I’ve spent most of my career as an art director, designer, illustrator, and animator — making characters, campaigns, social content, weird little brand worlds, and visual ideas for other people. Astral Invaders started as a chance to take all of that experience and point it at something of my own.
Several years ago, generative AI started showing up everywhere.
At first, I honestly didn’t pay much attention to it. I didn’t fully understand it, and every time I tried typing in a prompt, the results felt like random digital hogwash. It barely seemed to listen to what I asked for. Half the time, it was weird in the wrong way. The other half, it was just broken.
But at a certain point, I realized I needed to stop ignoring it.
Not because I thought it was magic. Not because I thought it was going to replace creativity. But because I wanted to understand it. I wanted to figure out what these tools meant for me, for my work, and for the future of being a creative person in general.
So I started playing.
I threw all kinds of ridiculous ideas at it. Retro TV references. Old sci-fi. 1980s weirdness. Things like ALF crashing into The Dukes of Hazzard. Stuff that made no real sense on paper, but felt like it might create something interesting if the machine got confused in the right direction.
And it did.
Most of what came back was nonsense. But every now and then, something strange would show up that had a little spark to it. Not polished. Not finished. Not even good, exactly. Just… interesting.
Then this guy appeared.
He was ugly. He was awkward. He was absolutely some kind of weirdo.
But there was something about him.
He didn’t feel like a random image. He felt like evidence from something bigger. Like a still from some forgotten sci-fi show you half-remember seeing as a kid. Something buried on an old VHS tape. Something that maybe aired once at 11:30 at night and then disappeared forever.
That was the first signal.
I started wondering: What if this wasn’t just one character? What if there were more of them? What if this was a whole cast? A strange lost universe full of space soldiers, cosmic creeps, malfunctioning robots, alien weirdos, and characters who looked like they escaped from a 1980s toy aisle?
That became the beginning of Astral Invaders.
I’m not quite ready to give away all the secret sauce behind how these characters are made, but that first rough little spark eventually led to something much more intentional.
The process became less about typing in random prompts and more about directing, shaping, editing, retouching, rebuilding, and chasing a very specific feeling: a lost retro sci-fi universe that never actually existed, but somehow feels like it should have.
Astral Invaders is my way of building that universe one character, one card, and one strange transmission at a time.
Over time, I’ll be sharing more from the archive here: character reveals, behind-the-scenes experiments, fake lore, process notes, and whatever other space garbage comes beaming through.
This is the first transmission.
More weirdness is on the way.
