The Umgurai Saga was my first, and to date (September 2004) only major serial comic that actually got further than a few issues and wasn't solely a barrage of in-jokes to be passed between friends during high school.  It had its roots as such, but over the course of my three-year tinkering with the series, it grew and evolved, as did my comic-creation skills.  It may be a stretch to say, as my friend Matthew Beermann did, that Umgurai went "from Dick and Jane to Lord of the Rings" - and it's unquestionably a stretch to think that a comic few have even read since several years ago (when it wandered offline "temporarily" for some reorganization) deserves a page like the one you're currently reading.  But, so it goes.  For a long time, TUS was my singular project - my baby, my laboratory and my joy.  That it never had a proper ending still galls me somewhat.  It's unlikely to ever get one, so perhaps a page like this is the best sendoff I can produce.  Anyway, I haven't written an utterly self-indulgent and self-important blatherpiece on one of my own creations in a while.  I'm entitled.

This page is basically a lengthy summary of the Umgurai plot, with some commentary on my creation of the series - although I've tried to keep this to a minimum, as the only thing less useful than a synopsis of a comic you can't read is authorial reflection on a comic you can't read.  For fun and historical impact, I've added some pictures.

A logo for the comic's website from some time in 1998, definitely early Volume Three era.  For some reason Quartz is not wearing his glasses.  The black shape surrounding our characters is a mysterious symbol that I came to associate with the comic for no apparent reason.  This remains one of the series's great mysteries.
The Umgurai Saga concerns the adventures of three high-school students: Eric Retre, Andrew Odnem, and Matthew Quartz.  Each brings some unique qualities to the table: Eric is courageous and good-humored (though naive); Andrew is fabulously wealthy, an organized leader, and (later) a martial arts master; Quartz is bitter, calm, and brilliant.  Their high school, Chambury, is located (unbeknownst to them) on a "Nexus of All Worlds," where "odd things come together naturally."  Eric is perhaps one of these odds things; Quartz and Andrew are already an established team when, in the series' first issue, their absent-minded technology teacher (Mister Moby) places the three together to do video lab activities.

From left to right: Eric Retre makes a case for a plan; Matthew "Quartz" Quartz looks bemused; Andrew Odnem taking the leadership role.

This leads to a number of isolated, oddball adventures in Volume One (Acts 1-11): the boys battle oafish classmates (the so-called Army of Fools) who seek the seclusion of the video lab; befriend a dippy extraterrestrial salesman (Igasu); and occasionally find themselves lost in the devious webs of ambitious and iron-fisted principal Mrs. Wrathborne.  These ridiculous hijinks bring the team together and keep the story moving long enough for me to figure out how to draw them so they look the same from panel to panel.  All the while we become aware of larger mysteries that will eventually provide material for the later plots of the series - fortunate, since the Army of Fools material had a rather limited shelf-life.  A shadowy team of conspirators in funny outfits is seen from time to time, and the last issue of the volume, Act 11, introduces Indianuck of the Space-Time Cowboys, intergalactic stewards of the Nexuses of All Worlds.  The Space-Time Cowboys then drop out of existence for a couple of years before becoming remotely important again.

Scenes from Volume One, the visual crumminess of which is a major reason why Umgurai remains offline.  That, and I need to rescan everything at legible resolutions.
The short Volume Two (Acts 12-14) continues in this episodic spirit (chronicling the summer after our heroes' freshman year of high school), although by this point I was trying to focus on character development a little more.  For the most part, the events of this volume and its companion, the over-long, anime-reference-dominated Tokyo Story are irrelevant to the outcome of the series, although this is where Andrew acquires his martial-arts abilities, and the perenially useless characters Nic and Neko Ningen (a wiseacre computer and a wiseacre robot cat) show up. Also, the kids are firmly established as the heads of Quanerco, a vague corporation started by Andrew as part of his efforts to avoid being blotted out of existence by his sister in the family's inheritance wars.

Act 14: I discover ink and pretension.
Volume Three (Acts 15-36) consolidates much of what I had learned about comic-drawing and the Umgurai world after a hundred and seventeen pages of it.  The art remains crude for at least a while longer (some would say it never got better) but I was becoming more comfortable with pen and ink, and more importantly with writing plots that lasted longer than a single issue.  Ignoring a couple of filler issues, the lengthy volume (depicting, in some vague sense, the Quanerco kids' sophomore year of high school) can be broken up into several large chunks, most of which concern the activities of the villainous Tipsco Team, the shadowy conspirators from Volume One.  The Team consists of three former technology teachers - Mortimer Tipsco, Robert Hammer, and Al Bosco, who had a falling-out with Mister Moby many years ago when he refused to join them in using their newly-discovered superpowers for profit.  (In Bosco's defense, he was out of town while this all took place, and was turned to evil by Tipsco's misdirection.)  These three were joined by Doctor Goop, a gelatinous scientist with mysterious connections to Matthew Quartz's estranged father, Gendou Von Quartz.  The two apparently worked together on something called the Human Entropy Project shortly before the younger Quartz's birth.
Clockwise from top left: a reflective Tipsco, a spirited Bosco, an enraged Robert Hammer, and a quietly gleeful Doctor Goop. To this day I haven't thought of anyone more fun to draw.
Before Goop has a chance to explain all this, he is consumed in the fiery maw of a chemical behemoth called Liquid Evil.  Meanwhile, the mean-spirited and generally unredeemable Robert Hammer is banished to an "eternal cubicle" for incompetence.  This leaves the unbalanced team of Tipsco and Bosco, the latter increasingly convinced that he is not getting the whole story.  In the meantime, though, the Team, especially Hammer, manage to make a lot of trouble for our heroes, who survive the Liquid Evil incident as well as a double-whammy attack by Hammer and a reconstructed version of an old, safety-obsessed foe, Saber Sam (another former technology teacher, sealed away by the others in a safety poster before the big falling-out).

Cyber-Sam in a relatively lucid mood.  I always want to bring back this character, who was willing to engage in destruction and murder in the pursuit of textbook wood shop safety procedures.  He was more or less stolen from a set of educational comic books my real-life shop teacher had around.

These battles challenge the kids and baffle them as well, since the motives of their foes remain shrouded in mystery.  Their sleuthing efforts are interrupted by a day of shocking student riots at Chambury, provoked by the draconian policies of Principal Wrathborne.  As an indirect result of these events, Quartz is badly injured; meanwhile, Andrew stumbles upon a buried, forgotten past version of their high school, whose students still survive, trapped in the ancient world of 1991. The man who comes to lead this lost world, Archimedes "Archie" Davis, will gradually reveal layers of Wrathborne's evil that begin to connect her back to a larger, more cosmic plotline: she seized control of the school from the former principal (Archie's father) in order to steal his two power amulets.  She held on to one; the other was lost in the chaos and eventually found its way into Eric's hands.  The architect of this takeover is a masked and regal figure known only as Conrad. 

Left to right: Eric is beset by freakish clones; some vintage rappers prepare to tell Andrew the saga of the buried school in rhyme; Quartz lies bleeding, and his hands.

Soon after our heroes negotiate an end to the riots, the efforts of Bosco to undermine Tipsco bear fruit.  With his aid, the Quanerco boys are able to revive Doctor Goop (though for some reason they make no effort to restore him to a human body in the process); he and Bosco fill the boys in on the history of Tipsco and Moby's feud over technology education, but when Tipsco catches up with them an all-out battle ensues in Chambury's courtyard.  Things look grim for our heroes, but on a tip-off from Wrathborne, Conrad appears, strips Tipsco of his powers, and murders him for reasons which remain unclear, although it appears that for whatever purpose he seeks to protect the children.  This is the effective end of the Tipsco Team and Volume Three, ignoring a filler issue which establishes that the surviving Team members (Bosco and Goop) will remain friends and business associates with our heroes.

Conrad (left) casually incinerates Tipsco with some sort of "inverted-ankh" energy attack.
Volume Four (Acts 37-41) concerns the until-then-forgotten feud between Andrew and his sister, May Odnem, during the boys' summer vacation.  As May was a rather useless villain these stories reveal little (although the art has by now gotten about as good as it ever gets within Umgurai, barring a few really ugly moments).  There are some fun subplots, though, including another reappearance by Saber Sam (now the deity-king of a tribe of safety-obsessed islanders) and a run-in with Matthew's uncle, Würz Von Quartz, a phony in the employ of May.  May herself is (unbeknownst to our heroes) in the employ of a strange, dragon-like being later identified as Atticus, a Space-Time Cowboy who, like Conrad, apparently has an agenda in mind for Andrew, Eric, and Matthew.  In any case, the boys return secretly from their dangerous vacation and have a show-down with May, which ends in her apparent death when she blows up her own building; some unknown force (later revealed to be Conrad) spirits Andrew to safety and May into a mysterious imprisonment.

Typically obtuse dialogue between Atticus and May Odnem.
The final completed volume, Volume Five (Acts 42-48) returns the action to Chambury for a grand, much-heralded war with Wrathborne not far into the boys' junior year.  Wrathborne deliberately instigates another student rebellion so that she can have an excuse to unleash a vicious army of clone students created by her crony, mad science teacher John Napier Snodgrass.  Andrew, Eric, and Quartz of course throw their aid to the resistance and help turn the tide of battle, although one of Quartz's inventions overloads and destroys the school.  In the super-long special Act 48, the boys then make their way into the secret underground "belly of the school," with some guidance by Snodgrass, who doubts Wrathborne's commitment to his junk science.  Wrathborne observes it all, and draws the boys into a trap in her subterranean inner sanctum, even as her own underling Mrs. Leopard is seen fleeing the scene with none other than Würz Von Quartz; both fear the imminent arrival of Conrad, who destroyed Würz's island some time earlier.

Eric, Quartz, Andrew, and Snodgrass infiltrate the Deep of Chambury.

In any case, the kids are nearly overwhelmed by Wrathborne, as she wields not only the power amulet but a super-powered clone (trained, it was never revealed, against May's super-soldier The Weapon, provided to Wrathborne by Conrad at some unspecified point).  Through force of will and strength of conviction, Eric is able to trump Wrathborne's amulet-power and she is defeated.  Just as the entire complex is about to be destroyed in a self-destruct blast, the office is crowded by the arrival of Conrad as well as Atticus and his Space-Time Cowboys, all of whom seek the two amulets present.  The blast goes off and the kids are presumed dead by Mister Moby and Bosco (for some reason made the new principal of the school).

Eric and Wrathborne expressing their philosophical differences.  This is one of many cases in which Eric's personality and plot was derived from the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind comics by Hayao Miyazaki.
Volume Six was not really recognized as a separate volume at the time, but for all practical purposes the end of Act 48 marked the passing of Umgurai into its final plotline, so we'll recognize Volume Six as of now.  Acts 49-50 were all that saw completion; they depict the boys on the faraway home planet of the Space-Time Cowboys.  They learn that Conrad is an interstellar criminal dedicated to stealing all the power amulets (there are three - Eric has one, Atticus another, and Conrad, since Wrathborne's death, the third).  It is also apparent that the amulets at Chambury were stashed there possibly milennia earlier by Conrad, to evade pursuit by the Cowboys, with whom he had a falling-out over an unspecified radical plan that somehow involved the amulets.  Meanwhile, Gigo, a strange psychic gadfly who has all along been harassing Matthew, appears in the flesh as a Space-Time Cowboy working under Atticus.  The Umgurai Saga hits an abrupt non-conclusion in Act 50, with the boys preparing to take a long spaceship voyage back to Earth and Gigo carrying on a secret conversation with none other than Atticus's apparent archrival Conrad.

Eric and Andrew hanging out on Planet Frenredeh near the end of the series.  Don't mind the line running straight through Eric's foot.
What happened?  Life, mainly.  Production of Umgurai issues slowed dramatically by Volume Five; this can be partially attributed to the greater amount of work I was putting into the art and storytelling, but the numbers are pretty brutal.  A few examples - Act 35 took around two weeks to complete.  Act 49 took just over four months.  Act 50 wasn't completed for another year!  That's quite a slowdown, and I assure you that most of that time wasn't spent slaving over layouts.  I was having trouble focusing on the work in front of me, in part because I had by this point developed such an elaborate plotline for the conclusion.  What was ahead always seemed more intricate and interesting than what was currently going on; this was exacerbated by the fact that Acts 49 and 50 were both mostly exposition (flashbacks and so forth).  Not exactly killer material.  And for all the excitement I had for the final chapters, they threatened to be insanely complicated to work out the details of and make into coherent comics.  At some point I just ran out of steam; in any case, by the time I finished Act 50 I was in college, out of suburbia, and developing a much more active social life.  The time involved in drawing comics was prohibitively substantial, and I never picked up the pen on Act 51.

As to what the final plotlines were to involve, I'm kind of hesitant to get into it.  The accumulated plotsam and jetsam amounted to a variety of scattered files around my hard drive, many of them chat logs which it's necessary to read in chronological order if you want to understand anything.  In other words, I sort of remember how the ending was supposed to go, but in order to provide the satisfying details that were going to make it worth it - explaining how Conrad and Atticus related to everything that had gone by over the previous three years of comics, and what the hell Conrad's diabolical plan was anyway - I'd have to read a mountain of over-ambitious gibberish from five years ago.  I can't quite muster it, not yet.

And anyway, there's always the chance that I might finish the thing someday.  It's a small chance, but you never know...

Extras coming soon....  maybe.

Special thanks to all who supported me through the Umgurai process, including my family as well as the loyal readers: Justin Purdy, Matthew Beermann, Pat Burns, David Uzumeri, EBJ, and others I'm no doubt forgetting.  You guys helped make it worth it.  Peace.

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