Gonna be doing something different this week since it is (as of yesterday, the 14th of April 2024) the 20th anniversary of my website pole-land.com (which now simply redirects to this site) and the genesis of what eventually became A Distant Sky.

Pole-Land began as a collaborative project between myself and a group of my friends from high school, long before the advent of web 2.0 and the content-driven era of the internet; we wanted a cool hangout space for our own to chat and work on art in, and what better place than our very own top-level domain name?

Of course, given that we were all teenagers in high school, we didn't exactly hit the ground running and in fact over the last couple of decades I made several unsuccessful attempts to actually get the ball rolling on the original story concept, back then titled Foreign Policy.

I made a concerted attempt in 2014, the 10th anniversary of the website, to actually get the story off the ground (which you can see preserved here), which is where the middle designs are from; meanwhile the 2004 designs are my best attempt at rendering the earliest concepts for these characters as they existed right out of the gate, though they are gonna be... pretty indicative of how smooth my brain was in high school.

I am not particularly proud of the fact that Walt used to literally just be Rorschach from Watchmen, but again, high school.

Watch this space for more nostalgic ramblings!