Smash Pages Q&A | Jay Eaton on ‘Runaway to the Stars’

With a Kickstarter launching this week, we talk to Eaton about biology degrees, base-8 numeral systems and why a wall clock can take hours to draw.

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.

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Sunday Comics | Let’s ‘Runaway to the Stars’

Check out webcomics by Jay Eaton, Joe Poland, Nicholas Gurewitch, Campbell Whyte and more.

Here’s a round up of some of the best and most interesting comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

Jay Eaton has been working on Runaway to the Stars for quite awhile now, posting pages on Patreon and Tumblr, but now they’ve gone and gotten a shiny new comics website.

Runaway to the Stars is a worldbuilding project that I’ve been working on for over a decade,” Eaton said. “It started as an excuse to design some aliens and throw all my science fiction thoughts in the same vat, and eventually a book started to grow out of it like a fungus. If this comic intrigues you, there’s tons of additional artwork, writing and short comics that can be found on my perpetual work-in-progress Neocities website and my ancient tumblr blog. There is quite a rabbit hole to go down, if you don’t mind some bespoke coding jank.”

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