For a long time, science fiction has been a straight white man’s game. Luckily, as the political landscape changes so, too, do the landscapes of galaxies far away. Surely, no man has ever gone to some of these places before.

Finn, one of the two behind the queer space opera comic Crash and Burn and the project’s artist, explained the creation of the story. "It started out with a team of about three other friends of mine and myself, just kind of trading ideas about certain series we liked but couldn’t see ourselves in," they said. "Especially in sci-fi, we found a lot of series where the universes were super imaginative and big and expansive, and we saw ourselves in the protagonists, but that creativity kind of ran out as soon as it came to queer identities. There’s a lot of series that say all the alien species duplicate the human gender binary and they perform it completely as humans do. And so, we were trading ideas on how we’d do it differently.

"Eventually I took it a little more seriously, so I took those ideas and started turning it into something more linear, into a real story."

Kate, the writer, joined the project about two years ago, and laughingly recalls her push to write out a storyline. "I have been the driving force between getting this out there – it was much more of a hobby project before I got involved. When we started, this is my favourite part, I asked why does the ship crash? Because I need to figure out the plot, so I can keep writing this. The answer was ‘... we don’t know.’"

The web comic updates one page a week every Friday, but the first issue was debuted at Calgary Expo about a year ago to a very positive response. "We had an 8.5x11inch sign that just said, ‘Crash and Burn, gay space opera’. It was very tiny. And people saw it and people loved it! So, we made a bigger banner."

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Contributor Mars Tonic |

Locale Calgary |

Topic Arts | Calgary Expo | Comic Expo | Interview | Video |