With the launch of the Kickstarter for the Runaway to the Stars graphic novel from Jay Eaton and Iron Circus Comics, we are delighted to be joined by creator Jay Eaton.
Hi Jay, it’s so great to have you here with us. Could you please introduce yourself to our readers?
Hi! I’m Jay Eaton. I make a webcomic called Runaway to the Stars, a hard scifi story about an alien who was raised by humans. My background is in biology and horticulture, but I’m also fascinated by linguistics, speculative technology, and all the jobs behind the scenes of civilization that keep the lights on and the water running.
Can you tell us about the origins of Runaway to the Stars?
Originally it was a side project that I made as an excuse to design aliens while I worked more seriously on fantasy worldbuilding projects. Flash forward 10 years and that side project became my full time job and over 300 pages of graphic novel. Go figure, I think I was always a bit too obsessed with knowing how everything I draw works to write about magic.
Who is Talita?
Talita Dospaço is a 3-meter tall hexapod who was raised from infancy by a strange race of aliens who call themselves “humans.” Now she’s all grown up with social anxiety and a Master’s in aerospace engineering that doesn’t get a lot of use at her job in the recycling plant junkyard on the isolated exoplanet Ixion-3. While most of her human coworkers find her odd at best and scary at worst, she eventually befriends Idrisah and her wife Gillie, who too have their own struggles fitting in with Jovian human culture.
You created the art for Runaway to the Stars. What part of that process did you enjoy the most?
I like drawing expressions, anatomy, and the clutter of spaces that people live in. My favorite scenes to draw are always just conversations. The interplay between people, their emotions, their body language, it’s so much fun. In contrast, while I’m very proud of my finished artwork of machines and technology, I complain the whole time I’m drawing it. Haha.
How did Iron Circus Comics get involved with Runaway to the Stars?
Spike from Iron Circus found me first! She liked my blog that I was posting worldbuilding artwork on for fun, and sent me an email telling me that if I ever wanted to submit a book proposal for my work, she’d be interested to see it. I was still in college at the time so I had to reply “Thanks, that’s very kind, I’ll be back when I’m trying not to fail my classes.” But I got around to it after graduation. I’m very thankful Iron Circus Comics was willing to take a chance on me as an unproven first time author, since keeping a worldbuilding blog for fun and making a 300+ page graphic novel are vastly different levels of commitment.
How long have you been working on Runaway to the Stars?
Over a decade. It started as doodles of aliens in my college notes, then it grew characters, and then a story, and then I started getting serious about making those stories into comics. The book itself has taken about 5 years from the proposal packet getting accepted to the final artwork being completed.
What can you tell us about Bip?
Bip is a sapient AI, which in Runaway to the Stars are all descendants of a single “faulty” quantum computer. This original AI was copied many times onto new servers, each line branching off and diverging into new people through the pruning of old memories and acquisition of new ones. They are all huge–generally, one AI will occupy a server room–and interact with the world through screen avatars and remote controlled robotic units. Bip is the ship AI of a fancy little ferry vessel that shows up at the Ixion-3 scrapyard, and they ask Talita and her two human friends to fix the ship and get them the paperwork to start flying again. But Bip doesn’t want them to tell anyone else, of course, because they used to be a pirate ship and don’t want to alert the authorities that they’re still alive. They’re definitely hiding something.
Who are Idrisah and Gillie?
They are very much an odd couple; unlikely childhood friends who are now happily married. Both are employed xenolingiustics, which is the study and interpretation of alien languages. Gillie is a GMO catgirl, commissioned as a designer baby, but due to a developmental error she’s “off-model”… instead of being a human with cat ears and a tail, her human parts are a bit too cat, and her cat parts are a bit too human. She also has a form of congenital deafness that is very difficult to treat with implants, so she has foregone the risky surgery in favor of remaining deaf and communicating in sign language. She is an expert on bug ferret languages, which are primarily visual and tactile sign. Idrisah is a biracial Muslim woman and a second generation immigrant to Jovia, with a large extended family that speaks Arabic on her mom’s side and Urdu on her dad’s side. Her household spoke Jovian English while she was growing up and she feels guilty that she never became fluent in either of her family’s native languages, even after becoming an expert on the bitonal languages spoken by avian aliens.
Runaway to the Stars is black and white. Was there a reason you wanted Runaway to the Stars to be black and white?
It’s faster to draw that way. I’m a perfectionist who will take any excuse to spend forever drawing a page, and color is a dimension I didn’t feel was necessary to tell a compelling tale with striking artwork. Many of my favorite comics are in black and white after all, I am an avid reader of manga.
What has it been like working with Iron Circus Comics?
Good! They have given me the freedom to tell my story exactly how I wanted to. I’m very lucky they reached out first, they would have been my first choice for publishing anyways. They publish more niche and queer titles with an older audience, which I usually write for.
Can you tell us about the world that Runaway to the Stars is in?
It takes place in a setting where humans have colonized most of the solar system. The main characters hail from Nexus Jovia, a space station megacity orbiting Jupiter. Humans have also been contacted by aliens: the technologically advanced bug ferrets, and the imperial but diminutive avians. Centaurs are new on the galactic scene, a race of huge carnivorous hexapods that bug ferrets controversially contacted in their radio age. It’s also hard science fiction, which mostly means I spent way too long agonizing over how the technology works. All the spacecraft move slower than light, with interstellar travel made possible in a timely fashion by enormous machines that open connected wormholes. Most of a journey in an interstellar vessel involves slowly travelling between wormhole gates.
What can you tell us about Runaway to the Stars?
There will be more of it after this book. I have several books planned that follow Talita and her friends.
Any message for the ComicBuzz readers?
If you’d like to read the comic, you can find it at runawaytothestars.com, if you’d like to learn even more about the world of the comic, you can find that at jayeaton.site/RunawayToTheStars/home, and if you’d like to hold the comic in your hand as a brick of thin sheets of wood pulp and ink, check out the Kickstarter!
Feel free to check out Runaway to the Stars on Kickstarter.
We would like to say a big thank you to Jay for chatting with us and wish him the best of luck with the Kickstarter campaign for Runaway to the Stars.
