Welcome – or welcome back, as the case may be – to our website!

Well, we’re back. And yep, this is a relaunch of sorts. We’ve dropped the old ‘Kuparkuke’ identity and we’ve renamed ourselves (for now at least) to ‘Cult of Galaxy’. The reasons behind this will soon become clear. For now, know that we’re back and that we mean business. After lots of thinking and rethinking, we’re ready to take our project in a bold new direction. We’re posting on Twitter again, and we’ve got lots of content queued up for sharing.

But first, as we’re starting our website from scratch, let us reintroduce ourselves. For those who don’t know, we’re Chelsey and James. Chelsey, a cartoonist and character designer, started this project by herself in 2011. Her goal was to tell an epic fantasy set in outer space with characters she created. James (that’s me) joined the project in 2016 as a co-creator, offering to help out by writing stories. We’ve been working on the project together ever since. Things have come a long way since 2016, but right now in 2022 we’re super happy with where things stand. We can’t wait to start sharing things again.

What have we been up to then?

Well for one, we’ve recently relocated to a whole new city!

This is something we dreamed and talked about for years, so we’re so thrilled to say we finally did it. Until recently, we both spent our whole lives in the same city. We were never particularly happy there. With a population of under 70 thousand, that city was a small one, with few opportunities for people like us. Despite its central location, it wasn’t particularly well-connected to anywhere else, either.

We considered a few places to move to, but in the end we settled on Birmingham. As the UK’s second biggest city after London, it’s a world away from what we experienced growing up. It’s very multicultural (much like our project!) and there’s so much more to do and see. There are also many more opportunities. We’ve been living here for about a month now. Although we’re still not done unpacking, we’re starting to feel settled. We’re both enjoying the change so far, but we’re also excited to get back to work on our project.

And although we haven’t talked about it recently, we’ve been busy in that regard!

One of the biggest changes we’ve made is to our protagonist.

You may remember our yellow kuparkuke. We’ve binned off his old name and he now goes by ‘Kinoko’. That old name, which he suffered from 2011 to 2022, was always something we planned to get rid of. We knew we had to change it, but it took us a long time to come up with something we liked. Unfortunately, it was difficult to talk about our project without talking about him. We never felt comfortable doing that when we still had to refer to him by his old name. It means a lot for us to finally have a name that we enjoy sharing and using in our work.

Another major change we’re considering is bringing more kuparkukes into central roles. That’s Kinoko’s species, if you don’t know. The original plan was that Kinoko would leave his home planet Fungaia for outer space on his own. In outer space he would be one-of-a-kind. Everybody he knew on Fungaia would fade into the background, never to appear again.

For the past year or so we’ve been dedicating a lot of time to the kuparkukes. It’s begun to feel like leaving them all behind would be a huge shame. We like them a lot as characters, and we know they can bring a lot to the story. That’s why we’re considering having Kinoko’s closest friends come along for the adventure. These are Neemal, Cosmo, Hanton, Kupette, Harpette, and Starstruck. Nothing’s for definite yet, but we’ll be introducing them soon either way, so please watch this space!

So, what are we working on now?

In the short-term, we’re working on our website. It’s going to be a while until it’s in a state that we’re happy with, but we’re making progress. We’ll be releasing more character profiles over time. Did you know there are over 60 kuparkukes in the Enoki tribe? These are all distinct characters with their own roles and personalities. We’ll be adding profiles for them in due course. Beyond Fungaia, we have almost 100 alien characters. Some are allies, some are enemies! We’ll be putting together profiles for every single one of them, so keep an eye out for those.

We have a few short comics in the works. The majority of them are about Kinoko and his friends on Fungaia. They provide an excellent introduction to the Enoki tribe and we can’t wait to share them. As Christmas approaches, we also plan to modernise and re-release one of our old stories. You may remember ‘Mr Evil’s Christmas Carol’. It was a retelling of the Charles Dickens tale – a well-loved classic but with our own characters and flavour.

But neither of these things are our primary project. Today isn’t the time to introduce that, but we plan to do so shortly, and we have a lot to say on the matter. For now let’s say that it’s huge. We’re putting everything into this, and learning a lot in the process. We want to do a proper job of it, hence the reappearance of our website and blog. We promise we’ll have more details for you soon.

To everyone that’s stuck with us this far, even when we’ve been so quiet on social media, thank you. We know we’re a bit rubbish with social media, but we’re trying to do better in that regard. In particular, we’re trying to use our Twitter account again to share updates on our project. If you aren’t already following us there, please do give us a follow on @cultofgalaxy. (We also have Instagram, but we won’t promise to update that as we struggle enough with one!)