Crashlander is back! It’s a webcomic that runs every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

It’s the story of 8-year old Merrin Maddison, and an alien, crustacean, and robot, (and her Grandpa) that live with her. It’s like Close Encounters of the First Kind crossed with Family Ties.

These guys may be from wildly different backgrounds, but you can be sure they all dislike each other very much. It’s inspired by Calvin and Hobbes, Star Wars, and a little bit of Jim Davis. To check out more about the Characters click here.

If you feel like you’ve seen this strip before, you might have! It was online many years ago (originally titled Pet Alien) with a noisy Flash site and a bunch of strips. Then it was picked up for print and ran in a Japanese magazine called SOTOKOTO.

Much later it relaunched as Crashlander and featured in a UK videogame fanzine called Blessed. This got the attention of an editor at Future Publishing and led to Crashlander appearing in EDGE magazine for over 50 issues, accompanied by a new site and a ton of webcomic strips.

When I moved from the UK to the US for animation, I retired the strip due to life and work time commitments. However I still worked on it behind the scenes, and developed the property in a cartoon pitch and feature script. I got an agent and manager, and sold a Crashlander pilot to Amazon Studios. Of course they pivoted to adult animation right in the middle of development and everything got shut down. NO BIG DEAL. Oh well.

Now Crashlander is returning to being a weekly comic strip. I’ve been mildly frustrated with reading comics online for ages, so this was my chance to make something that turns checking out a bunch of newspaper format comic strips into a slightly nicer experience. By making the panels individual images I can create a responsive layout - large and easy to read on desktop, and a vertical mode on mobile. I also got rid of the clutter so it’s just comics all the way down baby. Hope you like it! (This site is a beta and I’m not a coder, so if you see anything funky drop me a note at james@crashlander.com)

The goal is to make 1000 comics, then end the strip. Why stop at a thousand? Well, I want enough for a book or two, but I don’t want to be doing this forever, until I fade away into a pile of dust. My thoughts are a limited amount of strips makes each one more valuable. With no end in sight a strip could feel daunting, but with a fixed number it feels much more achievable.

I also see some cartoonists suffering from burnout, on hiatus, or retiring completely. This is my way of (hopefully) avoiding that. Or I’m just lazy, who knows? Either way, having an end point tricks my brain into not giving up, and potentially could help the strip tell better stories.

My name is James Hutchinson. I’m originally from Reading in the UK, but now I live in LA. I currently work in animation and entertainment as a Creative Director. Before that I made lots and lots of design projects in New York. I worked at a design company called WDDG, then Big Spaceship. Recently I spent six years working at The Walt Disney Company, making shorts for Mickey Mouse and more.  Then I spent a year at Warner Bros., where once I wandered around the lot, got lost, and ended up  by a lake just as the trolley full of tourists on the Studio Tour appeared. I ended up being called out by the tour guide, much to my embarrassment. Hollywood is cruel.

I live here in LA with my wife, our twin girls, and a cat called Ripley.