Rise of the Cyber Emus
Original comic written and Illustrated by Anthony V D’Agostino
Follow the adventures of Steel Beak Squadron as they take on the fierce Iron Wallaby Federation in the Australian Outback!! With this book I was able to experiment with a digital collage style, with tons of texture. Flip through the book here, or check it out on Webtoon!
Process
from a character design class, it took the better course of a year to develop
these characters into my first original comic. Inspired in part by the ‘Great Emu War’—a real military operation in 1932 in which the Australian government attempted to combat its own national bird—this project draws from a famously failed effort to cull the emu population in order to protect farmland. The campaign revealed just how fierce and resilient emus are: capable of withstanding multiple rounds from machine guns and sprinting at speeds of over 30 miles per hour.
From that Idea I spun off three fierce Emu warriors to be my main characters, setting them as cybernetic soldiers who were waging war on the Iron Wallaby Federation, the former nation of Australia under the control of an AI overlord. Once the foundation of the story was in place i could go and start designing just how this world might look!
“If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world…They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.”
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Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery
Original Iterations
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