Astro Chimp comic!

Astro Chimp

Astro Chimp is a comic that I had been making for a college project. The brief was pretty much just to make something sequential with no colour and no text, which pushes your brain to find more visually descriptive ways to tell a story. Around this time I had an irrational fascination with the story of Ham the chimp who was sent to space in 1961. I wanted to write a story about how bizarre it would be to one minute be a normal chimp in a far off jungle, and the next minute be whisked off for astronaut training in a concealed air force base in new mexico. I spent a lot of time wondering what the training was like, and what happened to all the other monkeys. Astro chimp is my possible explanation to the incident!

I had a lot of fun making this, and I'm currently working on a second part to the story. Astro chimp threw me on a massive climb of learning what not to do, and figuring out just how long some stuff takes. I now know that if you spend most of your time on page 1, you won't have enough time to make the other pages as detailed, making it a little sketchy on the old artistic continuity! In the end I almost prefer the slimmed down style towards the end, it's less muddy in places. I think also that even though I did a bunch of research and character work before I started, it was only at the end of the story that I really felt I understood them and could comfortably be able to draw them in various situations. Hopefully that will make the next one a little more steady. Plus there will be some new characters! Yay!