I know exactly where I picked this one up: Right from the hands of Gene Ha at DragonCon 2020, while he was drawing me a headshot of Shock-Headed Peter from Top 10, the series that catapulted Ha's star and his Eisner count, justly so. Ha is like Colleen Doran, an artist who will work for the majors but has his heart in a self-written/drawn creator-owned series he's been thinking about for a while. Like Doran, Ha has bounced between publishers (Dark Horse, Lion Forge, and now Oni Press) trying to keep his dream project alive.



Doran's A Distant Soil began as a junior higher's attempt at Aquaman fan-fic; Ha describes Mae's origin as a fanfic riffing on Kyle Baker's 1990 graphic novel Why I Hate Saturn. Both Doran and Ha evolved their stories into kitchen-sink pastiches of all their favorite science fiction and fantasy concepts. For Doran, that means dozens of slang-talking characters with impossibly beautiful hair and clothing, sashaying around a crystalline spaceship. For Ha, that means dozens of slang-talking steampunkers and anthropomorphic animals like those in the cover above.

The basic story involves long-lost Abby Fortell, a young Indiana woman who has become involved in derring-do in a fantasy/steampunk realm. Her younger sister Mae and Mae's best friend Dahlia get dragged into the story by the appearance of an assassin squad in our world, which is similar to the first issue of A Distant Soil as well, but that's where those similarities end. Many characters are based on Ha's friends and acquaintances, including DoomRocket writer Molly Jane Kremer, who appears as Dahlia and wrote an issue about Dahlia facing down a date rapist at Purdue University, Kremer's alma mater.



The art starts in exquisite 3-D looking images for the first six issue arc...



... then turns into more traditional line art for the second six issues:



The story involves nonstop plot reversals, as the three co-eds have great difficulty figuring out which side in the fantasy realm is the "good guys," or at least the "not as bad" guys. They are all rather Mary Sue, with a high degree of techie skill, swordfighting prowess, rappelling up castle walls like a black ops unit, etc. The one who's on the floor being kicked full in the face in the panel just above will soon bounce back like the Energizer Bunny, not a bruise in sight.

Another nonstop element (also seen in Doran) is a torrent of genre references. The geeky trio speak in a stream of patois drawn from both otaku and American culture.



More surprising is a huge dollop of Czech language and culture as window dressing for the fantasy world of Cimrterén. This provides more opportunity for inside jokes, as in the Squirrel Girl movie poster on the wall of the Mark Waid-penned issue.



"Veverkadivka" is Czech for "Squirrel Girl," the series by Ryan North and Erica Henderson. Henderson signs her work "eh!" just as Ha signs his "ha!" In case you missed the joke, the larger scene has a squirrel in it.



Anyway, lots of interesting things going on in this series, and Ha is a champion for new indie talent, which makes his cause our cause.