What is The Lonely Spaceman?

The basics: The Lonely Spaceman is a full-color, 128-page comic written by me and illustrated by Matt Hope. It will be published to the web at LonelySpaceman.com (site currently under construction) at the rate of 3 pages per week -- a page will publish every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It will go live in mid-November and run for nearly a year.

So, what's the story? Well, it's sort of a SF fable. I also remember Joss Whedon mentioning about some episodes of Buffy that the metaphor was very thin. You could say that The Lonely Spaceman is a very thin metaphor It's about an astronaut who returns to Earth after a 200-year long mission to find the planet changed beyond recognition. The only way he can deal with it is to wear his pressure suit, his protective shell, everywhere he goes. The story is about how he learns to live without his protective covering. It has space pirates, romance, and a character based on Christina Hendricks in the Broken Bells music video "The Ghost Inside." So it's got that going for it.

Broken Bells "The Ghost Inside" from Jacob Gentry on Vimeo.

I found references to The Lonely Spaceman in various notebooks going back at least two years. The story hasn't changed much in that time, except that it used to be darker (and that it used to be called The Loneliest Spaceman). I decided to make it more whimsical because I thought that would be more palatable, and because I thought it would be more fun to write. I think everything I write starts out darker than it ends up in the final version. I am working on my issues, thank you very much...

As we get closer to the web site's actual go-live date, I'll be posting reminders. Many, many reminders, so you can check out the final product for yourself.

Next time: Why a web comic now?