Ashes Over Neon brings together science fiction, cyberpunk, comics, and music around a four-person band trying to find its place inside a system that has already decided much of their lives for them.
For creator Jake Tipton, those pieces aren’t separate. His background stretches from the U.S. Navy and NASA to music production and performance, and Ashes Over Neon (official site) grew out of an attempt to bring those experiences together through sequential art and an accompanying soundtrack. The result is a character-driven project concerned with autonomy, identity, creative expression, and the pressures exerted by the systems surrounding us.
Ahead of the release of Ashes Over Neon on December 10, we spoke with Jake about the origins of the project, building a science-fiction story around a rock band, working with Brazilian comic artists, the role of music in the series, and what independent creation allows him to do differently.
For readers encountering your work for the first time, can you introduce yourself and talk a little about your background as a creator?
Of course! Humbly, I just tell people I’m a light brown dude finding his way in this crazy world, but my therapist tells me I need to give myself more credit.
I started writing in 2011 when I first read Ender’s Game. I’ve always been a reader, always enjoyed English and writing as my favorite subjects, was an advanced reader in grade school, won some spelling bees, and was bullied and made fun of for liking anime, video games, and nerd culture in general, but I digress.
Ender’s Game was the first book I read that understood me on a deep level, both emotionally and psychologically. It also freakily directly reflected a large portion of my family dynamic. This is an important distinction in my life because while I was always inspired to read, this was the first time in my life I was inspired to write.
Parallel to that, I come from a musical family. My mom was a singer, and my dad was a bit of a renaissance man instrumentally. In school I played brass and percussion, traveled a bit being in marching band, then ultimately dropped traditional music to focus on a garage band where I played bass and then performed vocals in a couple of local bands.
I found my ultimate love of music in the metal genre, and I’ve been headbanging, belting, and shredding ever since.
You’ve worked in both the space industry and the music industry. How did those experiences eventually lead into creating a science-fiction comic centered on a rock band?
Shit, how much time do you have? [laughs]
My life, objectively, has been in the truest sense of the word, unorthodox. I have worn many hats and have lived many lives, all ultimately in the simple interest of survival. I know that might sound extreme to some, but it’s just simply true.
I was battling homelessness around 14, was living on my own by 16, started having roommates at 18 — what’s up with these two-year gaps? — and at 21 was when I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. With my experience in government, that directly led to NASA.
I had just gotten back to the States from my final deployment, had processed out, it’s winter 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 just came out, and I was couch surfing because, surprise surprise, I was homeless! [laughs] It was me, my laptop, and my 2015 Jetta against the world. When I was looking for jobs, it came down to Virginia or Florida, and Florida is what ended up sticking.
Related tangent, but I didn’t even know I was applying for NASA. They intentionally didn’t list the name to deter unqualified candidates.
While I was at NASA, I still wanted to work in music. I had gotten heavy into production, mixing, and songwriting, had started to network and gain a very small reputation, and was in another couple of projects, but balancing the two just wasn’t feasible.
Fast forward about four years and I had left government, was waiting for paperwork to go through for school enrollment, and a buddy from one of those past projects contacted me to start a virtual band, like Gorillaz, but heavy. Then he suggested that a comic go with this story.
What he didn’t know was that I’m neurotic, and when I say I’m going to do something, I do it all the way. What to him was just a passing suggestion, to me was a whole commitment.
Combining all of the skills I’ve learned in discipline, project management, and craft honing, I decided I was going to combine music and story. It was the perfect marriage. Of course there’s a myriad of other contributing factors, but when thinking about my creative journey and where I wanted to go, this direction just simply made the most sense.
For someone discovering Ashes Over Neon for the first time, what is the comic about, and what kind of story should they expect from the first issue?
I’m huge into philosophy. This first issue, I struggled with the binary decision of eye-candy appeal or character establishment. In my opinion, since something always has to give, ultimately, you can’t have both at a high standard in less than 30 pages. Of course outliers exist in every medium, but I don’t have the backing that Dark Horse has, or Marvel/DC has. I’m just one person.
So I chose the lane that’s ultimately timeless and I have the most experience in: character and story.
This first issue is about Sera, how she meets the rest of the band, and her decision to leave her current life and everything she’s built behind for an unknown one.
In my recent years of life, I was given new purpose from a college professor, Dr. Michael Sugrue (1957–2024), and during one of his lectures he said the right thing in the right moment to someone who was going through an existential stage in their life. He said, “Do what’s right today, and let tomorrow figure itself out.”
It told me that I need to get outside of myself and realistically surrender to what I can’t control. That’s what Dante gives Sera. The gift of choice, self-autonomy, and the reminder of freedom.
He asks her, “Who are you going to be tomorrow?” And that’s a type of question that should be ingrained in every one of us. Not worried about when you’re clocking in, not worried about the next bill that’s due, stressing about other people’s decisions or thoughts towards you. Who do YOU want to be? And how do YOU want to live YOUR life?
Themes like this are going to show up constantly in Ashes Over Neon because to me those are what’s most important.
Why did you decide to make a rock band the center of the story? What does that particular group dynamic allow you to explore that another kind of cast might not?
In Ashes Over Neon, the music actually came before the story. When Dan — the one I worked with years ago who reached out and catalyzed this — and I were writing demos, going over lyrics, and creating a story for the band that would ultimately influence the music, elements from even today started rearing their heads. It was a symbiotic process.
When carving out “a sound,” part of that craft is committing to certain musical techniques, instruments, etc. While we were like, “Yeah, we can do whatever we want,” I didn’t want to sound like everyone or everything else. I didn’t want it to be an afterthought. I wanted it to be serious. I wanted connection.
Bottom line, this music is still going to come from us, so it has to come from somewhere real and somewhere deep. I started revolving around themes of capitalism, identity, self-autonomy, and Dan had just seen the movie KPop Demon Hunters. At the same time, we were both going through serious health concerns.
So having this constant back and forth about having a woman-fronted act, singing about raw themes and subjects about going through hospitals, working until you’re dead, living for corporate agenda, literally SELLING your soul, all started to form itself in a way that we never even planned.
This is what birthed the four characters. What they play, and how they play, is directly related to both our experiences working with musicians over the past 20 years. Nox is a technical musician. He’s the perfect drummer. Malachi is heavy and precise as a guitar player who doesn’t want the spotlight, hence the focus on groove and down-tuned music. Dante is a showman through and through, always wanting to keep the energy high and give people moments to remember. He’s a DJ. And Sera has a deep-seated need to be a voice for the voiceless. She went through the wringer and she doesn’t want anyone else to go through what she did.
But Ashes Over Neon is uniquely a five-character story with seven unique relationships. The four in the band, and the band itself. When I was writing, I had to consider this sort of poly relationship that every band experiences, because if a member leaves, the music changes. Once the formula is gone, it’s gone.
Some people might even contrast that with Rick and Morty in its later seasons. Justin Roiland left and the show changed. Donald Glover left Community, and the show changed. Yes, I love Dan Harmon’s work.
But in music, and as a close follower of metal music, this is something that’s seen constantly. Killswitch Engage, Stone Temple Pilots, Linkin Park, As I Lay Dying, Issues, Rain City Drive — formerly Slaves — it’s just simply how the machine works.
So I couldn’t deny who these characters were when they are all together behind closed doors or on stage. They are their true selves, and anyone you can be your true self around is family.
You’ve described Ashes Over Neon as character-driven. How do you balance those characters against the larger science-fiction world surrounding them?
The characters are simply living in the world they were born into. I did not choose to place them in Everos, the concentric city made up of nine sectors. Very akin and direct with the saying “the cards life has dealt.” They all come from wildly different backgrounds.
That’s how the worldbuilding started to present itself more broadly, yet specifically, and their backgrounds directly contribute to the story.
This again came from direct experience in what it’s like in the real world to run a band. Ask any successful act, every single person has a role, whether it’s mainly writing, business, outreach, finance balance, etc. The band is both a brand and a business, full stop.
So it’s actually simple to balance them in the world because they already live there and, in a way, I know a lot of the lives they’ve lived, both inspired and in-world.
Cyberpunk is often associated with a very recognizable neon-drenched visual language. Ashes Over Neon appears more restrained, with the neon almost emerging through the ashes rather than overwhelming the world. How did you approach the visual identity of the series?
Correct. Ashes Over Neon is philosophical, metaphorical, and abstract in title. A cardinal sin in pop culture.
It should be aptly named “A Band of Misfits” if I were to go the conventional route, but if it’s to remain true, it requires to be original. That’s what real difference is to me.
If we do apply the title to the story in the most direct sense, it literally states Ashes Over Neon. You should expect there to be a lack of overwhelming neon trope. It’s in the name.
However, when compared to Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077, two titles that wear the same neon skin, they are still their own experiences. It’s the reasoning behind the setting it takes place in that gives it that neon association.
Now, of course you can’t have neon in the name without a little bit of fan service, and if I’m being honest, I love me some neon ambience. But I’m going to be a little snooty here. A fan of the genre is going to say, “There’s a refreshing take here that doesn’t burn your eye bulbs with it,” and a more passive fan of the genre is going to read this first book and say, “There’s barely any neon in this.” And that was completely intentional at this stage.
The neon trope only became what it is in the genre because it was smartly adapted, and I intend on doing the same here. You’ll get it, but you’ll get it when it best serves you, I promise.
Cyberpunk has accumulated a lot of familiar imagery over the last forty years, but underneath the aesthetics it has traditionally been concerned with people living under technological, economic, and social pressures. What does cyberpunk mean to you now, and where does Ashes Over Neon fit within, or push against, that tradition?
This is where my systems-thinking brain fires off on all cylinders, starting with my project-management brain.
If we look at science fiction as a broad genre, to me there’s clear indicators in how it evolves roughly every generation. To quickly dilute human history into one sentence, it started with Buck Rogers in the ’20s, a golden age with Asimov and Heinlein circa ’40s, Star Trek in the ’60s, our beloved birth of cyberpunk circa ’80s, and science fiction started to branch and fragment in the 2000s, which weirdly brought us back to a revival in the 2020s.
I’ll save my personal reasoning and perspective in justifying why this is, but the constant throughline traces back to my childhood in that I’ve always loved tech. From playing Tiberian Sun in the ’90s, to being in the trenches of Newgrounds in the 2000s, building my friends’ MySpace pages with HTML, and proving teachers wrong that we in fact would always, for the rest of mankind’s future, “HaVe A cAlCuLaToR iN oUr PoCkEt.”
I’ve always naturally been drawn to tech, and I provide this long-winded backstory because cyberpunk provides the genre of how I perceive life.
Ashes Over Neon fits within and pushes against because it contains an amalgamation of, and homages to, all of the elements that inspired and built it. Afrofuturism, feminism, retro-futuristic — which is synthesizing to be nostalgic — there’s going to be little nods all over the place to the greats that paved the way, and science fiction in general allows a creative space to be realistic.
This isn’t a story about hopping in a spaceship and shooting lasers around Pluto. It’s a story about four people surviving the system.
It’s about the corporate hothead finding relationship and love after leaving her family behind for a job. It’s about a now-grown latchkey kid who values community and spirit over screens and likes. It’s about a dishonored stoic who comes from a background of crime and detests any form of nepotism. And about a young adult who’s struggling to keep their inner child alive from fighting the shame of how they were born.
These outside pressures all come from economic concerns, social concerns, and, of course, high-tech advancement being heavily integrated into society and pacifying the human condition and experience.
There’s nothing punk about that. Fuck tradition.
The artists of the first issue are Brazilian, and you’ve talked about intentionally working with different artists on future issues. What drew you to Brazil’s comics community, and what interests you about allowing the visual style of Ashes Over Neon to evolve from issue to issue?
I used to write for a buddy’s website concerning tech and gaming news. From that network, I was introduced to a comic studio that the site owner also co-owns. The way I stumbled into it I took as a sign from the universe because this introduction happened completely unintentionally just a couple days after Dan suggested the comic idea.
By working with this studio and when I was introduced to the art team, unbeknownst to me, Brazil has an extremely thriving comic community. I didn’t know Brazilians got down like that. To make an analogy, it’s kind of like how the Russians have always had a space in video games — if you know, you know — the medium is just simply a part of their culture.
For instance, the cover artist for this first book, Eder Messias, has his name on Captain America, Hulk, Supernatural. He’s an A-lister.
Then while I was producing this and studying the craft of sequential art beside it, it occurred to me that all the best comics, in my opinion, shine the brightest when the marriage of image and text is executed in a balanced way that lets both forms shine when they need and should. Woman of Tomorrow, Birthright, Skinbreaker, The Killing Joke, Ronin. These are seen as some of the best in the industry, and it simply comes down to the marriage of expression.
Way easier said than done, but as this series continues I intend to find my partner in expression.
If I was writing an anthology, then I’d have a different artist for every story. But while the art in this first book is great, if I’m being overly nitpicky and overbearingly particular, it’s just simply not how I envision the story expressed from an aesthetic perspective.
For other stories I have in the pipeline, absolutely. Gustavo Novaes is a powerhouse and I would love to work with him again. But by no stretch of the imagination is this meant to demean or belittle his work. By no means. I just need to bring my specific vision to life.
There’s also a soundtrack connected to Ashes Over Neon. What role does the music play in the overall project, and how would you like readers to experience the soundtrack alongside the comic?
Balancing the music was harder than balancing the characters in the universe. [laughs] I will boil this down and save the book I could’ve written just on this portion.
For this first issue I had to heavily adjust my plans, so this music being released with it is actually foreshadowing to the series. The music follows the story directly, and in the next books these are the songs they perform on stage.
What’s going to happen is that through these next pages, you’ll stumble across a QR code somewhere on the page, scan it, and it’ll take you directly to the song. Not only are you reading and seeing it, now you’re hearing it.
This alludes back to the marriage I’m constantly talking about. I want Ashes Over Neon to be as immersive as possible, and this is the only way I currently know how to evoke more of the audience’s senses.
By the end of the series there will be about 20 songs that also grow in sound, story, themes, etc. It’s ambitious, but so was going to the moon.
This will either work or it won’t. But it will always be unique.
Because this is the first issue of a larger project, how much of the future of Ashes Over Neon did you know before beginning issue one, and how much are you allowing the series to evolve as you make it?
I’m a set-in-stone guy, and a long-term planner. We make a plan, we stick to the fundamentals, but smartly adapt when needed. If we’re sailing West, we go West. If we have to go North for a little bit, so be it. But we will get back on course. Unless something tragic happens, we don’t waver.
Before I even began discussions for book one, I wrote Ashes Over Neon in its entirety. The whole story is already finished, and the scripts for the first three books are already finished.
It will not change under the hood because I know what purpose I want it to serve. This would be like building a drift car and then using it to drag race. It doesn’t work like that.
The series is going to go into themes exploring what’s inherently human, the sacrifice commitment requires, and the cost of choice. If I veer from that, then it’s no longer Ashes Over Neon. Just like if you take away the webs, it’s no longer Spider-Man.
As future issues introduce different artists and continue developing these characters, are there elements of Ashes Over Neon that you consider untouchable — things that need to remain consistent even as the project evolves?
I guess I jumped the gun here. [laughs] But the main distinction in this series is the band aspect.
Remember the marriage? Mediums have different effects. A movie is going to be experienced differently than a book is. Music can make lasting impacts, but by and large is short-lived. This is a marriage medium I wanted to explore.
Having both music and reading reinforces different parts of us, and adding sound to image is in its own way animation via aural stimulation. It gives it life.
If you take the music away from Ashes Over Neon, it is no longer Ashes Over Neon. If you remove Malachi, that would be like removing Raphael from the Ninja Turtles. Every element in this skeleton is so integral to the story that it’s almost built like a house of cards. Take one out and the whole thing topples.
However, the reward for that is it can’t be compared to anything else, and by that it stands proudly on its own.
What do you think independent comics allow creators to do that would be harder to accomplish inside a larger, more traditional publishing structure?
This is a topic I’m going to continue to learn about as I explore the space, but what I think I know already about it, and from my other conversations with other indie vets, is that independence ultimately allows freedom and creative control. In all senses.
Then when you introduce big money, you run into the Spawn situation, and even though I’m a policy expert and a word nerd, I don’t want to deal with that, plain and simple.
By being independent, in all industries — even in music and film — you take all of the risk, but reap all of the reward. Or failure.
But let’s say I got recruited by DC. If that were to ever happen, I have to write Batman. I’d have to write Green Lantern. These characters and worlds have been established for almost 100 years, and that’s a long time building an international audience. Standards are already set and expectations are high.
So while I still absolutely would love to write a Punisher or Suicide Squad, by entering that world, by default, you’re entering an established framework that you cannot deviate from.
And what’s punk about that!?
Who do you think is most likely to connect with Ashes Over Neon? If someone is discovering the comic because they like science fiction, cyberpunk, comics, or music, what might they find here that they weren’t expecting?
I don’t mean to sound pretentious when I say this, so I hope it reads plainly and comes across the way I intend. Ashes Over Neon is for a more sophisticated audience.
It’s not a discourse on metaphysics, or an antithetical argument about an aspect of the theory of relativity, but it is ultimately mature. This isn’t an experience about short-term vibes. This universe is being designed and built to be that, a universe.
In an abstract way, I’m building my own version of Disneyland. I have written a novella that is the prequel to the series, two tabletop games that can be played solo or with friends, video games will be coming — flash games already exist that reveal Easter eggs about the lore — it’s immersive already. You can take the character quiz, you can listen to the podcasts, and this isn’t something to give someone a quick fix.
I’m sure someone will, and honestly, I hope at the least I can provide that on the surface, because that experience can’t be ignored. But there’s a reason why I’m establishing this so hard in every way I can.
This is my way of giving back the way the ones before me gave to me. I’m just simply repeating the cycle. This universe has something for everyone and I intend to keep delivering on that.
When somebody finishes the first issue of Ashes Over Neon, what do you hope stays with them?
I hope the feeling, or thought revolution, of choice ownership stays with them. That’s the crux of this entire issue.
I didn’t know who I was for over 25 years. I was wearing different masks and different costumes. From a church pew to military formation. It occurred to me one day I had never lived my life for myself. It was always someone else’s framework. A system I didn’t choose, but was told to walk into and give my all to.
My health, my effort, my spirit, quite literally my all. Your “all” is your life.
Then all it took was for someone to tell me what I do control. My actions and decisions.
I don’t expect to change lives with a single book here, but if it does, then good. Your life should be your own. Your choices should be your own.
Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people, and that’s a form of control that can be largely exploited, and I abhor that throughout history it has been.
I’ve had my freedoms taken away, technically voluntary and involuntarily. But now I intend to use my freedom to give someone else theirs.
Thank you for making me a part of this, and letting me speak.
Ashes Over Neon is scheduled for release December 10, with the first issue introducing Sera, the rest of the band, and the choice that sets the larger story in motion. Jake has already written the complete story, with scripts for the first three issues finished, and plans for the project extend beyond comics into original music and other connected experiences.
At the center of all of it, though, is the question Jake returns to throughout the interview: how much of a life is determined by the systems surrounding us, and how much can still be chosen for ourselves? For Ashes Over Neon, that question begins with something much smaller than saving a world. It begins with deciding who you want to be tomorrow.
Ashes Over Neon is available for pre-order now and will begin shipping December 10. The digital soundtrack download will be included with each order at the time of shipping.
