Jay Eaton describes their path to comics less as a choice than as an inescapable gravitational pull, one they spent years trying to resist before giving in entirely.
After pursuing biology in college and working in horticulture, Eaton eventually committed full-time to the project they’d been building on the side all along: Runaway to the Stars, a hard sci-fi slice-of-life graphic novel about a centaur aerospace engineer, a shipwrecked AI pirate and the unlikely friendship that upends both their lives.
Eaton has been building this story on the web for years, and now it’s coming to print via Kickstarter through Iron Circus Comics. We talked about world-building as narrative, designing for bodies that aren’t human and what a biology degree is actually good for when you’re a cartoonist.
Before we get into the book, can you walk us through how you got into comics in the first place? What was the moment that made you think this is what I want to do?
Comics was less of a decision, for me, and more like an inescapable black hole pulling on me my whole life. Even as young as 5, despite spending most of my time drawing and making up characters and stories, I had some vague idea that art “didn’t make money” so I should do something that did “make money.” I pursued biology in college to get a STEM career, then found out the hard way that while I loved learning the subject, I was not very good at the GPA maintenance part of school. I started working in horticulture because I love gardening, but kept doing comics on the side, because, well, I never actually stopped. Eventually I essentially won the lottery in terms of online support and it allowed me to focus on comics full time and finally commit to a project as big as Runaway to the Stars. So I do put the biology degree to use, but instead I’m using it to design realistic anatomy for Talita, the 3 meter tall hexapodal alien who was raised by humans. Life is unpredictable!
The book is described as “hard sci-fi slice-of-life” — two genres that don’t always go together. How do you balance the technical rigor of hard sci-fi with the quieter, everyday rhythms of slice-of-life storytelling?
Well, the smarmy pedantic answer is that real life is the hardest sci-fi. Okay, sorry, stop throwing things. What I mean is that humans in the modern day interface with technology that was utterly unimaginable 100 years ago, and hasn’t stopped us from having our silly daily rituals and petty interpersonal dramas and mundane problems. I like telling stories about the everyday lives of people in fantastic settings, because I think it highlights the differences in a way that’s often more visceral than action and adventure, since everyone has a personal point of comparison for it.
Your background is in horticulture and evolutionary biology, with side interests in linguistics and speculative technology. How much of that expertise is actually baked into the world-building here?
If I had no interest in those things all that I certainly wouldn’t have made drawing this book so difficult, haha. There’s many pages that seem simple but they are still victims of my insatiable desire to know how everything works. Like, I’m drawing a wall clock. But this is a bilingual workplace that has most of its signage in both Jovian English and Tiiliitian, so I have to add a time in Tiiliitian, because of course it wouldn’t be the same as human time standards, their day is a different length and their numeral system is base 8 and they write numbers in order from the smallest unit to the largest unit, so let’s decide how they divide up time, figure out conversions between their units and our units, pick a time of day for the Earth clock, then run the numbers… and so, it’s taken me hours to decide what 3 marks on the page look like. So much of the book is like this.
Getting into the characters … Talita was abandoned as an infant and has grown up largely disconnected from her own species’ culture. How much of the book is really about her figuring out who she is, versus just trying to help a shady AI escape the planet?
Hmm… I’d say the book is about the reader gradually uncovering who Talita is and how she got here, and for Talita, it’s about realizing that her “here” isn’t ok. When the book starts, Talita has fallen into a kind of rut working a recycling plant job on an isolated exoplanet where her only neighbors are her human and avian coworkers, who find her odd at best and scary at worst. But she feels like this is the best place for her to be, because she’s been burned by previous experiences and change is scarier than sticking to her routine. When Bip the AI arrives, it shakes up her life and forces her to reconsider things, so she starts questioning whether she actually wants to stay.
Publisher Spike Trotman highlights three very different communication barriers among your main characters: Gillie’s deafness and clunky tech, Idrisah’s linguistic disconnect from her own family and Talita’s social anxiety. Did those characters develop together thematically, or did they come to you separately?
They were primarily developed together. I like to make characters who are terrible at fitting into their own society, because in following their life I can wordlessly communicate what IS normal in that society.
The book comes with immersive appendices and extensive additional world-building material (I’ve always dug the “back matter” materials you’ve had out on your website). At what point does the appendix become part of the story, and how do you decide what goes in the main narrative versus the back matter?
I don’t know, it’s very moment to moment. I do world-building for fun that will never be relevant to a story I’m writing, but even if it’s never mentioned or seen, it helps create groundwork for parts of the world the narrative will encounter. Because I have a large backlog of information, I can often make up new lore on the spot, since it’s just adding another link in a web. I’d say that narrative is more important than world-building, but I like to use world-building as narrative– you can create a lot of dramatic tension by strategically withholding information about the setting until it can make the greatest emotional impact. If introducing an aspect of the world feels like force-feeding story context to the audience, I rewrite. Additional lore is strictly optional.
Co-species spaces, accommodation, and communication are central to the book’s focus. How do you depict that visually on the page, AND What does thoughtful accommodation actually look like in your character designs and environments?
When designing cospecies environments I try to put myself in the shoes of someone with a different body layout, senses, and abilities; and figure out how they would move through a space and engage with the world around them. For stuff with direct real world examples or analogs, I read a lot of first-hand accounts, read about activist efforts, see if there are already solutions for accommodation problems, and see how the users actually feel about those solutions. Sometimes technology that seems like a great solution to outsiders is clunky, invasive, or ineffective for the end user. The way multispecies accommodation appears on the page is often simpler than you’d expect, like Talita’s big keyboard that she uses with her large hooved fingers is just a copy of real keyboards used by people with visual impairment and/or motor disabilities.
Do you have further plans for more Runaway to the Starsafter this book?
Oh yeah. I have multiple books worth of stories planned with these characters and characters who haven’t shown up yet. First things first, though. I have to draw them one at a time.
Check out the Kickstarter page for more details.