Volume 2 of Black Powder Red Earth is out and available on Amazon.com. As we’ve reported before, BPRE has been described as “Syriana meets Blackhawk Down”, though you won’t really get the full effect of that until the series is complete. (It was written and plotted in a cinematic fashion, so each successive issue will be faster paced and more dynamic than the one before.)
Jon Chang of Echelon Software is one of the creators of BPRE, and helped design the Facebook game of the same name. “The Facebook game was the first project, then the graphic novel,” he advises. “What’s interesting is that a lot of what you see in those first installments, events we wrote as likely, has occurred. It was originally projected theoretically, now it’s really happened. This is hard military fiction…there’s no overtly heroic actions or larger than life stuff, it’s as close as we can get to the complexities of what day to day operations are like in southern Iraq. So there’s a really realistic angle, it’s a compelling piece of work because it’s so believable and so accurate..”
The writing and artwork are excellent. You should consider checking it out.
You can check up on BPRE developments on their Facebook page or watch their homepage if you’d like.
-DR