Home: Medianical Age

Medianical Age: Drifting through the tides of time

Origins

The Making of Medianical Age

Medianical Age is a fantasy and science fiction novel. The Spanish edition was published by LACUHE Ediciones in 2023 and the English edition in 2025. This is my first book with illustrations! One of them can be seen on the cover, which is a color illustration of all the main characters:

Medianical Age characters illustration

And inside, you will find some black and white drawings. Here is the first one, which depicts the deceitful surgeon falsely removing the stone of madness from the skull of Nogurd, the nobleman's son:

I would also like to show you the illustration of this distinctive shield, which has great significance in the novel and also appears inside the book:

When I designed the shield, I opted for a medieval-style dragon, that is, how fantastic creatures were represented in the Middle Ages. The drawing of a dragon in the illustrated manuscripts of the time could include anything from feathered wings to rooster feet. A very different graphic vision of dragons from what we have today. This coat of arms blends the concepts of the two eras in which the novel is set: the Middle Ages and the future.

But how did it all begin? I'll tell you below:

THE BEGINNING OF THE IDEA

The first ideas for this story came to me in 2009. I would like to point out that, from the beginning, they were always accompanied by drawings of the characters. I even made the pages of a comic book of what would be the beginning of the story. This is a picture of a notebook that I still have, where I jotted ideas and which still contains some documentation clippings. As soon as you open the notebook, you can see the date when I started writing down ideas, August 5, 2009:

However, the project remained in a drawer for quite some time, until in the year 2020 I decided to revive it, venture into redesigning the story and the drawing style, and give it the format of a novel with illustrations, as I never forgot about Medianical Age.

In general, the characters belong to the antihero category, and some of them are based on minority groups (Nogurd, Peccoth, Jimmy Joe), as you can read in the About the novel section. Below are some drawings of the characters from 2009, which were the first sketches for the designs, and the redesign of the characters today. For the redesign, I kept the essence of the old drawings and retained all the characters' names.

MEDIEVAL CHARACTERS

NOGURD

Since he was a child, Nogurd claims to have been visited by terrible creatures that only he can see, and which he is truly terrified of. The constant repetition of this situation leads to him being confined to one of the castle towers by his ashamed family. Nogurd is linked to the theme of madness, which during the Middle Ages was defined in a very negative way, and through him we also see the Theory of the Stone of Madness.

EDELYN

Edelyn is the wife of the feared Black Knight, an identity he gave himself to terrify his rivals, taking advantage of the association of black clothing with darkness and other macabre concepts such as death itself (especially in ancient times). She is a fierce lady, as one would expect, being the wife of who she is. An important characteristic of this character is that she is pregnant.

In the case of Nogurd and Edelyn, we see a reversal of the typical roles of female and male characters as they were portrayed in the stories of yesteryear. You will find these details in the novel.

RIPAZ

The son of the deceitful surgeon who promises to remove the stone of madness from Nogurd's head in order to cure him, or so he says... A young ruffian who tries to follow in his father's dubious footsteps, as he admires him greatly. In short, he is learning his trade. In the illustration on the cover, you can see that he is holding a stone.

PECCOTH

Peccoth is a member of the castle guard. When he arrived at the fortress as a boy, he became the only friend of Nogurd, a child who claimed to see terrible beings that no one else could perceive. He is also one of his guardians. He is a red-haired character, and through him, we see in the novel the absurdity of ancient beliefs about red-haired people, especially in the Middle Ages.

FUTURISTIC CHARACTERS

K-79

As the synopsis says, K-79 (Keith) is the visionary who has provided a solution to the world of science in the future: the construction of cyborgs from people who were about to die in the past, for different purposes, due to the shortage of humans caused by low birth rates. However, his ambition knows no bounds. Yet, even though he belongs to a distant future, he is the oldest character in the novel, as his first sketch, as shown in the image, dates back to 2004 (how dizzying!). I later included him in the 2009 version of Medianical Age.

LUDH

Ludh works side by side with K-79 in the construction of cyborgs, but while the former represents ambition, she advocates common sense. She thinks K-79's idea of bringing humans to the future is brilliant, given the needs of his time, but does she agree with his aims?

Both K-79 and Ludh wear white outfits, conveying the minimalism of the future and their connection to working on the same project. But I also wanted her clothes to convey her elegance.

JIMMY JOE JAMESON

Jimmy Joe is a cyborg from the future who lived in the Old West when he was fully human, the son of a Native American woman and a gunfighter. Having become an outlaw when he lost his entire family, through him we see some aspects of this period of the 19th century.

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This is the translation of an article about the making of the novel previously published on my blog title Medianical Age: A la deriva entre las mareas del tiempo. ¡Mi cuarta novela!