OMAR SALIH & JAMES McCRONE TAKE HUMANITY TO THE BRINK IN EXTINCTION WAR | PODCAST #767

WEPA, Crusaders! Omar Salih and James McCrone join me for Comic Crusaders Podcast #767, and this time your boy actually got inside Extinction War before the interview. What initially sounds like a massive humans-versus-monsters sci-fi war gets considerably more complicated once you realize humanity helped create damn near every problem it’s currently trying to survive.

Extinction War #1: Sequence 01, Operation Thronebreaker introduces a future where unchecked scientific ambition, corporate greed and ecological collapse have already helped wreck civilization. Genetically engineered primates created by humanity survived the fall, broke free of the limitations placed upon them and eventually came to control the fertile Green Zones, while surviving humans struggle for resources in contaminated Red Zones. Humanity wants its world back, but after reading this first chapter, I’m not convinced the book wants us blindly cheering for either side.

That’s where this conversation gets fun. Omar and James take us into the thinking behind this world, its military action and the challenge of making a giant science-fiction conflict feel personal. We talk about Operation Thronebreaker, the visual language of a broken Earth, how much world-building is too much world-building, and why the primates are far more interesting when you stop treating them like generic invaders and remember exactly who created them in the first place.

Then Extinction War starts getting WEIRD. Xenoparticles and experimental technology enter the equation as desperate people begin pushing scientific boundaries that probably exist for a damn good reason. I’m leaving the results alone because there’s a sequence in this book that deserves to be experienced without somebody explaining it first. What we CAN talk about is the morality behind it, the suffering hidden beneath all that cool science-fiction imagery, and whether the real monster in this universe might be the belief that everything can be controlled if humanity just builds a powerful enough machine.

We also get into characters like Shadi Farnleigh, the younger generation inheriting this disaster, the mysterious idea of the Earthborn, and the introduction of A.T.L.A.S. Prime near Callisto, which makes it clear that Omar isn’t building a tiny story. There are different pieces of humanity scattered across this universe, competing ideas about survival and a much bigger picture beginning to emerge behind the war on Earth.

Beyond the pages, Omar and James give us the creator side of the story: collaboration, independent publishing, crowdfunding, marketing and what happens when you discover that creating your own comic also means building an audience and a business around it. Omar is bringing his first creator-owned comic into the world, and we’re catching this team while the universe is still being built instead of ten years after everybody knows how the story turned out.

Read the six-page preview and discover Extinction War at ExtinctionWar.com. You can also join the official Discord, follow @extinctionwar on Instagram and Threads, @extinction.war on TikTok, and connect with the project on Facebook. Check out the book, support independent comics and tell them the Crusaders sent you.

THE CRUSADE NEVER ENDS! WEPA!

Website:
https://extinctionwar.com
Discord:
https://discord.gg/BT4UGry7dN
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/extinctionwar/
TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@extinction.war
Threads:
https://www.threads.com/@extinctionwar
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/share/19Jh49yjAg/