Nurt

Animator, Comic Artist, Educator, Screenwriter

page 1, starting from space looking down at the ancient world and crashing into the ocean, caption reading Earth 444 Million Years Ago

page 2, showing a lively Ordovician reef, caption reading Right Where You're Sitting…

Nurt is a science fantasy comic about a trilobite and an orphaned fish travelling in a converted comb jellyfish to escape the first mass extinction. Set in the shrinking and freezing oceans 444 million years ago, the comic sees them endure loss, find purpose, and question everything as all roads lead to the mysterious change engine at the bottom of the ocean known only as…

….THE SOUP!!!

What excited me most about this story was getting to combine my love of prehistoric creatures and worlds with my current anxieties around growing into an adult as the world grows increasingly unstable. Nurt himself already struggles with self-hatred from his own left eye, which glows and shifts like a lava lamp, and subconsciously projects it onto Bap, whose genus is destined to evolve into everything from amphibians to reptiles to us. Even knowing the Earth will go on to recover and see life grow into uncountable shapes and sizes, I wanted to spotlight the immediate effect on tiny critters just trying to get by.

I wanted to combine the wit, imagination, and style of Calvin & Hobbes with the earnestness, aesthetic, and themes of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The state of the world depicted in the comic is at a severe tipping point, but the characters work to find reasons to keep living anyway, whether it’s discovering their increasing mutations, working out the dysfunctional father-son dynamic they gradually develop, or just distracting themselves with a schlock movie.

pages 5 (Nurt and Bap argue inside the jellyfish, oblivious to a sea scorpion stalking them from the shadows), 6 (they continue as the scorpion approaches them until a larger sea scorpion reaches out and eats it first, Nurt and Bap continue on their way), 7 (Nurt plugs in an old B-movie and the two sit down to watch)

At the time this story takes place, nothing had yet grown jaws, let alone crawled onto land, so it was a fun challenge to work. Land is to them what space is to us, but such explorations are thwarted by the encroaching ice, which is shown to have claimed Nurt’s father at the end of the chapter.

character sheet of Nurt, Bap, and Gnurt (G is silent hehe)

Nurt and Bap are caught in...THE SOUP!!!

THE SOUP (all caps) is inspired by the ancient brine pools found at the bottom of the ocean, where we theorize life might have begun, is the ultimate entity driving both the freeze of the oceans and the rapid mutations of life. Anything that falls in is spat out onto the beach having changed, but it is erratic from centuries of exploitation by machines and societies of the past. My story takes from science in that the origins of this life-giving entity trace back to the 4.4 billion year old initial collision of Thea, a giant celestial object, with the previously toxic and uninhabitable Earth. A “child” piece of Thea and Earth remains to this day as our Moon, which I saw as a perfect parallel to Nurt’s parenthood journey. To Nurt and Bap, THE SOUP represents safety, but more importantly answers to what makes them so different, and the two slowly learn that there’s more to this mystery than they initially believed.

pencil outline of pages 3 (our heroes travel along the seafloor canyon as giant orthocones float past in the distance) and 4 (our first look at the glowing comb jellyfish they travel in and of Nurt himself)

final draft of pages 3 and 4 (only one orthocone now)

01 05

In continuing Nurt, I’ve given some thought to the web format shown in work like Evan Dahm’s 3rd Voice and Rice Boy. The story of Nurt, like the characters and world within, is perpetually evolving, so I’d like to give myself the time to make a proper first chapter before pitching to a publisher. One way or another, I’m so excited to get this out of my head and onto the page!