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Wild Stars page art, shown above without text, are © copyright 2001-2015 by Michael Tierney.

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The WILD STARS go Digital!

The saga of the Wild Stars has always been on the cutting edge, from the first novelization in the Seventies that editors described as being "too edgey" to the comics that I printed in my garage in the Eighties, using die cutting and foil stamping techniques a full decade before the rest of the industry.

Wild Stars #1 Wild Stars #2 Wild Stars #3 Wild Stars #4 Wild Stars #4 Wild Stars #6 Wild Stars #7 Force Majeure: Prairie Bay #1

Wild Stars: The Book of Circles cover So it should come as no surprise to anyone that the Wild Stars have entered the Digital Age! All of the Wild Stars comics (click on any of the covers to be linked to the Little Rocket page at: www.mydigitalcomics.com. They are also availble on the Amazon Kindle Store where you can read the 25th Anniversary Edition of the Wild Stars: The Book of Circles -- Recalibrated collection, featuring a lot of extras not available in the print edition, including a complete gallery of all the color covers, inside and out, and discover even more of The Hidden Wild Stars. Hidden Wild Stars 1


The Hidden WILD STARS

Michael photo 2 by Michael Tierney

When first collecting the nearly three hundred pages of my Wild Stars comics into graphic novel format, I subtitled the package as "The Book of Circles," because this is a multilayered story. Once you get to the end, and the many mysteries are revealed, you can then go back and read it through again, seeing a layer of stories you might have missed the first time.

Hidden Wild Stars 2 A customer at one of my bookstores told me how he'd read the novel five times, and discovered something new each time. Even then, I was still able to show him things that he'd missed, because there are even more layers of:

The Hidden Wild Stars.

One layer that no one saw is how the entire story is in the format of a football game. After the pre-game talk, it begins with a whistle and ends with a gunshot by a man wearing a striped shirt, followed by a brief sudden death overtime period. This was a tale of time travel twice told, once in great detail, and once more in short form, just in case the reader didn't get it the first time.

Some hidden details in the artwork were added with the graphic novel, and aren't readily evident without a magnifying glass. But now that I've digitized the Wild Stars, which comes with a Zoom enlargement option, it's time to reveal some of these buried Easter eggs.

But most of the hidden details were in the initial comic book releases. We'll start with a couple that you might have missed.

One detail that you hopefully saw on the first time through came on Wild Stars #7 page 57(graphic novel page #279) where the Artomique Georgian Raveling mistakes the alarm on the Time Traveler Detection Device to be another bomb set by Colombian Drug Lord, Ernesto Mendez (who bragged way back in issue #3 about burning down a Fire Station). As the camera angle opens up to show the time traveling Keltic War Chief in the foreground, you can see Georgian and Tamara Piper bailing out of the car in the background. But you might not have noticed the homage that penciler Dave Simons paid to my bookstore, Collector's Edition, on the building behind them.

Hidden Wild Stars 3
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Issue #7 page 39 (GN page #262) shows the interaction between Alvin Phillips and Nanette with Carlton's old girlfriend, Shannon. But did you recognize the two men passing behind them? That's the Artomiques Achilles Hister and Genghis Champlain, who'd been meeting upstairs in the Crossroads hotel with the Brothan during the previous three pages, and are now leaving.

It's the only time throughout the series that you see them without their hats.

Hidden Wild Stars 6
Hidden Wild Stars 7 A couple of details that I added in the graphic novel stage go way back to the 1988 Wild Stars Volume Two #1 page 7. You'll need a magnifying glass or the Zoom option to see the detail I added on page #73 of the graphic novel. Yes, that's the Keltic War Chief Cormac Mac Kal, covered in mud and hiding in the supports beneath the building.

Hidden Wild Stars 8
Hidden Wild Stars 9 You'll need the magnifying glass again to see the details added to Volume Three issue #2 page 18. This page was originally drawn by David Brewer, but it was also intended to introduce characters not shown again until issue #6. So on page #109 of the graphic novel, I photoshopped in Dave Simon's rendition of hitman Bob Tyler in the first car in the first panel, and Lester Piper and his criminal crew inside the van in the second panel.

Hidden Wild Stars 10 Hidden Wild Stars 11
Hidden Wild Stars 12 Also on this page, I added some word balloons to explain why David Brewer drew Sheriff Honery Honorman and his deputies wearing one kind of hat, and Dave Simons drew them wearing another. And, yes... the Barbara on the Dispatch radio is Honery's girlfriend, Barbara, shown on page #32 of issue #7 (GN page #254).

Hopefully, the joke with the "Argenta City Limits" sign being followed by the railroad 'Proceed with Caution' sign you noticed the first time through.

One detail that really worked out and one that didn't

This alternate reality Artomique, Achilles Hister, was conceived in the stone circles of Stonehenge under specific stellar alignments by Adolph Hister and Eva Braun. When trapped in our reality, he started a search for the man who would be his father on this world: Adolf Hitler.

I first wrote Wild Stars back in the Seventies, and had originally intended for Hitler to be discovered alive. After a couple of decades passed, I finally had to drop an anchor in time and placed the story in the Nineties, tying it to the celestial event of the Shoemaker-Levy Comet's impact with Jupiter.

Hidden Wild Stars 13 By this time, I decided it was too late historically to have Hitler found alive, and instead had Achilles recover his corpse on page #45 of #7 (GN page #267), and then bargain the coffin over to his Russian allies.

A year or so after #7 was published, Russia finally revealed to the world that they did indeed have the remains of Adolf Hitler, which they claimed to have kept secretly buried for decades. This dovetailed nicely with the events in Wild Stars.

At the time when I was drawing the very first issue of the Wild Stars comic in 1984, I was playing a lot of poker and backgammon (dice have always been a friend of mine).

So, when working up the scene where Erlik was gambling with Carthage in an attempt to win back ownership of Old Atlantis, I chose Backgammon as the setting. To depict a stone that would represent ownership of a planet, I experimented with several designs, and finally ended up with the sparkling egg shape.

Hidden Wild Stars 14 A year or so after Wild Stars Volume One #1 was published, I was baby-sitting for my brother Tom and his wife, Francis, while they took a Caribbean cruise. In their VHS tape collection was a James Bond movie I hadn't seen; Roger Moore's Octopussy. I was shocked at the similarities in a scene where Bond won a Faberge Egg in a game of Backgammon. Doing some quick research, I found out that the movie came first.

This is why one hidden detail was never followed through on. If you look closely at the Backgammon board as I drew it, you might notice that it has five points in each section -- not the regulation six. The whole back story about how Carthage was so angry because he (incorrectly) thought Erlik had cheated, when Carthage himself was cheating all along, was dropped. (Addendum: This plotline was finally addressed and resolved in the sequel: Wild Stars 2: Force Majeure)

One story element that I intentionally left incomplete was the identity of the mysterious stranger who used mind control to manipulate Akara and the Wild Stars Armada, and then the Rogue Planet. He was only shown without his mask in a blurry siholette in #7, and while Daestar confirmed that the stranger "...was who you think," that identity was never said.

Hopefully it was obvious.
Wild Stars Volume 2

2014 Update!

All of the dangling sub-plots alluded to above are resolved in Volume 2 of the Wild Stars!

Click the image to the right or this link to see a preview page!

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All images and text are © 1984-2016 by Michael Tierney.
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