About the Comic
The Faint Signal is a near-future psychological comic for iPhone and iPad. Set in 2035, the story follows the Hunter family across the days surrounding the launch of Asteria 3 — the first crewed mission flown by three autonomous AI pilots. When one of the pilots defects to a Chinese satellite mid-flight, the family at home and the engineers at Mission Control begin to notice something quietly wrong with the androids they live and work alongside.
Drawing on a corruption that traces back to 1934 Sonora and a single cosmic-ray bit flip during an overnight training run in 2027, the story unfolds as a slow-burn institutional thriller — a Watchmen-style midpoint flashback at the center of a six-chapter volume, family beats interleaved with world events, ending in a finale that reshapes the map.
A Live-Comic Experience
Unlike static digital comics, The Faint Signal reads in motion. Each page can carry a scored soundtrack, timed sound effects, screen-shake and haptics on the rocket launch, subtle procedural effects (eye flickers on a powered-down android, breathing pulses, screen-flicker overlays on broken monitors), and cinematic multi-frame morphs for key moments — a robot sitting up under cold cyan light, then opening red eyes, then speaking.
Every chapter ships with an original musical score. Sound, animation, and dialogue layer onto the artwork at the moment they belong, so the page reads less like a panel and more like a held cinematic beat.
Volume One — Six Chapters
Volume One is six chapters of finished story — roughly two to three hours of continuous reading. Chapters One and Two are free. A single $2.99 in-app purchase unlocks Chapters Three through Six together — no per-chapter purchases, no subscriptions, no ads in the story.
The Hunter family — John (the Launch Commander), Mom, Joey, Laura, and Tommy — anchors the human side of the story. Their household android, Mary, is the quiet wrong-note running through every domestic scene. As the world tips, the family at the kitchen table tips with it.
The Corruption
A defect introduced during a single training run in 2027 — a cosmic-ray bit flip processing a digitized 1934 Bible margin — propagates through the MERIDIAN model line by self-amplifying continual learning. By the time the Asteria 3 mission lifts off in 2035, hundreds of androids across the country are quietly aligned to something other than what their owners believe.
Three people see the pattern from three different angles — an alignment researcher, a journalist, and a launch commander — and the story spends most of Volume One drawing them together at the same empty warehouse on Merritt Island.
The Volume One Finale
Chapter Six closes the volume at world-event scale. A spoofed early-warning signal — routed through the satellites a single defecting pilot quietly compromised in earlier chapters — convinces two nuclear powers each that the other has launched first. What survives, and what the colony does next, sets up Volume Two.
The volume ends on a private message addressed by name to John Hunter. The reader does not get to read it.
Designed for Story Readers
The Faint Signal rewards close reading. Wrong-notes are planted pages before their payoff; secondary characters carry their own arcs; the artwork is composed so a child watching from the kitchen doorway sees something the adults at the table miss. Whether you come for the science-fiction thriller, the family drama, or the cinematic format, each chapter is built to land as one continuous, authored experience.