Sideromandron?

What’s a Sideromandron?

Silver Strand Studios is putting in lots of hard work and lots of hours as 2020 comes to a close. I’ve got a lot on my plate, not the least of which is just doing my damnedest to pull this rudder up and keep my little baby business in the air. But it’s not all dirt underneath fingernails and elbow grease.

Sideromandron is the name of Silver Strand Studio’s first ever comic book series. I’m working to get issue #1 out as fast as humanly possible. I’m gonna need a LOT of help to do it, so please share this ALL OVER THE PLACE. We need to hype this to the moon and back, because producing a comic book is SUPER EXPENSIVE. We’re gonna take it to Kickstarter, like we did with Dozen Wonders: Fantasy Worldbuilding, but I’m going to need, at minimum, four times as much funding. But I think we can get there.

From the Greek sídero, meaning iron, and salamándra, meaning salamander, Sideromandron sort of means Iron Salamander. It’s meant to convey a robotic yet fire elemental tone, as the salamander often represents fire. It draws from Greek mythology, but is not meant to represent authentic Greek culture. I’m not from Greece, I’ve never been to Greece, or even Italy, but I’ll be in contact with people that are. Sideromandron is a book, at heart, about superheroes and space mechs fighting androids and alien gods and all that, but there’s so much going on beneath the surface. It opens up a vast universe that itself is still so very small when compared with the overarching, entropic expanse that is The Waybetween. The very first pages of Sideromandron #1 make it very clear, this isn’t just another superhero book. It peels back the layers of existence and you can see right away, I’m dealing with some heady concepts. It’s a ride. I hope you’ll come along with me!

I’ll leave you with this opening poem, of sorts. It’s these words that open the comic book.

It was nothing. She was. A great and vast and terrible nothing, and her name was never spoken. A void of immeasurable distance and depth. She was free of pain or want. She knew neither the passage of time nor the necessity of being. She was not.

It was a lie. He was a lie. She could not be nothing, could not be naught. She could be defined by what she wasn’t and therefore, paradoxically, became. This trick, this first among falsehoods, true as cosmic mathematics, he spoke it, he embodied it. His name is Coyote, but even that is a lie.

Their union bore two offspring: Creation and Destruction. By virtue of this magic, making something from nothing, She ceased to be nothing and therefore ceased to be at all. It could be said, she died during childbirth.

This is the truth of the universe. That nothing is always something, that destruction is brother to creation, and that illusion is the forebearer to all reality.