Midnight Rider · Backers & Collaborators
The Midnight Rider universe — for backers & collaborators. This page is unlisted; you were given the address on purpose.
Everything below is the whole map: fifteen issues in three arcs, plus the backstory arc held in reserve. Issue No. 1 of Arc One is written. The rest is the plan — a plan, not a promise.
About the artworkThe covers and artwork on this page are temporary placeholders — flat silhouette studies standing in for the real thing. They are not the official covers. Sandy Heron Comics is looking for artists, and the finished covers will be drawn by the artist who joins the book.
Arc One
Columbia, California, 1852. A working courier builds a business one night job at a time.
A miserable day’s work, one last job after dark, and three rules broken before sunrise. The day pays nothing; the night pays in dust.
The night work pays too well to quit. Chico starts choosing the dark on purpose — and charging what it’s worth.
Bigger jobs need more hands. The operation grows, and so does everything that can go wrong.
A client who lies, a job that doesn’t pay, and the wrong kind of attention. The business learns what it costs to be cheated.
The biggest job yet — one run that could set the courier up for good, or finish him.
Arc Two
A self-contained journey: the city of gold that every desperate man in California can suddenly see from his own hill.
Stories come north of a chief who covers himself in gold dust and washes it off in a sacred lake. Every myth has a man at the center of it.
In the telling, the man becomes a city at the edge of the map — and every faction in California wants the road to it.
Men who would shoot each other at home agree to ride together. The journey south begins.
Gold fever doesn’t care whose side you’re on. The expedition starts eating itself — and Chico feels it too.
At the end of the road, everything gets weighed: the gold, the cost, and what a man will trade for either.
Arc Three
The secret is out. Everyone knows the Midnight Rider is Murrieta — and California closes in.
Exposure turns a working courier into a legend at war. The rampage years begin.
The state raises a company of Rangers under Captain Harry Love, with one job: bring him in.
The gang is rounded up man by man — and every captured stranger swears he’s Murrieta.
Five men answer to one name. The law can’t kill a legend if it can’t find the man.
A head in a jar tours the state at a dollar a look. But legends don’t stay in jars — and neither, somehow, does he.
Arc Four — In Reserve
The prequel — the backstory the main series never shows. Murrieta’s mining days, when the old Chico Fernandez was still alive: the first Foreign Miners’ Tax, miners killing foreigners, sheriffs taxing men to death. California when it was still the elusive city of gold, and the making of everything the Rider becomes.
Held in reserve. If it is ever made, it will be the only place these stories are told.