t going to cut it. We would need several characters in different situations all over the world. We’d started out thinking we were going to do one 16-page introductory story. But that evolved into four separate 4-page shorts, each introducing a different character doing their own thing in their own corner of the planet.

So who were they? To get the most bang for our buck, those four characters had to span a wide range of possibilities. But we also needed to tie them together and make it clear that they’re all part of the same world. We decided to start each story with a view of the earth in space. Then we’d zoom into a different part of the globe until, by the end of the first page, we’d find our character and we’d be off on his or her story.

That gave us some thematic unity, although at the cost of one of each character’s four pages. We decided we wanted to sell that page a little more dearly. Biosfear is the near future. All of our characters would be alive right now. They would have watched our world turn into theirs. Over the zoom in, we decided to let the character narration give us their reaction to that. So in each of our stories, we’d see a different character, with a different way of looking at the world, having a different adventure in a different part of the planet. With all that in mind, we came up with four people who would let us cover the huge world we’d come up with.

• Dr. Darryl Chesney - Darryl is a civilian, the normal guy with a daughter to raise, who’s caught up in a situation beyond his control. He’s an American virologist and epidemiologist who took his family to Africa to do volunteer work. He was caught up in an outbreak of anarchy and violence that killed his wife. He and his daughter were rescued, and found themselves living inside a huge steel and glass dome in the Queen Charlotte islands. It’s a strangely martial place, uniforms, required combat training, and Darryl’s not sure who these people are or what they’re up to. But in a world that’s falling apart, it’s a safe place for his daughter, and right now that’s all that matters.

• Mine Fujiwara - Mine is a Japanese ethnobotanist amped up with cutting edge biotechnology and cybernetics. She’s a combat machine with a direct mental link to the Internet, and a fleet of UAV drones that extend her reach and senses. She explores the remaining areas of the Amazon rain forest, seeking new plant species, the source of undocumented natural medicines and psychoactive drugs. Mine races to find them before the Amazon ceases to exist - and before they’re found by Big Pharma, which doesn’t distribute the things it finds to biodiversity banks aroudn the world the way she does. Mine takes the long view of what’s happening to the world. Species evolve, thrive and go extinct. Civilizations rise and fall and are replaced. To her, all this is just one more natural cycle, winding down…

• Ehud Halevi - A former Israeli staff officer and intelligence agent, Ehud has spent his life doing whatever it takes to protect the Israeli state. He’s one of the unseen movers and shakers working behind the scenes to get things done. To him, this new world looks pretty much like what he’s used to - islands of stability trying to hold back the tides of destruction. Ehud has been recruited into the secretive organization that runs the biospheres around the world. He’s sort of the unofficial Defense Minister, using a lifetime of high-level contacts with soldiers, spies and diplomats from governments around the world to gather military resources and protect the biospheres from harm.

• Dallas MacKintosh - The handsome fellow you’ll meet below. Dallas is a war chieftain in the scottish Clan MacKintosh. As central governments lose control, power is devolving to the local level, and in Scotland that means a resurgence of old clan ties and enmities. The clans would fight anyway, over centuries-old things only they understand. But now they’ve got something to fight over - the oil platforms of the North Sea. With elements of the British government backing his play, Dallas has turned his ability to keep the oil flowing into real power - power he needs to fight off rival clans. Dallas is the one character who actually likes this new world. After centuries of being run by a hereditary investor class, the world belongs to the warriors once again. And Dallas is just fine with that.

So those four characters gave us quite a palette to work with. They’re not the only characters we’ll be visiting, and they’re not as disconnected as they may seem. But that’s part of the story we’re going to be telling.

Getting over the men in skirts is one thing, but drawing them in the coolest way possible is another. With so many ways of screwing up a cool character like Dallas in a skirt (okay okay, it’s called a kilt), I’m trying my darndest to maintain the essence of what the book is about (or at least of what I know so far of it) and keep Dallas McKintosh the most awesome guy ever to wear a kilt in a comic. It’s actually been quite fun drawing him. I love the flow of the kilt with his “300″-esque chiseled physique to overthrow any doubter that this guy isn’t the real thing. I looked at many pictures of scottish people, especially the warrior-types. “Braveheart” came into mind as soon as I got the script and looked him up. Remembering back to the movie, it was a hoot to root for Mel and his gang. I hope my efforts in trying to re-establish that emotion is the same I get from the reader from this book once it’s done. When you finally do get the chance see the images, take some extra time to focus on Dallas. His eyes pierce through you and whatever else he looks at with amazing concentration. You can almost feel his strength as you gaze into what he’s about to do. His action sequences look really cool, I think. I’ve tried to capture an-almost Matrix-y feel, displaying Dallas’ incredible abilities and pinpoint accuracies. I’ll try posting a few editions of him once I get the hang of this blog so keep coming back!

Now that we’re actually getting into production, it would probably be a good idea to get the background out of the way, so we can talk about things as they’re happening, and you’ll know what we’re talking about…

When we left off, Greg and I had a huge, multifaceted setting for Biosfear. This is actually a strange place to start for a writing project - it makes more sense if you’re approaching it as a game design exercise, and I know I was drawing heavily on my old GM muscles in fitting all this stuff together.  At the end, we’d come up with all these elements and trends and technologies and events that would fit into our world.  So what kind of world is it?

The world of Biosfear is a near future in which everything that can go wrong is pretty much doing just that.  The climate is changing, oil’s running out, uncontaminated food and water are in short supply, and old diseases are coming back.  Governments are getting stretched very thin.  The old power structures (the ones that kept the lid on a lot of ethnic and religious craziness around the world) are losing their grip and brushfire wars and local terrorist movements are erupting everywhere.  Basically, the center is not holding and things are falling apart.

Our focus in that world is a  shadowy organization with worldwide connections in the scientific,  economic and military communities - along with the criminal underworld and a few other weird circles you didn’t even know existed.  They’re getting ready for the whole thing to collapse.  They’re collecting everything from genetic samples to cultural artifacts to people with particular skills, and secreting them away in a series of very well protected Biospheres around the world, to preserve them as the world outside goes off the deep end.

A lot of the people involved are the kind of people who get things done behind the scenes.  They’re the ones who are used to thinking strategically, globally, and for the long term.  A lot of them are career military officers, intelligence agents, and people who’ve evolved past all that into elite outfits that most people have never heard of.  They have a sense of being part of a professional community that transcends national politics.  And the way they’re used to dealing with problems is with covert, deniable teams of elite spies and warriors.

So in some way’s it’s a Tom Clancy world of military hardware and secret operations.  But there’s an additional layer of science fiction and paranoia beneath the action that steers us sharply into Philip K. Dick territory.  The world that’s collapsing, our world, is revealed as mainly a political and media construct, meant to hide stranger things beyond the grasp of the powers that be.  We also go into an underground of crime and outlaw media, martial arts, psychic abilities and mind-expanding drugs.

What we came up with, ultimately, was a methodology for our future, a way of altering and deconstructing the world we see around us - almost like a “Biosfear” Photoshop filter.  And then we applied that filter to everything.  Throw a dart into a map of the world, and we either already know, or can quickly work out, what would be going on there in the Biosfear world.

That’s handy, but it hardly creates a coherent narrative.  Unless we were prepared to sit down with our audience and repeat the whole bull session we used to create all this, we needed some techniques and devices to hammer it all into shape.  And so that’s what we did.

I’ve got no business being here. The Internet is cluttered with comics fans who’ve lived and breathed this stuff since they first learned to read - people who’ve paid their dues in love and blood. If you drill down into my basement and assemble a stratigraphic column of things I’ve been into over the years, you’ll only hit comics at two very separate points.

There’s a big strike in the 80s - Marvel Mutants books, Alan Moore back when he was doing Marvelman and V for Vendetta in Warrior Magazine, First Comics. Then nothing for a long time, until another blip around the 90s that’s pretty much all manga translations - Nausicaa, Area 88, lot of Shirow cyberpunk. That all came from falling in with a bunch of anime geeks that showed me Bubblegum Crisis and Hayao Miyazaki.

But apart from bouncing through comics those two times, that’s just not where I’ve spent my love and blood. I’m mainly a science fiction and fantasy writer, focusing on short stories and screenplays. And I came to this job in a roundabout fashion. I was introduced to the Z2H team by a film producer I’d been working with - he recommended me for some behind the scenes stuff they needed, and we got on well.

And that’s how I got the call to come talk about what eventually evolved into Biosfear - and is still evolving. You’ll see for yourself when he starts posting, but Greg Allen is one of those guys who you just set up in a room somewhere, unscrew the top and stand back. Warning: Contents Under Pressure. He’ll just spray cool ideas all over the place. That’s pretty much what we did in our first meeting. The nice part was that we clicked.

You wouldn’t think it to look at us, but apparently our adolescences were wasted in pretty similar ways. Most of what he threw around I could pick up and run with. And I think he was pleasantly surprised to find that this time, instead of just a stew of disconnected ideas sloshing around and getting on the furniture, at the end of it, we had a sprawling but still workable set of characters, themes and storylines.

So we got to work. Biosfear is a setting that can touch down anywhere on the planet, full of action and intense character-based drama, spectacle and philosophy, with the destiny of both mankind and the planet at stake. Especially in these initial pilot and trailer projects, the big job is to find those specific characters in those precise places and situations that can distill it all down to something accessible and exciting without losing the scope of Greg’s big ideas.

Next time, how we decided to approach that.

This is the official blog for the Biosfear project: a post apocalyptic epic that spans the globe and criss-crosses the imagination. Created by Greg Allen and written by John Michael Sullivan, you can track the project’s progress by coming back here. Or just subscribe to one of our syndication feeds on the right-hand side.