"Supermassive Black Hole A*, or simply A* (pronounced "A star"), is an animated webcomic telling stories of a human civilization at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, an area of space dominated by a huge black hole. How humans came to be there, and how they survive, remains to be told in A*'s episodes, developed and released at the rate of about one every 2-3 weeks.
I'm Ben Chamberlain, the guy who makes A*. 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.
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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