Jack Steel

What it was

Squadron Leader Jack Steel and the Starblade was an audio adventure serial produced under the It's A Trap! banner — twelve episodes of pulp aviation derring-do, recorded with a cast of actors and released as a podcast between 2008 and 2013. Alongside the episodes ran Starblade Unsheathed, a behind-the-scenes companion show, and this blog, which tracked casting, recording, artwork and release week by week.

Why it existed

The blog existed to give the serial somewhere to live between episodes — a place to post the recording updates, the artwork as it arrived, and the small announcements that make a production feel like it's moving. Reading it back, it is as much a record of making the thing as it is a feed of the thing itself.

What I learned

That audio is a generous format for a small team: a cast, a script and some patience will carry you a long way further than the same effort spent on pictures. And that the making-of turned out to be worth recording — the Unsheathed episodes and these posts have outlasted most of the platforms they were published on.

Listening to the episodes

The episodes are not hosted here. All twelve remain available from their original podcast host, and the links in the archived posts below point there. The short audio clips and the theme song are still served from the original Jack Steel site.