Stargate: Insurrection #4 – PizzaRat dot Net

The cover for the fourth issue of my toy comic series, “Stargate: Insurrection,” showing the principal characters (from left to right, Colonel William Stryker, Dr. Randall Stryker, Major Ellen Cooper, and Anthony Cage) running away from an open Stargate, one which has green tentacles crawling out of it, and an iris that looks more like a vortex that would suck you into hell if you got too close. The text, “A toy comic by Phil Wrede,” is visible on the lefthand side of the image.

A page devoted to summarizing the events of the previous three issues. The text reads, “Previously on Stargate: Insurrection - Stargate Command is being forcibly shut down by the U.S. government! Everyone in the Cheyenne Mountain complex is now under the eye of… Tech billionaire Alexander Weir (no relation to Dr. Elizabeth Weir)!” Alexander Weir is “played” by an action figure of Walton Goggins. The text continues, “Colonel William Stryker and the last free SG team barely escaped ahead of Weir’s incursion! On a mysterious alien planet, they made one friend, Anthony Cage, and some enemies! Cage calls them ‘The Eldritch,’ and they are not happy hosts! In a moment of crisis, Cage revealed his own Eldritch form to the team, but his magic abilities weren’t enough to save Lt. Matt Wright! Fatally wounded, Wright let Cage drain his remaining life force, to power the team’s escape from the unceasing Eldritch horde…”

Inside of Cage’s cabin, hidden in the woods, Cooper and Randall both pepper Cage with questions about the nature of the apparent planet-wide network of Stargates (which all previous gate behavior has indicated was impossible).

After some discussion, Cage eventually agrees to tell the SG team about the history of his world, which will include explaining how the gates work.

As a flashback begins, Cage starts his story with a group of wandering humans on yet another unnamed world (this group includes action figures of Carrie-Anne Moss, Michelle Rodriguez, and Harrison Ford). They found a gate during their wandering, and they didn’t know what it was.

One of the humans sat before the DHD (“Dial Home Device”) for two days, according to Cage, before he was able to activate it. The jewels in both the DHD and the gate glowed green, rather than red.

The human who’d activated the gate was the first to walk through it, and it took him to Cage’s planet, where he and the SG team are right now.

Eventually, the rest of the wandering humans followed their leader to Cage’s world. As they looked around, trying to get a sense of where they were, they didn’t know that this world was watching them!

We interrupt Cage’s story to return to events on Earth, at Stargate Command within Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs. The soldiers of the government shutdown team hold their guns on General Jack O’Neal (“played” by an action figure of Pedro Pascal), Richard Woolsey (an action figure of Robert Picardo), and Sergeant Louis Jones. They stand in the embarkation room, before the inactive Stargate (which broke in earlier issues, and that breakage is directly responsible for Stryker’s team emerging from the gate on an unknown alien planet).

Woolsey and O’Neal figure out that Weir’s soldiers can’t get the Stargate to work, and so he needs their help.

Woolsey attempts to rush the Stargate, in a fit of rage, but O’Neal and Jones hold him back. Weir is greatly entertained by their resistance to his orders.

As he adjusts his tie, Weir observes that he knows he can make his prisoners follow his orders, because they believe in the work done at Stargate Command, and they can’t give up what they believe in. At the bottom of the page, we return to Cage’s story about the history of his world; the wandering humans look up into the sky, and see a great and terrible portal opening above them (it looks rather like the portal on the cover of the issue, in fact).

Silhouettes and shapes are glimpsed within the portal; one of the humans tries to run away, but he’s stomped on by a giant, inhuman foot.

Several bipedal figures - Eldritch gods - finally emerge from the portal (including action figures of Angelina Jolie and Kathryn Hahn), who quickly transform into Eldritch monsters, much like Cage and all the people on his world.

The wandering humans are terrified, and try to run, but they’re quickly captured.

Cage skips ahead in time, explaining that once the Eldritch had bent the wandering humans to their will, they sent them through the gate to other worlds, whose populations they’d capture and bring back. They’d also somehow bring back the Stargates from those other worlds, and established the planetary network that way.

The Eldritch wiped the glyphs from every Stargate they obtained, rendering them utterly useless for interplanetary travel.

We return to Cage’s cabin as his story concludes. Cooper found it an interesting tale, sure enough, but her primary concern is getting back to the village where they met Cage, so that the SG team can retrieve Lt. Matt Wright’s body. Cage is unwilling to return immediately.

Cage and Col. Stryker agree that they need to give the Eldritch in the village time to let their guard down. Randall points out that he’d like to eat sometime before they saddle up for a return trip.

Conversation about food leads to still more detail from Cage about his world. Apparently, he’s a genetic anomaly; most people on his world have little to no free will, and live their lives as effective extension of the Eldritch gods’ will. He (and, presumably, others) does not.

Cooper worries that this means there’s a hive mind, one that could be watching them right now, but Cage tries to calm her, saying that he’s been ostracized and is all but ignored. The rule of the Eldritch gods has never been challenged. Randall says the name of the comic in dialogue when he remarks, “Not that we’re here to lead an… insurrection.”

We alternate between Cage and Weir in the final page of the comic. Cage implores the SG team to help him free his world. Weir monologues about how he wants to bend Earth to his will (and, presumably, the other worlds that can be accessed through a working Stargate).

The credits for the comic, citing the Unsplash users whose photographs were the background art (as well as the U.S. National Archives, and the Extreme Sets cabin set), the use of fonts by Blambot, the creators of the Stargate film, and the SG-1/Atlantis TV series, the ownership of the Stargate IP by Amazon Studios, the use of stock visual effects by Action VFX, and that the figure (and certain background) photography/script/lettering were by me, Phil Wrede.

If you’ve been reading my Stargate toy comic, and patiently awaiting the reveal of the secrets of this strange, unnamed world upon which our heroes have gotten stranded… Congratulations, your patience paid off this month! I hope it was worth the wait; I know I had a lot of fun piecing together the elements of Anthony Cage’s tale (the story elements and the photographic elements, both – I got to dig deep through my action figure collection while looking for just the right “cast” for this issue).

As I’ve mentioned before, I really enjoy the horror elements of both the Goa’uld and the Wraith’s introductions in SG-1 and Atlantis, and I’ve been trying to meet that bar with the Eldritch here in Stargate: Insurrection*. It didn’t actually occur to me until I was doing my last lettering pass for this issue, but the Eldritch are kind of a pastiche of the Wraith and the Goa’uld, aren’t they? Hopefully, now that I’ve realized that, I can use that realization to play with/meet/subvert expectations for their behavior in the future!

In the blog post for the last issue, I credited the GI Joe Ghost Viper’s demon snake head with a chunk of the inspiration for this comic series writ large, but even then, I knew I wanted to have my own particular brand of foe for it. The universe is so vast, there would always be new civilizations to antagonize/befriend, no matter how far out you go (even if many of them look vaguely human).

*I always enjoy hearing the name of the show, or the movie, in the dialogue of the show/movie, a la James Cromwell’s beautifully awkward line in Star Trek: First Contact. I hope somebody else found that moment in this issue as charming to read as I did to create!

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