By the summer of 2019 I was utterly exhausted by the Pop-culture War, having seen most of my beloved franchises torched into burnt-out husks by Post-Modernism, Nihilism, and Identity Politics. Disney had turned Star Wars into the cinematic equivalent of fast food, CBS had taken the intelligent optimism of Star Trek and twisted it into a mean-spirited and poorly written parody, and the BBC had essentially told generations of Doctor Who fans, “We’re taking this away and giving it to someone else because you don’t think like we want you to.”

I had given up on comics and superheroes years before, but they were faring no better. Though Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns had been catalysts in making me the storyteller I am today, they had also turned the paradigm of the four-color superhero on its head. Attempting to emulate (or flat-out copy) these seminal works, an ensuing generation of writers and artists embarked on the systematic and industry-wide deconstruction of the hero.

And I had grown bone-tired of it all.

So, as I sat in a local auto dealership waiting on a factory recall, I brainstormed and doodled in my notebook. I set out to recapture what I had always loved about heroic storytelling and genre fiction. Naturally, I had to go back to the beginning—my earliest childhood heroes. Who were they and what about them had fascinated me at such an early age, why were they essentially timeless?

The Lone Ranger. My dad has always been a big Western buff and, like most of my tastes in fiction, I inherited that from him. As a child of the 1970s, my favorite toys were the Lone Ranger and Tonto action figures from Gabriel. I watched the old reruns of the Clayton Moore TV show and was ecstatic when the Saturday-morning cartoon finally came along. Even more so when I found out about the live-action movie in 1981, which I saw at the local drive-in theater when I was eight years old. I remember begging for the film novelization, and then having my dad go through and mark out all the “bad words” so I could read it.

But what was it about the Lone Ranger that so captivated me? Was it the blue suit and the twin six-guns, the mask? Probably. But I think it was also the fact that he was the Good Guy, so much so that he wouldn’t even kill the Bad Guys. No matter how much harder it made his life, the Lone Ranger always did the right thing.

The Bat-Man: Like a lot of folks my age, one of the earliest memories I have of Batman comes from the Saturday-morning Super Friends cartoon. Another, of course, is from reruns of the old Adam West TV show. These incarnations share almost nothing in common with the grim and gritty Dark Knight of modern times. When I was a kid, Batman was the hero with the best gadgets and the coolest vehicles, but he also smiled and made jokes. And though there was plenty of Bang! Pow! Zap! action, as often as not, the Caped Crusader used his wits to beat the Bad Guys before sharing a laugh with Robin and Commissioner Gordon.

Captain America: I’ve always loved medieval knights even more than old-west cowboys. With his shield and chainmail shirt, Captain America seemed like the Marvel Universe’s version of a modern-day knight in shining armor. As I got older and began reading his comics, I found that the comparison extended to his ethos as well. Cap, like the Lone Ranger, is the quintessential Good Guy. He’s also a soldier, like my father and my grandfather, so I appreciated the military aspect of his character—the rigorous training and discipline, the drive to exceed one’s personal limits.

And though Buck Rogers had done it decades before, Captain America is also a man out of time. He’s a Greatest-Generation character living first among the Baby Boomers, and now adjusting to Gen Xers and Millennials. Yet, in his mind and in mine, the Right Thing doesn’t have an expiration date.

The Phantom: One of—if not the very first—costumed crime-fighters. Another two-gun hero in a mask on a white horse. A man with a mysterious origin and a legacy of immortality. A legendary man who fights pirates and corrupt governments. But a living, breathing man all the same. The fact that the character’s mystique is built on family and lineage makes the Phantom a believable human being. We know that the man in the mask will die someday, but the Phantom and what he stands for, what he fights for, what he believes in will live on. And the Bad Guys secretly tremble in that knowledge.

So, where to take this amalgamation of Wild-West lawman, urban crime-fighter, super soldier, and jungle legend? Why, SPAAAAAACE of course! (Yes, Space Ghost was another obvious influence.)

Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are Sam Jones and Gil Gerard in my mind, not Larry “Buster” Crabbe and well, Larry “Buster” Crabbe… though I have watched some of the serials. But the proto/sub-genre of the ray-gun and rocket-ship has its fingerprints on everything from Forbidden Planet through Star Trek and Star Wars all the way to Farscape, Firefly, and The Expanse. We, as human beings, love the notion of exploration, of reaching out to see what’s “beyond.” Infinite space will always be that, the carrot forever out of our reach. And that is why space adventures will always appeal to us in one form or another.

The Last Star Warden is a Good Guy. He is a lawman dedicated to doing the Right Thing, even if the modern worlds around him don’t necessarily know what that is. He’s a mortal man, alone in this quest save for his friend and one-time enemy, Quantum. The Lone Ranger had Tonto, Batman had Robin, Captain America had Bucky (and later The Falcon), and the Phantom had Guran. The Last Star Warden has Quantum, an interdimensional alien with a mind like a supercomputer. Together they battle the Bad Guys, wherever they find them. They’re soldiers fighting The Good Fight.

In SPAAAACE!

The Last Star Warden