Star Fetched Comic
Star Fetched is a simple story about a young boy (Rhys Randall) who notices a strange star in the sky one night and decides to fly his cardboard spaceship into the cosmos to learn more about it. The absurdity of the premise comes from the heart of the tale, which is to represent a child's view of space travel and adventure in an attempt to capture the imagination and joy that we all experienced in our youth.
While the premise began as a reimagining of 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star', the story has evolved quite a bit over the years given my own experiences as a father and watching my children grow. I'm not going to pretend that Star Fetched is an incredibly deep story, but it has grown deeply personal the more I've worked on it, and I believe that while it is intended to be a story for children, it will resonate with adults and fellow parents as well.
History
The idea for Star Fetched came to me back in 2012, while my wife and I were expecting our first child. As we discussed potential names, two names in particular came up: Rhys and Randall. Every time I heard the two names together, I couldn't help but think of classic sci-fi heroes like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon; it just had that sound to it. After my son was born (no, we didn't name him Rhys Randall), I started doodling him as a child space hero named Rhys Randall, flying around in a cardboard spaceship and discovering alien life.
In 2018, taking inspiration from Spaceman Spiff and Commander Keen, I began work on a comic about Rhys Randall with the very unoriginal title The Adventures of Rhys Randall". I got about 5 pages in, and life threw a tremendously awesome curveball my way: I got asked to work on a video game with Crescent Moon Games. You can get the details on that here, but the long and short of it is that we ended up turning Rhys Randall into a video game and naming it STAR FETCHED. The task itself was nightmarishly tedious, with all my free time going towards illustrating game assets. However, the hours of work forced me to become a better artist, so when the game was finally finished, I was 1000x more prepared to make the comic... And I've been cranking away ever since.
As mentioned before, the story has changed a lot since its initial conception. Rhys's family is more prominent, and he now has a sister named Lily who monitors his trip from Earth, giving him somebody to confide in along his journey. Rhys as a character has become more defined as well; initially he was just a generic child on a space adventure, but seeing as he is based on my oldest son, I've obviously watched his personality develop over the years from a playful toddler to a brilliant young man (at the rate I'm going, he might be a man when this book is finally finished). With those changes in mind, Rhys has changed to become more of a boy genius who still maintains some childlike naiveté. Don't be deceived; the book isn't as intelligently written as I'm making it out to be, but I guess what I'm getting at is that Rhys has more of a personality than he did at the start.
Progress
As I'm writing this, I've completed 55 pages of art. How many pages is this thing going to have? Yeah, I don't know. It's in the 80+ range at the moment; it could be more, but it definitely won't be less. I have an outline I'm following, but how I get from point A to point B is handled very loosely. Once the art is complete, I'll be working with my good friend Cal Jameson on the lettering, and then it's just a matter of getting it published, printed, what have you. It's a process I wasn't completely prepared for, hence why it's taken me so long to get this far. If you're interested in seeing more art from this project, I'd suggest going on Twitter (or X? Are we still allowed to call it Twitter?) and searching the hashtag #starfetched. I've basically dominated this hashtag.
My aim is to keep this page updated if anything of note comes up or changes, but for now, your best source of updates on the project is my Twitter (fine, my X).
