Telekinetic terrorists contest Earth’s toehold on Mars
Jack ruins Alpha Centaurian peace negotiations
Time war kicks off decades of chaos
Jack’s son revives an ancient star empire
A race snuffs out stars in the name of art
Rebels disrupt a fascist telepathic network
Robots pilot balloon warships above a toxic waterworld

That about sums up the seven novels of the Jack Commer series. You may not want to read all 531,743 words in one sitting, but you now have the entire Commer universe in one place.

Paperback
Amazon

eBook:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Smashwords

The thick object almost has to be held in your hands to be believed. I needed Times New Roman 8 to fit over half a million words into 823 pages, just shy of Kindle’s paperback limit of 828. Amazon reports that the book weighs 2.96 pounds. The eBook versions may be easier to hold.

The strange statistic for the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander – The Complete Series Omnibus is that the entire process just took one week. I bundled seven novels into one Word document on April 7th, finagled the document over the next few days, published it on April 12th, and received the paperback proof on April 14th. What started as a curiosity to see if I could arrange seven books into a printed omnibus turned into a project I’m now in awe of.

The physical paperback looks good. As I tweaked formats and repeatedly scrolled through 823 pages of my writing history, I found the omnibus evolving into a karmic treatise on my long involvement with this series. The published versions of the seven novels date from 2012-2021, but the series goes back many decades into childhood writing.

Yes, the type is tiny, but it’s readable and the inner margins are good. And who knows, I may sell a copy here and there. Again, the eBook is probably more readable for many people, and of course it’s just like having the complete Mark Twain on your Nook or Kindle reader, available at any time, right?

I hadn’t intended to make a bookmark for this tome, but the idea came for one that works well.

The omnibus was also a way of re-engaging with the Jack Commer books as I work on the spinoff series, Supreme Commander Laurie. Draft 1 of Book Two, The Benign Incursion, nears completion.

Quick Summary of the Murky Origins

My first fifth-grade story about Jack, “Voyage to Venus,” electrified my nine-year-old self.  Wow, this is cool, this is where I belong, this is what I want to be doing. In the seventh grade came a two-thousand-word effort I called a “novel,” Trip to Mars, positing a Final War so destructive it mandated the evacuation of the Earth in late 2033, a timeline still in place in the finished Jack Commer Series.

In the eighth grade I wrote 110 pages of The Martian Marauders, basically a Hardy Boys adventure set in space. It described the four Commer brothers’ discovery, after humanity evacuates to Mars, of telepathic Martian terrorists bent on taking back their planet. But halfway through I abandoned the novel, leaving two brothers dead and surviving Captain Jack and copilot brother Joe hanging helplessly in the ventilation shaft of a Venusian prison.

But twenty years later, after writing several literary novels, I ran across the handwritten manuscript and I knew I had to spring the Commer boys. So I typed out a hundred or so pages to conclude the story with new adult themes. This was all such fun space opera that a sequel soon followed, Jack Commer, Supreme Commander, where I explored the embarrassing ramifications of one-way Martian telepathy, a physician’s hopeless infatuation with Jack’s wife Amav, and Jack’s desperate attempts to keep his crew sane on his doomed expedition to Alpha Centauri.

But both novels remained rough drafts, with minor handwritten corrections, for the next couple decades, until a third Commer novel, Nonprofit Chronowar, presented itself and made me realize that Jack’s brother Joe had serious trauma issues about the Final War and the evacuation. By this time I considered the three manuscripts as a trilogy, and I revised The Martian Marauders and Jack Commer, stabilizing the three novels with massive fact, character, and chronology files.

The Martian Marauders was published in 2012 by Double Dragon Publishing. By 2021 there were seven published Commer novels. For a while I was embarrassed to admit that I’d begun my first published novel in the eighth grade, but finally I realized this was a wonderful asset for the series. Who publishes their eighth-grade novel?

Chronology Issues, with a Nod to Heroes and Villains of the Thirties

For those ready to fly to Hollywood to make Jack Commer movies and Jack Commer action figures, Book Four, Collapse and Delusion, already anticipated that. The first three books in the series are set in the timeframe 2028-2036; the next four go to 2075 after everyone’s been rejuvenated to look thirty-five. However, in the 2040s entrepreneurs come up with clunky AI robots marketing Jack and company’s early heroics, branding their robot set Heroes and Villains of the Thirties. These full-size HAVOTTs are based on both major and minor characters, and thousands are released for collectors who stage mock battles.  But these contraptions start wreaking havoc throughout the last four books as they get upgraded to astonishing levels.

Pushing up the years got me away from having to be too close in time to events that the books, after all, expect to occur in the next few years. It also allowed me to resurrect minor figures from the early novels and develop them into major characters in later ones. And of course I could bring back Jack’s insufferable dead brother John, or anyone really, as a robot.

The Last Words Challenge

Before writing the final novel, Balloon Ship Armageddon, I dared myself to end the book and the series with “And Jack Commer shot his spaceship directly into the sun.” So that’s how the giant omnibus ends. Did he and his crew survive this stunt? Supreme Commander Laurie posits the result.

Questions from the Overview

Spaceship Typhoon I’s shocking suicide reduces four Commer brothers to two. After the Final War, the evacuation of Earth, and telekinetic Martian terrorists, is eldest brother Jack fit to lead the United System Space Force? And has he ever recovered from decades of futile time war with the Alpha Centaurians?

And a Partial Answer, from Balloon Ship Armageddon:

“At the first shock of the unknown Jack Commer tended to veer straight into hysteria, then at the last second accept whatever circumstances were in front of him and start working with them. And bring everyone out alive. He was really quite endearing that way.”

copyright 2025 by Michael D. Smith

more information on the series
The UR Jack Commer: A Look at the Childhood Beginnings of the Commer Saga
The Irregular Origin of The Martian Marauders
The First Childhood Appearance of Jack Commer, September 19, 1962
Trip to Mars in Paperback
Supreme Commander Laurie