The Long Way to Ankhara — AltWorld Comics

Same Name. Different Universe. Different Problem.

Years later, AI video generation opened another door for me.

That became AltWorld Cinematics.

At first, I experimented with stories using existing characters and universes.

DC vs Marvel.

Mortal Kombat vs Street Fighter.

DC Civil War.

DC Legacy.

Alternative stories. Crossovers. Different versions of worlds and characters I already knew.

And eventually, inevitably, I wanted to build my own superhero universe again.

So I resurrected the name:

AltWorld.

But I didn't resurrect the old mythology.

No gods this time.

A meteorite crashed into Earth. Some people developed superpowers. Governments reacted with measures that were perhaps a little too extreme.

And a man named Doctor Zero began gathering some of these powered people into a team to help others like them.

The easiest description of what I had in mind was:

X-Men meets Smallville.

And this time I didn't run into the Gaia problem.

I ran into reality.

Sometimes the Medium Says No

The AI video technology available to me simply wasn't capable of producing what I had in my head.

And there was another constraint:

I had to do it at essentially zero cost.

Those two things together eventually made the project impossible to continue in the form I wanted.

A story can exist perfectly in your imagination and still be impossible to produce in the medium you've chosen.

So AltWorld went back onto the shelf.

Again.

But the need to create something didn't.

Maybe I Needed to Learn How to Publish First

Then came AltWorld Comics.

I had wanted to publish comics for a long time.

That's why I called it AltWorld Comics rather than the more general AltWorld Publishing.

And this time, instead of beginning with the enormous dream, I asked a much smaller question:

What is the fastest, least demanding way to actually publish something?

That question led to Fantomah Remastered.

We made it. We published it. It even made a couple of sales.

That mattered.

Not because a couple of sales changed my life. They didn't.

But something had gone from an idea to an actual published product.

So naturally, the next question appeared.

Could we make something original?

That became Dark Tales.

Then another question:

What would something more literary and text-driven look like?

That became KnowAll.

There were a few other experiments along the way—mostly attempts to answer the eternal question of “Could this actually make some money?”—that probably weren't particularly necessary.

But even those taught us something.

And eventually, after trying different formats and different ideas, we came back to what we actually wanted to do.

Fantasy.

A world.

A story.

Then Ankhara Became Possible

By this point, we knew our limitations.

That sounds negative.

It wasn't.

It was incredibly useful.

We knew what the technology could do. We knew what it couldn't do. We knew our financial limits. We knew what we could realistically produce.

We had published things. We had experimented. We had failed at things.

And somewhere along the way, I had also learned that limitations don't necessarily restrict creativity. Sometimes they give creativity a shape.

So I went back to that old world.

Not literally. I didn't simply open the old AltWorld files, change the names, and call it Ankhara.

But the bones were still somewhere in my head.

Four Elemental Gods. The Elemental War. Three gods uniting against Fire. Fire being wounded. The possibility that something could kill a god. A place that had once belonged to Gaia and would eventually echo in the place where Tuth lived.

Old ideas returned.

But now I knew some of the mistakes they had created the first time.

And this time, Ankhara worked.

We started building it knowing our technical limitations and our financial limitations from the beginning.

About six months later, Chronicles of Ankhara: Quest for the Godkiller was ready to be published.

The Lesson I Had to Learn Twice

Looking back, there's something I find amusing about the entire journey.

One of the first things stories ever taught me came from morning cartoons:

Reality doesn't have to limit imagination.

Years later, after trying to build worlds of my own, I had to learn the other half:

Imagination still needs rules.

Fantasy doesn't have to be realistic.

There can be gods. Magic. Impossible creatures. Ancient weapons. Things that could never exist in our world.

But once you decide how your world works, the story has to respect that decision.

Fantasy doesn't have to be realistic. But it has to be true to its own reality.

And there is another lesson that brings me back to that blonde girl with blue eyes.

When I was a child, stories gave me permission to imagine things.

I don't want to take that permission away from my readers.

I want to build Ankhara. I want to give it history, rules, characters, conflicts, religions, myths, kingdoms and mysteries.

I want to give you enough to see it.

But I don't need you to see exactly the Ankhara I see.

In fact, I'd rather you didn't.

Because one of the things I've always loved about books is that the writer doesn't create the final version of the world.

The reader does.

The writer starts the picture.
The reader finishes it.

And somewhere between those two versions—

that's where Ankhara lives.

This is Part One of the story behind Ankhara. A future Part Two will look at what happened once we decided to actually build the world: the rules we set, the things we deliberately did differently, the problems we wanted to avoid, and the decisions that eventually shaped Chronicles of Ankhara: Quest for the Godkiller.