In The Sci-Fi World I Created, Vampires And Werewolves Are Still A Huge Problem (20 New Pics)

STARS has quite a loose, improvisational tone - their ship can travel anywhere, including Toast Space or the Umbrellaverse or The Sideways or the Neverrealm. I'm really not planning so far ahead that I lock myself out of being allowed to do fun things with the premise. We'll find out what the Galaxy looks like together.

The most challenging aspect of working on STARS is really just finding the time. I have a lot of other projects to work on, and STARS is just a fun outlet for me to goof around with. I tried to learn some lessons from my other series SWORDS, which began to take its lore a bit too seriously, which means I'm always double-checking that jokes work in the setting. STARS is more loosey goosey so if the setting needs to bend to fit a good joke, so be it. All of the characters sharing a ship also means that anything that happens causes them to grow together, as a team.

The goal for this first arc of the STARS storyline is for the crew to reach the edge of the Galaxy and begin charging up a powerful jump to the next one. In my head its gonna be pretty special, and not something I've seen done before. I want faraway galaxies to be even weirder than usual.

STARS has a simpler art style than SWORDS. It's drawn at a lower resolution, not really ideal for print, and has little to no shading. The series is really about being optimized around getting out as many little jokes as I can, unrestrained from the usual trappings of genre tropes. It's very fun and freeing.

The main character of STARS, Seiya, is the ship's "Interspecies Resources" manager. Think of him as the Human Resources guy, but the scope of his work extends to making sure that all the different aliens aboard the ship are comfortable. While Star Trek often champions the idea of uniting over our differences from a more lofty, diplomatic, planet-wide angle, there's a certain intimacy to Seiya just going around the ship making sure each individual is comfortable and their voice gets heard, which Star Trek isn't always about. I'm currently watching Discovery, which I think really started to touch on those ideas in Season 2 especially. Maybe that makes STARS a modern sci-fi for a modern audience.