The Broken Light is an ongoing webcomic that began in March 2010. It is predominantly set during civil war-era America, although there are no guarantees it will stay there.
This project came as a surprise to me… when I was in school the civil war was about the most boring subject I could think of. It was a lot of marching and names of generals, dates and battles. This is a terrible way to teach history. Nobody talked about the hookers, the women who went into battle as men, the abominable prison life, the child laborers, the poor southerners, the black organizers who assembled revolts, the riots, and Harriet Tubman was just a paragraph leading people to slavery in stiff prose rather than explained as the greatest American who ever lived and one of the greatest women who ever lived.
The civil war is possibly the most fascinating, violent, and defining periods in our nation’s history. It has turned into a mythological time, without real people and simmered down to a simple fight of ideals, but it is so much more. As far as the nuts and bolts of the comic, I was inspired by Samurai Executioner and the way Edo period Japan was given a real face, embracing this mythical time with fictional characters and I felt as though I could treat the civil war in the same way. As a result, most of the characters are fictional, but some are real and some are conglomerates.
If you would like to use any of the artwork or commission an illustration, please email Sabin at: presspermanent@yahoo.com
