Neon Galaxy

I want to talk about an animated TV show called Neon Galaxy that I pitched and began developing at a large animation studio in late 2019. A few months ago, after over four years of development, I learned that it wouldn’t be moving forward. I mourned, vented, and did all the things one does to get over that weird feeling of creative loss that is not quite a death, not quite a breakup, but something along those lines.

These days, I’m onto other projects. But I realized recently that I had this sense of guilt towards the characters, like I owed them something. They had become real to me over those four and a half years, but they never got to see the light of day. They never got to be known and loved outside of my own mind, the little team I worked with in development, and the kids who saw materials in early demographic testing.

And the thing is - if you knew these girls, you’d know how much they love the spotlight.

There’s a lot I can’t share - designs by other people far more talented than myself, two minutes and forty-three seconds of gorgeous animation, a fully voice-acted and scored animatic, and several incredible songs by BETTY freaking WHO, who I still can’t believe I got to work with. My favorite thing about this project was getting to assemble a dream team of collaborators - they made the world so much bigger, brought in so many ideas, and took the characters from sketches in my head to fully realized people. I wish I’d gotten to work with them for much, much longer.

But all I can share is what I own - my drawings, words, and ideas. I’m not entirely sure why I’m sharing these - it’s definitely not the most *strategic* of moves. But I got into this business, not to make strategic moves, but because there is nothing as magical to me as the way characters become real through the act of telling their story. And the idea of those characters being locked away in a company’s archives, gathering dust, does not sit right with me.

For now, this is a farewell. Maybe one day I’ll be back.

Here’s Neon Galaxy.

The show is set in the distant future. A cataclysmic event broke the earth into pieces, but humanity survived by developing plant-based technology. The setting is technologically advanced in some ways - plant powered spaceships hop between the Asteroids, holograms are beamed into the night sky, creative body modifications are common - but most of the tech is old and cobbled together. It’s not a sterile, Apple-store style sci-fi setting. This world is lived in, complex, overgrown with plants and bright with lights and art and personality.

Most people live on the broken pieces of earth - the Asteroids. All the wealthiest and most fortunate live in the Megacity, a massive, futuristic city built on a space station. Resources are scarce outside of the Megacity, and Asteroid dwellers work tough jobs to get by. Neon Galaxy gains popularity by visiting the Asteroids and playing in-person concerts, something that most bands don’t do. They make authentic music that inspires and speaks to ordinary people more than music from the Megacity does.

Neon Galaxy also has some RIVALS…

The band also has a sentient swarm of nanobots named TES (voiced by a dear friend who is also a beloved internet Dungeon Master…) The bots can assemble into cool costumes and accessories for the girls, as well as light displays at their concerts. TES is the embodiment of imagination, and his only limit is the girls’ creativity (especially Indigo, who he forms a special bond with). But as the story goes on, we realize TES is not just a tool - as a new A.I., he’s like a baby, but a baby with lots of powers. He is chaotic and playful and always running experiments on the humans around him…

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To me, Neon Galaxy was always about collaboration and the magic that comes when people work together - the way you end making something bigger and more unexpected than any single creator could dream up. That’s why, when folks ask me if it could become a graphic novel instead, I reply that it needs to be told in the medium of animation. Animation lends itself to making entire worlds full of characters, life, and music. Every one of the hundreds of hands that touch a show or movie brings something new and vital.

And it’s a weird, bad time in animation right now. Studio mergers and simple corporate greed have made it more and more difficult for anyone, even seasoned creators, to survive, let alone get shows off the ground. I’ll never know for sure why Neon Galaxy, which tested really well, got right up to the edge of being greenlit before it was killed; but I’m far from alone in having this kind of heartbreak. As the Animation Guild meets with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to negotiate a new contract this week, I hope they can win gains that make it possible for us to tell good, interesting, out-of-the-box stories again within the studio system.

But the fact is: if studios continue to axe shows while underpaying and abusing creators and artists…we will simply find ways to tell our stories without them. I set Neon Galaxy in a ruined, post-apocalyptic world because of a core belief that I hold: no matter what, people will never stop making and caring about art.