NEOKOSMOS is the story of human children who are being raised on a space station as part of an alien experiment, after an extinction event that ended all life on the planet Earth. Only allowed to speak to each other via text and screens, and only given access to human culture from an archive of Wikipedia, the kids deal with loneliness, fraught teenage feelings, and the challenges of being raised by a race of cold and calculating lizard aliens with unclear motives. If this weren’t enough, their entire world is flipped upside down when the space station is attacked by a band of menacing space pirates.
In 2015, NEOKOSMOS began its life as an an experimental science fiction webcomic. Our goal was to create a story that read more like an animated film than a comic — each frame of the story was illustrated, with an emphasis on expression, acting, and dialog. Updates included animated gifs, original music by James Roach and Toby Fox, and breathtaking animation by Adrienne Garcia. You can read this version of the story for free right now at neo-kosmos.com !
The webcomic version of NEOKOSMOS ran for 2 years before it was discontinued due to time constraints. While it wasn’t clear to us when we first began NEOKOSMOS, the universe and stories that we wanted to explore ended up too expansive for every frame of the story to be drawn out like a movie. Instead of scrapping the project entirely, we thought long and hard about how to best convey the story that had become so important to us. Eventually, we decided on a solution: revisiting NEOKOSMOS as a fully illustrated series of YA novels.
Since we are both artists as well as writers, we want to create a product that reflects both sides of our creativity. We are going to be experimenting with format and visual storytelling throughout the prose-driven novels, creating what we hope will be a unique and engaging reading experience for everyone!
Our final goal for the NEOKOSMOS series is to create a trilogy of science fiction novels for a young adult audience with a strong focus on neurodiversity and LGBTQ+ themes. With your support, we can make this goal a reality!
However, you don’t have to wait for too long to read the full story! One thing we really liked about having a webcomic was the serial and interactive nature of posting a story as it is worked on – and we are continuing that tradition right here on Patreon! $10 Patrons can follow along with the story as it is written, with new chapters being released EVERY WEEK! If you were a reader of the webcomic and you want to catch up with all the new developments, this is the the tier for you. We are already well past the point where the webcomic left off. Come see what you’re missing!
