#futureofcomics

A few regular Noxian folk hanging out, running errands, getting on with their lives. 

Every idea starts with questions. The best ideas begin with the best questions.  It was late one evening on a skype call that seemed to be full of only bad ideas that we started to ask a whole bunch of new ones for the first time. The main one was this; how would life be different on a world where one hemisphere evolved in the dark of an endless night, the other in the light of an endless day (the kind of planet that would become the setting for our comic book, Thea.) From here the questions kept coming: Would plant life emerge on the dark side, how hot and arid would the light side be? It’s fair to say that for most of these we started pretty clueless but curious to learn.

The inspiration for Thea started thanks to NASA and Astronomers using the Keck Observatory.

Our attention was caught by groundbreaking headlines in 2010. The detection of a new planet, Gliese 581g, which astronomers hailed as an extraordinary scientific discovery, “the first exoplanet that has the right conditions for water to exist on its surface.” said Steven S. Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and therefore the best candidate out there for a place that might possibly harbour life.

The planet was within an area called the habitable zone, commonly referred to as the Goldilocks Zone, where the heat from the star is neither too cold nor too hot for water to exist in liquid form on its surface.

There was something, however, even more remarkable.  The planet was ‘’Tidally Locked’ to its host M-Dwarf star.  Tidally locking occurs when an object's orbital period matches its rotational period.  In a tidally locked world the sun would remain ever to the east: draping half of it in endless light, half in eternal dark and along its north-south equator would lie a land of never-ending dusk. That mere fact sent our imaginations into a tailspin, but we’ll leave that for another post.

For the past five years we have been developing Thea, an original Sci-Fi series set on a tidally locked planet. What started off as the kernel of an idea, has developed into a world far beyond what we first imagined it could. Our journey has led us to numerous cold calls with cultural and linguistic experts, an unhealthy amount of hours trawling through books on the histories of ancient civilizations and obscure tribes, and out of our depth conversations with orbital mechanics experts from NASA. As a result, Thea today consists of vast continents, incredible flora and fauna, civilizations with rich histories, complex religions, unique technologies and most importantly characters whose lives and stories have been shaped by all of the above.

I have been asked many times ‘why is that comic you’ve been working on taking so long,’ and this is the best answer I have. We wanted to write a great science fiction, not simply a science fantasy. We wanted to ensure that everything we did was grounded and that none of our choices were arbitrary. Skip forward five years and we are excited to be able to introduce you to Thea - the first issue launching in December this year. Here on this blog you will hear all about the journey so far, get to know the team - our inspiration and process, and of course, Thea itself. The kernel has grown up and is taking on a life of its own.