Greetings, comrades, this is Joey Peters. I am a writer, cartoonist and beauty contest champion. The last few years have been rather busy for me, but now for the first time in a long time I’m returning to the world of creativity.
Of my creations, probably the most notable would be the various comics I made inspired by the legacy of Fletcher Hanks. Hanks was a weird crank who made terrible but interesting comics during the late 30’s and early 40’s. He’s most famous for creating that weird meme comic–Stardust the Super Wizard, who is a space god who torments the wicked in ridiculous and incomprehensible ways. He also created Fantomah, who is the first superheroine. She’s pretty much Stardust if he was a jungle girl (a typical sort of character in weird stories of the era) and also she’s a skeleton monster. I wrote and drew Attack of the Super Wizards, which is kinda a history of American comics if Stardust had survived through all of it, and The Super Wizard Returns, which is an attempt to do a straightish faced take on a modern Stardust. I also created World’s Greatest Lumberjack, which is basically: If Stardust is Hanks’ Superman and Fantomah his Wonder Woman, then wouldn’t his vigilante lumberjack character be the Batman? All told, I’ve written and drawn more pages featuring Stardust and Big Red McLane (the lumberjack) than Hanks ever did.
Also of note, is my novel: Starship Victory, which is Star Trek pastiche through and through. Somewhat disappointingly, many of the plot threads that I tugged on to create something kinda original out of the morass of Star Trek’s history have likewise been tugged on by Star Trek Discovery and Picard. I’ll probably get around to reposting that stuff here eventually, and maybe even do a blog post explaining in detail these apparently obvious plot developments that bland hacks apparently gravitate toward.
But ultimately the real point of this website is Dissidents of Utopia.
It’s a little bit different from a lot of my previous work. Most of the things I’ve written in the past have an undercurrent of surreal weirdness, and this is not really that. DOU is trying to provide a hopeful vision of the best possible future for mankind. It’s an optimistic space opera where a unified human race comes together to reach out into the galaxy and meet the other intelligent beings out there. To that end, the United Sol System Science Federation has created the Starship Gagarin.
Gagarin is a functional, brutalist starship meant to house four hundred of mankind’s brightest minds as they venture out into the galaxy. They are organized along democratic means, each division of labor elects it’s own administrators, and they collectively decide the work of the ship. The resources they have access to are scarce and the ship is as self-reliable as possible. They eat food produced in bioreactors that recycle organic material used onboard. Working together, they will struggle with challenges provided by the other intelligent species of the galaxy.
In addition to the text, I’m going to experiment with video content. I think to start with I’m planning on making videos that dig down on ideas I touch on in the text–the first two ideas I’ve hit on are the concept behind Project Gagarin itself, and the alcoholic beverage I mentioned throughout the novel, frixel, which is a kind of fungal moonshine. I’m not actually the type of writer that does tons of ancillary pre-writing about the lore of the setting, so these end up being “Well, if this exists how did it come to be?” I do have some notes about how the future history grows toward DOU, but they’re really not that detailed.
I’m also going to record audiobooks of the book as I post these videos and post them as a podcast.
I do have a draft of the full DOU novel, which I’m going to re-edit as I make my way through it (I have a list of things I plan to rework as I get to them). I also have rough ideas of what the plot of the second and third books will be and I’m trying to not get any further ahead than that.
That’s kind of it. I just want to write some sci-fi and I have some semblance of free time that I haven’t for a while, so I’ll explore this space for a while.