The Creation of Chi-Chian

In 1989, 22-year-old Voltaire was in Tokyo meeting with advertising agencies and toy companies about a series of animated projects. One night in an outdoor cafe, a thought sprung into his mind and resulted in a drawing on the tablecloth before him. There on that tablecloth, Chi-Chian was born. Back in New York, where Voltaire was heavily entrenched in the world of directing and animating television commercials, Chi-Chian would occasionally show up on napkin drawings in New York cafes where Voltaire relaxed between projects.

He says, "I must have drawn her hundreds of times on cafe napkins and, sadly, most of those drawings usually found their way into the laundry, reduced to a ball of pulp in my pockets! I was so busy directing spots that I would fantasize about Chi-Chian and her world whenever I took a little time off. Over the next 8 years, her world became really detailed in my mind and I had created a whole saga around her that included the history of her parents. I knew that I had to find the time to put this all down in some kind of cohesive form. I decided that a comic book would be the best and least expensive way to tell her story, so one night I sat down and simply started drawing out what would eventually become the first issue of the Chi-Chian comic book."

At that time, Voltaire had just directed his first station ID for The SCI FI Channel. That award-winning Halloween promo, which featured stop-motion skeletons cavorting in a pumpkin patch, was well received, and Voltaire was invited to create another station ID for the channel.

Voltaire says, "I brought the prototype of the Chi-Chian comic book to The SCI FI Channel and proposed doing a station ID based on the characters in the book. They liked the designs and so, before I knew it, I was building and animating the world of Chi-Chian." In the resulting station ID, a stop-motion version of Chi-Chian electrocutes a giant robot with several thousand volts of electricity.

With his Chi-Chian character airing on the SCI FI Channel, Voltaire then took the comic-book prototype to comic-book publishers Sirius Entertainment, who commissioned him to create a six-issue miniseries. The series was released between 1989 and 1999 and found a small but fiercely loyal following in lovers of dark science fiction, organic technology and rich, emotional storytelling.

Three years after her television debut in that classic station ID, Chi-Chian has found her way home to SCI FI in an animated, online series!