Joshua Morgan
17 years ago - 1-year-old Joshua Morgan is kidnapped from his bed in Shamballah by Deimos, and hidden in Castle Deimos.
16 years ago - 2-year-old Joshua Morgan is magically cloned by Deimos. He is taken by Ashiya in a ploy to deprive Deimos of a pawn, and given to a woodsman's family to raise. He still wears his only possession; the wristwatch talisman of his father, Travis Morgan.
12 years ago - 6-year-old Joshua's adopted family is killed during the Theran siege of Shamballah. He moves into the city with the refugees of the war.
9 years ago - 9-year-old Joshua is chosen by thieves guild from the war orphan refugees in Shamballah for his speed and cleverness, becoming a pickpocket and sneakthief.
5 years ago - 13-year-old Tinder discovers that his mentor in the thieves guild, Darvin, is part of a conspiracy involving a man in the palace dungeons in an iron mask. He visits the man and is told stories of the surface world. Tinder frees him, and discovers that it is Travis Morgan, who kills the doppelganger that has replaced him and reclaims his place as the queen's consort. Tinder reveals that he has Morgan's watch talisman, and that he is Morgan & Tara's lost son Joshua Morgan.
The role of Joshua Morgan in the overall story of Travis Morgan is really, really hard to overstate. He's not a character that appeared a lot in the classic comic other than in a few key places, but his presence was felt throughout practically everything. The fact that we, the readers, knew of his existence while the characters didn't was played a such a classic trope of fantasy fiction, and it really stands out as a key part of this adventure.
Of course it's also probably the one thing we change the most in our take on this story, but I think our reasoning should be pretty clear.
Of course it's also probably the one thing we change the most in our take on this story, but I think our reasoning should be pretty clear.
|
Joshua Morgan's Comic History Joshua Morgan was introduced pretty suddenly in issue #15, when Travis and Tara are finally reunited after some time, and Tara reveals that she's given birth to his son (the issue does briefly mention that they'd actually been married back when they were last together, just so nobody in 1978 would worry anything pre-marital had happened). Such was the breakneck pace of the adventure of Warlord, however, that no sooner had the son of Morgan & Tara been introduced than Deimos suddenly appeared and stole their son away, prompting the parents to begin a whole new adventure to hunt for their lost child. This arc ends pretty wildly, and we basically kept all these events for our timeline, but try to keep up;
Deimos clones Joshua, then Ashiya steals the true child, leaving the clone in it's place. Deimos accelerates the growth of the clone to adulthood, magically manipulating him to fight Morgan, who goes through the rest of the series believing he'd killed his own son. |
|
Ashiya leaves Joshua with a simple woodsman's family, and later we actually see Morgan working with that same woodsman to save people from an invading army. After a big siege storyline, Morgan finds that same Woodsman dead and laments the tragedy, but of course he doesn't know that man was also the adopted father of his own son! We later see Joshua as a street rat surviving as a cutpurse in Shamballah, unaware that he's actually the son of the Queen, now going by the name Tinder. During the "Conspiracy" storyline, while Morgan is imprisoned in an iron mask, he winds up meeting young Tinder and telling him stories about the surface world... this is the closest Joshua ever came to reconnecting with his parents, but the story ends with him riding away from Shamballah.
Joshua's role in the story gets much bigger in the '92 miniseries, which is framed entirely around a young minstrel wanting to learn the truth of the legendary hero Travis Morgan. By the end, we realize this handsome young minstrel is actually Tinder, and the series ends with him traveling with Morgan, neither of them realizing who they really are to each other. In the new '09 series, they do finally discover the long-hidden secret... the moment Morgan dies. On Joshua's blade. Trying to stop his father from sacrificing himself to save the world. It is unbelievably, gloriously TRAGIC, and exactly the sort of end Grell probably always had in mind. Joshua picks up his fathers helmet, and becomes the new Warlord for the rest of the series. It's as fine an end of a fantasy epic as you might imagine, but of course we have an idea... |
|
|
Our Joshua Morgan StorySo this, more than anything else, is where we're really changing things up in the world of Skartaris and in the story of Travis Morgan. We have used every bit of the early stories involving Joshua, the entire lunatic sequence of events that lead to him being cloned, to Travis believing he's killed his son, and to Joshua being raised by a woodsman. We're keeping the death of his adopted family, and his time as a refugee and as a street rat... but we are pulling a big switch right there, in the conspiracy storyline, where in canon, Tinder rides away from the city and no one ever discovers that he is their lost son.
There are fun stories that happen after this point in the series, but overall, this is kind of the turning point. This is where Travis starts feeling like he's running away from Tara, and the big plot events coming up feel like they're happening just to extend the story. So instead, this is where we chose to let the story find a conclusion, and its in the most natural place in the world; with Travis actually reconnecting with his son. We're going to have Joshua grow up being raised by his parents. When our timeline closes, Joshua is 18, the Prince of Shamballah, and we imagine poised to have all sorts of adventures of his own in a world ready for a whole new story to unfold. |