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A little tease for the first season.  Book one will launch in December this year.  Exciting times!

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A few regular Noxian folk hanging out, running errands, getting on with their lives. 

So happy with how the concept art has been shaping up.  Can’t wait to share more over the coming weeks.

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Every idea starts with questions. The best ideas begin with the best questions.  It was late one evening on a skype call that seemed to be full of only bad ideas that we started to ask a whole bunch of new ones for the first time. The main one was this; how would life be different on a world where one hemisphere evolved in the dark of an endless night, the other in the light of an endless day (the kind of planet that would become the setting for our comic book, Thea.) From here the questions kept coming: Would plant life emerge on the dark side, how hot and arid would the light side be? It’s fair to say that for most of these we started pretty clueless but curious to learn.

The problem is that once you begin on that road, there’s no natural ending.  Around the corner there is always a seismic question that you never even considered - ‘how would Theans tell the time?’ One of these was sparked by seeing the two plastic animals in the photo (in the mind of a two year old they hang out together,) side by side, perfectly adapted to survive opposite conditions. Consider what wonders would emerge from the different evolutionary pathways in Thea’s dark and light extremities.  The hunt for answers for these kinds of hypothetical questions is the new normal for the team working on the first series of Thea the comic, and as far as we are concerned that’s no bad thing.

[explorethea-blog]

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The inspiration for Thea started thanks to NASA and Astronomers using the Keck Observatory.

Our attention was caught by groundbreaking headlines in 2010. The detection of a new planet, Gliese 581g, which astronomers hailed as an extraordinary scientific discovery, “the first exoplanet that has the right conditions for water to exist on its surface.” said Steven S. Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and therefore the best candidate out there for a place that might possibly harbour life.

The planet was within an area called the habitable zone, commonly referred to as the Goldilocks Zone, where the heat from the star is neither too cold nor too hot for water to exist in liquid form on its surface.

There was something, however, even more remarkable.  The planet was ‘’Tidally Locked’ to its host M-Dwarf star.  Tidally locking occurs when an object's orbital period matches its rotational period.  In a tidally locked world the sun would remain ever to the east: draping half of it in endless light, half in eternal dark and along its north-south equator would lie a land of never-ending dusk. That mere fact sent our imaginations into a tailspin, but we’ll leave that for another post.

Gliese 581g turned out to be just a mirage, a potential misreading of data, but this year NASA made the headlines when TRAPPIST-1 a solar system with 7 planets, all tidally locked, was found. Perhaps we will find a new home in TRAPPIST-1 or perhaps it will be just another dream. Regardless Thea would not have come to be without these and NASA’s extraordinary work reminding us all to look upwards.

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For the past five years we have been developing Thea, an original Sci-Fi series set on a tidally locked planet. What started off as the kernel of an idea, has developed into a world far beyond what we first imagined it could. Our journey has led us to numerous cold calls with cultural and linguistic experts, an unhealthy amount of hours trawling through books on the histories of ancient civilizations and obscure tribes, and out of our depth conversations with orbital mechanics experts from NASA. As a result, Thea today consists of vast continents, incredible flora and fauna, civilizations with rich histories, complex religions, unique technologies and most importantly characters whose lives and stories have been shaped by all of the above.

I have been asked many times ‘why is that comic you’ve been working on taking so long,’ and this is the best answer I have. We wanted to write a great science fiction, not simply a science fantasy. We wanted to ensure that everything we did was grounded and that none of our choices were arbitrary. Skip forward five years and we are excited to be able to introduce you to Thea - the first issue launching in December this year. Here on this blog you will hear all about the journey so far, get to know the team - our inspiration and process, and of course, Thea itself. The kernel has grown up and is taking on a life of its own.

We hope that as you get to know Thea you will fall in love with the world and the characters just as we have!