I've heard a rumour from Ground Control
January 23, 2012
Jonathan King and I have a new comic out. City Lights is a science-fiction story hosted at Jonathan's tomorrow-themed site The Brighter Future. I wrote the story and scribbled some thumbnails and Jonathan drew and painted all the finished art, breaking it down into frames and making it look just like a bought one. The development process consisted of me liking everything he did, although we did debate moving a word balloon on page five. A tense moment, but it passed.
The story was inspired by astrophysicists Ed Turner and Avi Loeb's proposal to search for alien life by detecting light from cities on other worlds. The idea of discovering aliens living so far away that you can't communicate with them in any normal sense is romantic and strange, and I've always been interested in scientific communities based in exotic locales such as Hawaii (they're featured in Electric). I wrote the script in three acts: a storyboarded intro and outro bracketing a long dialogue sequence. The wordless set up and conclusion meant the story would work better as a visual piece.
City Lights was conceived with Jonathan's previous comics in mind: he contrasts big empty spaces with intimate storytelling details and frames the action in a cinematic way. When he is not drawing strips he is making movies. The above still is a good example of his style. I love the way it's 3D but flattened, naturalistic yet stylised, clean but atmospheric. You can see for yourself here.
