Finally, tentacles (Patreon)

A new comic is up!  

And this one is straight-up old school horror fun. I just grabbed some things I wanted to play with - Orion, Oumuamua (I even imagined NASA hauling its old EMUs out of their museum displays for this mission) and mashed em together. 

Maybe because of that, it took a couple of drafts to get right (I’ve included an earlier version of the script here too). Originally I wanted to follow the astronauts as they explored inside Oumuamua, but sadly this is one of those times when the ten panel limit meant I had to cut a whole bunch of stuff that I really would have enjoyed doing! 

Still, the story was largely inspired by pulpy old sci-fi magazine covers and I think that still comes through in the story, so I'm happy.  

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NOTES:

The one big idea that I spent the most time thinking about was actually left completely unexplored in the comic. And that was the origin of the creature. 

I knew it had to have a large surface area so it could detect radio waves, and I knew it would have to be in super-deep hibernation for half a million, or a million years at a time. 

But what I really enjoyed thinking about was how it evolved. And that it was the same kind of natural selection we are familiar with here on Earth - but with an evolutionary process operating at much slower scales than we are used to. Evolving at stellar and galactic timescales instead of planetary ones. And if so, what might that produce? 

I also wondered if it was a biological spacecraft that went feral billions of years ago, and evolved away from its functional origins. 

Anyway, I’m going to explore this more in a future comic, I think. The vast timescales of the universe really give a lot of scope for the imagination to go nuts.