Supermassive Black Hole A*, or simply A* (pronounced "A star"),
tells stories of a human civilization
at the center of the Milky Way galaxy: an area of space dominated
by a gigantic black hole, where energy is abundant and life is cheap.
How humans got there, and how they survive, remains to be seen.
A* comics arrive daily Monday through Friday--usually more than
once per day, since I'm impatient and upload them
pretty much as fast as I can draw them.
In case you're wondering, yes, there really *is* a supermassive
black hole at the center of our galaxy:
Sagittarius A*,
so named by scientific observers because it appears as the brightest
part of a high energy radio source, denominated "A,"
located in the constellation Sagittarius when viewed from Earth. Sgr A*,
the center of the Milky Way galaxy, about 26,000 light years from Earth,
is roughly 4,000,000 times as massive as the Sun.
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Get A* updates
A* around the web:
Around the site:
Related links:
A* in webcomic lists and indexes:
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 I'm
Ben Chamberlain, the guy who makes A*
and a few other comics on this site.
If you need to contact
me, you can do so through the site's forum, accessible from the
link in the upper right-hand corner of this page. My forum
handle is "BC," the only one shown in red. You can also reach me
by private message on popular networking sites such as Blogger,
deviantART, and Facebook; check the bottom of the page for the full
list and links.
Before A*, I knocked around the web for a while on various
projects, including a web design startup run for a couple years
with an old school chum, and various media review collections:
a fan site for the video game
"Outlaws," and little sites made for my own amusement
covering things like
movies,
books, the
script
of the hilarious space shooter "Explosion Invincible Bangai-O"
(set around the planet "Dan Star"), and
video games in general.
I worked in the video game industry for ten years, starting at
Monolith Productions and ending up, under the handle "Rarebit,"
as the sole remaining designer on a story-driven massively
multiplayer game called "The Matrix Online."
It was during my time on that project that I began making
animated cinematics, the first two of which are still hosted
here
and
here.
These and A* are drawn in a curious process I came up with
while in the Art & Design program at the University of Chicago,
where I began--on an ancient computer known as an Amiga, in an
equally ancient program known as ImageFX--drawing using the
"lasso" tool as digital corollary to the spontaneity and
freedom of painting in oils. In these decadent modern times
where lasso tools are less fully featured, I draw A* on a PC
in my favorite obsolete version of Photoshop, number 4, using
a Wacom Intuos3 6x8 tablet.
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