That Golden Age | Chapter 1.1

Dane is a new bouncer and entertainer at the retroclub Golden Age. On his first night, a customer pays for a private dance with one of the club's star performers, Des. The customer beats the dancer and flees before anyone can stop him.

In this first chapter, Dane takes Des home, and they get to know a little more about each other.

This comic has sex and violence, just how your momma likes it! This is the first book of "That Golden Age" series, set in a speculative future that you can read more about below.

An Age of Hope And Despair

At the dawn of the Second Renaissance, humanity was so deep in its collective despair that some did not believe a future was possible. With the certainty of civilization’s collapse so prevalent in the public consciousness, it took awhile for the realization to take hold: the solution had been found: autoevolution!

Suddenly, cheap genetic therapy and epigenetic tuning became a way an individual could transform their body. A person could change their skin color as easily as get their hair dyed. With computer modeling, even more radical changes could be made safely. More isolated communities took pride in customizing their features, with distinctive hues, shapes, and skin tones that nature had previously forbidden. Animal-inspired shapes and features became more common; an explosion of changes that made individuals seem like wholly different species.

The boldest eschewed conventional life altogether. Some chose to return to the water, adopting a more sea-friendly form, joining communities of like-minded individuals. Some became hardened and space-proof, orbiting above the blue marble that had birthed them, bathed in the light of cosmic radiation.

While all the physical changes continued, there was a sharp resistance, and insistence on preservation of humanity. Some feared the diversification, the lack of boundaries, the increasing strangeness of the faces and forms they saw. Every feature came to be considered to be a statement, a declaration of some sort of solidarity with a group.

As the unrest churned, the richest and most powerful took the opportunity to leave Earth and settle Mars. The great exodus sucked a tremendous amount of capital out of the remaining humanity, and the power vacuum has yet to be fully filled. Mars was terraformed and "the oceans of mars" became an idiom for an unlikely event.