From John Coleman, Author:
 
I’ve been a fan of superhero stories all my life. Despite my love of that genre, I’ve often been frustrated by how superheroes are handled in the big, shared universes we all know. Some flaws just seem inherent in superhero stories:

I want to tell a story that eliminates all that and allows superheroes to reach their full storytelling potential. I created Century, a multi-arc story told over 100 years, from 1941 to 2041. It’s also set in the fictional Century City, Maryland. It also involves a hero sent from the year 2041 to 1941 to change the past so that the dark world he knows does not come to pass. So, the title is a reference to multiple things.

The story is about the nature of power…who has it, who can use it most effectively, and what it can do. When our story begins in The Strange Second Life of the Cybersmith, it’s near the end of 1974. The world is already different than the one we know. And it will continue to change along the way. It always annoyed me that superheroes very rarely seemed to effect any actual change…they just put the flag back up on the White House, and then that’s that. The characters in Century will show us what it may have been like if people like this really existed.

Telling the story over a 100-year span allows me to draw on real-world events. For instance, what would have happened in World War II if superhuman agents had fought on each side? What would have happened if people had led the counterculture movement of the 60s with superhuman abilities?  What would happen to the Cold War if it became less about space and nuclear arms and more about a superhuman arms race? Some of the events we know from history will change or not even happen at all. For example, Pearl Harbor was a victory for the US. 

The 100-year span also allows me to have a large and diverse cast and use them to tell various stories through the eras. There are dozens of characters in Century. Each story will feature a specific cast and draw upon both the real-world climate of the time and trends within the superhero comic industry. These smaller arcs will be primarily self-contained and will have clear endings. Much like we all know how the myths of Hercules and Achilles end, the characters in Century will grow old and die, and their story will end. And others will then begin. I see all these characters much as those of the ancient Greek myths, where their stories are interwoven, and the hero of one tale could be the villain of another. 

In addition to an examination of power, the other major theme will be of choice versus fate…faith versus science. This theme takes shape in the form of our two main protagonists, Paradox and the enigmatic Cybersmith. These two have fundamentally different outlooks on the nature of their mission, and that difference will grow throughout the years and form the overarching story that will run throughout. The mystery will be slowly revealed over time as the series progresses.

Much like the myths of old, I see Century as a tapestry of stories, individual yet all part of a larger whole. The story's 100-year timeframe creates a dynamic that opens the possibilities that superhero stories have but rarely achieve. Using these stories to examine real-world power and concepts like free will versus predetermination will add weight to them that is often lacking in superhero stories. 

The story that begins in The Strange Second Life of the Cybersmith is a part of that tapestry. It’s a third of the way through the 100-year span, so we get strange glimpses of a past that never was. It starts us toward the middle, letting us establish past events as needed and introducing us to two of our main protagonists, Cybersmith and Paradox. 

Century is an entire shared superhero universe in one series.