Roswell, Texas, is a speculation of what Texas might look like in 1947, had Santa Ana died and Crocket survived at the Alamo, rather than the other way around. We can all speculate differently about how things would be different. This particular one assumes a more virtuous Texas than the one we have, and how some people’s lives can become very different because a better world was available to them.

I would like to correct an error in the comments. Judah Benjamin Rockwell is actually this universe’s analong to George Lincoln Rockwell, the notorious white supremacist who was a contemporary of Malcolm Little’s.

We thought it would be fun to take these three guys, who would have hated each other (and probably did) in our world, and make them friends as a result of the changed history.

Oh, and Lew Rockwell was not a founder of the Libertarian Party. There were about a dozen founders, as such but the guy who usually carries the credit is David Nolan.

Meir Kahane founded the JDL in our world. It’s not surprising that he’s a Ranger, since he successfully infiltrated the John Birch Society here.

Judah Rockwell is, I believe, supposed to be the father of Lew Rockwell, the founder of the Libertarian Party.

Wild Bill Bear is this world’s version of the two guys who were the detectives in The Probability Broach which I mentioned previously. In that world, Gallatin sided with the farmers in the Whiskey Rebellion and America never moved beyond the Articles of Confederation. That Bear was also in law-enforcement in their version of Denver.

Tom

Considering that in our world he’d be dead before 40, looks like a better deal for him.

Tom

As far as the cars and roads go, it’s also damn unlikely that Elliot Ness, T.E. Lawrence, John Wayne, Bette Page and Marie Curie’s daughter would all be searching for a Martian, too, now, isn’t it?

Parallel world stories are like that. I would rather that the folks involved did interesting things with Jerry Lewis than completely redesign a car (or motorcycle) from scratch every time one is to be portrayed. I’d call it economy of the fantastic. Stephen King once said that, when writing a fantastic story, eveything that is not part of the fantastic should be kept as mundane as possible.

And remember, everytime someone looks for realism in a Science-fantasy comic book, God kills a catgirl.

Tom

Smith throws a lot of libertarian theory into Roswell, as he did with his non-graphic novels. For a student of 20th Century history such as myself, there are some outrageously funny references. It’s not preachy for the most part, as some of his later books have been–the visual medium of graphic novel seems to be conducive to Smith showing the results of his theories, rather than shoving them down our throats with prose.

La Muse is less governmental-libertarian and more of a satire showing the various groups (religious, secular, governmental, medial) that are currently working to remove our freedoms and having the lovely heroine fuck with them both literally and figuratively. It’s very, very funny, as satire should be.

Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land did the same sort of thing for America in the early 1960s when it posited a young man with similar godlike powers who was raised by superior aliens–sort of a wolfling in reverse.

La Muse is a Savior. Both her comic and Stranger revolve around the question of whether or not humanity is ready for real freedom and, actually, What WOULD Jesus Do in our present-day society.

Tom