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An ancient world of the future, DURRA is a planet of diverse species, dead cities, and a high technology so arcane that its own wielders don't know it from magic.

Battlers of Durra is the banner under which I'm creating a story setting for some of my own illustrations, books, and comics. It is inspired in no small part by He-Man and the Masters of The Universe, but hopefully goes sufficiently beyond homage or pastiche to stand apart as its own thing. 

Battlers doesn't just take inspiration from the story world of MOTU, but also from what that franchise was in the real world: an action figure line and its marketing apparatus. With Battlers I want to play with some ideas that this inspires, like:

• Characters that are designed to be toys
• A mindless cycle of violence that only exists to give those toy-characters a purpose, and
• Media "for children" designed by adults with no oversight or advice from experts in child psychology

More than anything though, it's important that this world be imaginative, fun ...and unafraid to be stupid.

Soulstone of The Ur-Lich

The first Battlers story is titled Soulstone of The Ur-Lich, and it will be presented as a children's 8×8 paperback. Playing with the idea of appropriateness, the content of the book will actually be more appropriate for adults while aping the narrative simplicity and aesthetics of mass-market tie-in paperbacks.

I loved these when I was a kid, and the MOTU minicomics, Golden Super-Adventure books, and Marvel Books of the 1980s are representative of an interesting cultural moment where some of the media being sold to 5-to-8-year-old kids didn't look much different from the covers of sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks aimed at adult readers. 

Here are some draft spreads from the upcoming book.

Animation

I'm planning on producing two animated "artifacts" of the "lost" Battlers of Durra Saturday morning cartoon:

• A 60-second intro/opening titles animation
• A 5-minute mini-episode 

Both of these, as one-person animation projects, will be fairly time-consuming. But, if all goes well, I'd love some day to produce a full 22-minute pilot episode for the show as well. Before any of this though, I'm producing some test animations to work-out the style and my process. The animation above is the first test piece. A ~20-second power-up sequence for Drok is currently underway.

Characters

One of the best parts of a project like this is creating a colourful assortment of heroes and villains to embroil in perpetual, pointless conflict. Here's a little gallery of dramatis personae [which will link to pages for each of these characters at some date in the near future!]