Subject Matter: Attempting to break the past

I mentioned in a previous post how I kind of wanted to break away from the licensed and history of toylines and create my own stories. I've noticed that just creating a light para-military team is a hard sell. People know GI Joe. Good luck getting people really interested in something else with other characters. Looking at Eagle Force, Valaverse, Operation: Recall, etc. Now, a friend up in Canada as well as one currently in Bangkok have asked for years, why not just do your own crew??? Now, I was writing stories based on GI Joe; particularly with the figures because I was doing diocomics. While I wasn't going to try to make money off it, I was happily doing what I wanted with the characters and to an extent, not destroying the rich and convoluted history/canon. (GI Joe has cartoons, movies, comic books, etc all feeding into it.)

Let's talk about Marauder Gun Runners. This was an independent company who started by making 1:18 scale weapons for 1:18 figures. At a certain point, they launched Marauder Task Force which were customizable military (collectible) military action figures. A lot of the early adopters were 'porting' over GI Joe characters into MTF format. I ended up doing that and at first, it wasn't received with open arms. It felt like people thought it was blasphemy. It took a few years for the toy community to chill on it.

The real point here is that I was making up MTF teams. For the most part, no relation to GI Joe or anything else. But there was references to GI Joe. Later, many GI Joe would join the Marauders Task Force (in my universe). This was a chance to do stories with all new characters! Yet, all I did was link them into the GI Joe universe. Well, sort of. The Desert Foxes were initially a GI Joe team that transferred over to Marauders. But the Desert Foxes were not a GI Joe property (even tho I used Hasbro heads for most of them). I had the Iron Fists (no relation to Warhammer 40k) which were my 1st (and they were built from the very 1st Kickstarter campaign that started this whole MTF thang!).

Skip ahead nearly 10 years, I had moved out of the diostory arena and into good old fashioned writing. One of the projects (I call them projects because if I bail on them, no big deal), I wanted to tell a story of a military crew whose name gets used in the Warhamer 40k universe. The World Eaters. The story would follow a crew who get manipulated, become more violent, and ended up hunted by the world for their actions. They started as the Marauders' Devil Dogs, later to become the War Hounds, and in their last manifestation, the World Eaters. The Demon Hunters are another Marauder group, tasked with hunting them down. They are already a hunter group; the World Eaters, in this form, are not actual demons. Kind of metaphorical. 

As I was writing the 1st story, it was definitely stand-alone in terms of lack of GI Joe or any other toyline influence. Except, the World Eaters belong to the 40k entity so I am kinda treading in copyright territory. These guys don't become 40k World Eaters, they only end up with the name. The premise is, people are forgotten, it's the titles and names that transcend the ages. I had this fun idea that when the Emperor created the War Hounds/World Eaters, he would have been sitting on his throne, thinking like he does all day and night... "I have a new chapter. They need a name. I seem to remember, in the history of the world, there was a particularly nasty military group called the World Eaters... And so shall this chapter be named. THIS I COMMAND!!!"

I don't really consider the Devil Dogs stories a 40k thing. Story 2, a couple characters from the GI Joe side come into play. But that will also be setting up for the 4 Horsemen project which will come after the World Eaters series (4 Horsemen will most likely take place at the same time, not actually after time-wise). Basically, will I ever write a pseudo-military story that stands on its own? Probably not!