It's been quite a while since we had an update here - for the most part, RailWalker is a labor of love that often takes second place to making a living...

2012: Final Prayer

RailWalker fans should look out for a new comics collection called 2012: Final Prayer.

According to some, the Mayan Calendar predicts the end of the world (or something like it) in 2012, and this anthology from Heske Horror, an independent publisher of horror comics, collects a variety of stories on that theme from a number of different of artists and writers.

The collection comes with two alternate covers - one intended for the US, one for the UK.

My own contribution, a short comics story called "Harkinton," is a tale of the aftermath of the apocalypse. Fans of the RailWalker At Rites series, or of Keys should be aware that this is not a tale of happy pagans dancing in the woods, nor of serious self-reflection... 2012: Final Prayer is a horror comic anthology, after all, so the story is a bit grim and violent. Brick doesn't appear as a character (though he is referenced), but there's another RailWalker involved...

What's that you say? Another RailWalker? See the section below on Wolf for more on that...

Reviews of the anthology have been good so far, and several reviewers singled out Harkinton for praise:

"Now this I would actually love to see as an ongoing series...Eagleson truly has a jewel at the tip of his pencil!"
          -Alex Rodrik, Comics Bulletin

"Duncan Eagleson kicks it off with a violent tale of the wandering, sword-wielding Harkinton..."
          -Rod Lott, BookGasm

"HARKINTON is a well written, beautifully rendered story..."
          -Sebastian Piccione, Project Fanboy

For several generations the warrior shamans of the Railwalker Order have ridden herd on the supernatural chaos that erupted in the wake of the Great Crash which came at the begining of what was then called the 21st Century. Today, they travel the Zones between the city-states, the only law there is outside the cities.

Bay City has been rocked by a series of brutal killings which the City Guard have been powerless to stem. Suspecting the killings may be the work of a supernatural creature, City Boss Micah Roth summons Railwalker Wolf and his partners Rok and Morgan to help with the hunt for the killer the newsfeeds have dubbed "The Beast." With some of the City Guard resenting the outsiders, and political factions within the city wanting to use the killings to their own advantage, the Railwalkers are working in a powder keg. Out in the Zones, Wolf and his companions have faced mutants and madmen, wild animals and even demons, but the Beast of Bay City is a type of predator the likes of which they've never seen before. To apprehend The Beast will take more than esoteric knowledge and skill at arms. Railwalker Wolf will be called upon to face his own private demons, and plumb the depths of the mystery and darkness surrounding his own personal history.

Earlier this year, I finally typed "The End" to the final draft of my first RailWalker novel. It isn't about Brick, although he's referenced as the founder of the Order, and will appear in one of the prequels I'm working on now. Wolf and the existing contemporary RailWalker tales will bookend an entire saga that's been forming in my mind, the tale of the collapse and rebuilding of western civilization, and the RailWalkers' part in that. Despite the fact that there's a metastory here, I've been careful to make sure each book stands alone, and does not require reading any of the others to understand it - no cliffhangers, no Continued in Book Two. I'm three books into the series, and not slowing down.

I don't have a publisher yet - one major paperback house has read Wolf and rejected it as "not fitting neatly into a niche market," so I'm currently still seeking a publisher, and representation.

It would be great to make the full text available to interested RailWalker fans, but I've been advised by those as should know that posting too much of the book on the internet could damage its prospects for getting picked up by a mainstream publisher. For those who would like a peek, the first two chapters are available here.

Flash intro pages have been done to death. They were cool when we first started using them - even if many of them were overdone. New to animating, I got caught up in the enthusiasm, and initially opened the RailWalker site with an 870K animated intro. But I noticed that after the first few weeks, even I bookmarked the second index page, so I could skip the animation. I decided enough, already. If you want to see the original intro, it's here:

RailWalker Flash Intro