Jay Eaton

Short Story: Microwave

Added 2021-06-22 19:00:07 +0000 UTC

Here's the short story I made for Iron Circus's 2018 anthology FTL Ya'll.

I think they invited me on because I draw aliens, but the anthology prompt kind of threw me for a loop:

"Six months from now, detailed schematics anonymously uploaded to the Internet will describe, with absolute precision, how to build a faster-than-light engine for $200 in easily-available parts. Space travel will be instantly—and chaotically—democratized. The entire cosmos is suddenly within reach of all humankind, without organization, authority or limitation."

Which didn't make me think of space travel as much as, how the airline industry would immediately go extinct. This is what came out.

I drew this before even making Airsled, so both greyscale and professional comic work was very new to me. The size of the images in particular was an issue for me at the time. None of my usual line art brushes looked right scaled up, so I ended up doing a chunky binary brush art style. I don't think it turned out awful, but reading it over 3 years later my thoughts are definitely "Wow, I've improved so much!"