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| How I "draw" stuff? | Nov 30, 2009 9:00 PM PST | url |
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This past weekend's Princess and the Giant comic came out looking like this
but did it start out that way? Not...really. I happened to preserve some of the *successful* (scary thought) steps of the drawing, so I put together a little animation of them, and it came out...surprisingly hideous. For instance, at one point, the drawing looked like this:
Yipes! You can see that terrifyingly transmogrify into the finished drawing--and you can check out the finished full-size comic--in the Princess' forum thread, right here.
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| Jupiter's volcanic moon: Io | Nov 30, 2009 5:12 PM PST | url |
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I got the Wikipedia-combing bug again over the weekend, and wrote up an article with some spiffy images and details of the most volcanic body in our solar system, Jupiter's moon Io, which, although only a bit bigger than Earth's own moon, has as many as 400 active volcanos scarring its sulphur-strewn surface. Cool beans! The Io article has lots of big colorful pictures of the lively moon, and an animation of the above image, which shows one of those volcanoes shooting a plume of material 300 meters above the surface.
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| Possible image for the first A* lunch boxes | Nov 28, 2009 6:16 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* comic:Pah, only got one actual comic done today, but it's kind of a complicated one, with three poses each for Selenis and Vero--for use in the eventual animation. And I put together this sort of late-70's, mid-80's "let's fade a big face across a dramatic scene" type of thing from some of the artwork generated for today's comic--click this tiny version for the big version:
I don't think that period is actually "cool" again yet, but eh well it's bound to come back around one of these days to re-horrify us all. Also, to get in the holiday mood, Selenis is trying very hard to look like the "Grinch" here.
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| Buttons and Banners | Nov 28, 2009 6:10 AM PST | url |
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Added finished versions of the pretty purple banner I showed off a while back, and these tiny "button" images
to the icons page.
Similarly, added these buttons
to the "Princess and the Giant" thread.
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| Asteroid Fly-bys and other excitement | Nov 28, 2009 6:07 AM PST | url |
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I happened to dig up some fascinating pictures and drama of spacecraft making asteroid fly-bys, most successfully Galileo, which for instance found that the 50 km asteroid Ida had a cute little 1.5 km moon of its own, Dactyl:
Cute! More about that, the biggest explosion ever photographed, and the weird "safe mode" glitches that have plagued several asteroid landing attempts, including the disastrously unlucky Japanese probe Hayabusa--which against all odds is still limping home, and hopes to deliver actual asteroid bits back to Earth next summer...although they aren't 100% sure the return capsule captured anything in the two abortive landing attempts--in the article.
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| Server software upgrade Dec. 10th | Nov 27, 2009 6:08 PM PST | url |
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My ISP just notified me that they'll be upgrading the software on the server running A*'s site on Thursday, December 10th. Down time is expected to be only about 15 minutes total, so you probably won't even notice, but I thought I'd post this just in case.
They're going to be updating the versions of various software that it's running, like FreeBSD, Perl, PHP, etc, and supposedly afterwards it will be running even faster than it is now, so yay, early Christmas prezzie. :D
My ISP, who I've been using for over ten years now on various sites, is pair.com. They're expensive by the standards of some of the "unlimited* stuff! (*but not really)" hosting services out there these days, but they have always been really on the ball and incredibly reliable.
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| Thanks and comics! | Nov 27, 2009 3:15 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* comic:I hope those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving have had a good one! This seems like a good time to mention that I'm really grateful for all the people who've taken to reading any of my comics in the five or so months since I started making them, and particularly to those oldschoolers who've been around since I first started putting out A* movies eight months ago. Thanks, and I hope I can keep you entertained with comics for a good long while yet.
Speaking of which, there's also a new -word- comic that I've just put up.
And we'll be back to more A* tomorrow!
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| Comics & Thanksgiving Plans | Nov 26, 2009 1:54 AM PST | url |
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Added 4 new A* comics:Those two of Selenis today came out surprisingly well (of course she looks slightly different than in all the previous pictures, but let's just pretend it's artistic evolution rather than...eh...inconsistency ;), so I've added large versions of them to the gallery; click these tiny versions to get there:
Tomorrow's Thanksgiving here in the US of A, and most folks take the rest of the week off, but I think I'll be able to get out at least one comic tomorrow--probably pretty late in the evening--and I should be kicking a few out on Friday, too. So, if you get bored on your long, fowl-fattened days off, why, come check up on A*!
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| LHC and other "Symbols" | Nov 25, 2009 7:34 PM PST | url |
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CERN's Large Hadron Collider is (nearly) up and running again, smashing protons and ions together at just under light speed to see what little bits come out: things with funny names like hadrons, gluons, bosons, beauty quarks, etc.
A group of scientists and professors from the University of Nottingham put together the best coverage of the LHC I've seen yet:
http://www.youtube.com/v/OzR4eXIz_uA
And the web site of the producers of that clip, sixtysymbols.com, is chock-full of similarly fascinating videos covering fundamental concepts in astrophysics. Well worth a look if you're into this sort of thing.
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| A* episode 4 in German | Nov 25, 2009 2:05 AM PST | url |
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Vitruv, Starschwar, Neo87, and SEPET have combined forces to produce A* episode 4 with German subtitles. Thanks guys, great job!
Now A* can be big in Germany, just like the Hoff. :D
If you don't sprechen sie deutsch, you can head to A* episode 4 in English.
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| Generic Soldier hits it big | Nov 25, 2009 1:45 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:A rough animated version of Mr. Generic Soldier's Oscar moment:
And I was so enamored with him that I put a big version of him in the gallery, behind this little one:
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| Mars is lovely, wish you were here | Nov 24, 2009 12:21 AM PST | url |
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(image by NASA)
Over the weekend I posted some nifty photos from Mars in a brief article on the A* forum; these are photos taken either by robots on the surface of "the red planet," or by satellites orbiting it. For instance, the photo above of tracks left in the Martian sand by the six-wheeled rover Opportunity was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite.
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| A* Episode 6, Dailies 112 - 114 | Nov 24, 2009 12:10 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* comics:Selenis does her hiding in shadows trick again, only the other way this time. Here's a rough cut of it animated:
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| Eyeses | Nov 21, 2009 4:41 AM PST | url |
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Added 4 new A* comics:Those of you who may happen to recall the cinematic I did for The Matrix Online a year ago might be able to guess what's about to happen here, just after our femme fatale interrupts herself and looks suddenly to the side. Yes I still like these eye close-ups! (Those of you who don't know could find that old thing via a link near the bottom of the about page, but I'm not gonna link it directly here because well it's pretty rough by current A* standards, believe it or not. ;)
As if you needed more proof I like eye close-ups, here's a super-big montage/collage/whateveryoucallit of today's eye drawings (click this smallish version for the giant version in the gallery):
That's all for A* this week (there should be a new Princess and the Giant over the weekend, for those of you who follow my weekly fantasy comic), so have yourselves a nice weekend, and we'll find out exactly what Selenis' self-interruption's all about next week!
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| Other people link to A*! | Nov 21, 2009 4:40 AM PST | url |
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Chuck Harrison of Decaffeinated Coffee was kind enough to add a link to A* on his comic site's "friends" list, so that was pretty neat. Thanks man! Decaffeinated Coffee is a single-panel humor comic, not necessarily about coffee, so you may want to go check that out.
The only other webcomic person who's linked to me so far that I'm aware of is Johnny Lin, from his spiffy Orbit comic's site. Yay!
And let's not forget SEPET's site, which has A* in Italian. I've never been to Italy (yet!), but it seems to be a pretty darn cool place, if I may say so.
Now, if *you* have a link to A* that I haven't linked or mentioned yet, lemme know and I'll take care of that little oversight.
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| A* Episode 6, Dailies 105 - 107 | Nov 20, 2009 2:27 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* comics:Nothing like a little cross-examination at gunpoint. Hey, maybe I should do a legal drama! "Your honor, the evidence clearly shows that the victim was a clone, and thus..."
Oh wait, I forgot they aren't so big on law around A*. Which raises the question: what do they fill their lives with, if not courtroom TV?
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| A* Episode 6, Dailies 102 - 104 | Nov 19, 2009 1:46 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* comics:I put a large version of today's middle comic--Vero looking "malcontent," as Selenis put it--in the gallery; you can get right to it by clicking this smallish preview:
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| A* Episode 6, Daily 101 | Nov 18, 2009 2:28 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* comic:Well! An unexpected sudden rearrangement of my "home office" ate up a good chunk of the day, so there's my excuse for having *only* one comic in this update; past a certain point, it seems that ergonomics will brook no further delay. (Yesterday's disruption was just a party--yes I have crazy friends who have parties on Mondays! It is odd. Of course I'm there in my usual 'ooh I should've done more sleeping and less comic drawing over the weekend' stupor...)
Today's single comic looks a little funny, and I hadn't really planned it to come out that way; in fact, I drew up the shading of the characters in some detail (see), but it just wasn't having the punch I wanted, so silhouettes with funky auras was the obvious next step to take. Ahem.
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| Late but still 100! | Nov 17, 2009 3:18 AM PST | url |
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Knew it was gonna be late, didn't think quite this late, but hey it's still this episode's 100th daily comic!
Added 1 new A* comic:Selenis getting back to business. ;)
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| A* Episode 6, Dailies 98 - 99 | Nov 14, 2009 4:00 AM PST | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:Almost made it to 100! That should be along Monday, although my Monday update will probably be pretty late. Yeah, so what else is new? :p Have a nice weekend!
Ooh wait I know something new. There's a new word comic thingy up, and as usual between Saturday and Sunday there'll be a new Princess and the Giant going up.
Also also, I'm working on a new ad to replace my stale old ads! Still working out the lettering (it'll go in the middle, sort of crossing the event horizon in a staggered way), but it's got some pretty purple, so here's a preview, cropped a bit at the sides to fit into the news column:
You may recognize the head and general layout from episode 5, daily 116! But see I've cleverly swapped the planet of Gabbot's Claim in the background with a black hole! Of course you couldn't actually be as close to a black hole as Selenis appears to be here--well, not that close and still smiling, anyway--but hey, it makes for a nice ad picture!
The text will probably be something about "daily sci-fi comics"..."no escape" or so... That's the part I'm still working out. ;) My first thought was "The center of our galaxy...sucks" which is kind of snappy buuuut sort of has a negative sound to it. Oh those misunderstood black holes!
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| The Fourth Comic | Nov 13, 2009 3:41 AM PST | url |
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Yep, I started a fourth comic!
word
word.smbhax.com
Found free fonts get scrambled up into silly little poem picture things. Updates when a poem pops into my head. For future reference, you can always find the link to -word- on the more comics by me page, the link to which is right up there in the A* site's main top menu!
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| The return of Vero's face | Nov 13, 2009 1:27 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* comics:You know, I think today's first daily is the first time this episode I've actually had to draw Vero's (nearly) entire face. He can be tricky because he doesn't really have any features that are distinguishing on their own; you've got to arrange them just so in order for him to be recognizable. And I made this one confusing for myself because it will be animated as a sort of shadow morph where his head goes from back-lit to side-lit as the background pans behind him, and his shadowed face sort of has more cartoonish features (blank white eyes and mouth), but as the light comes around the side of his head, those features have to be rendered more realistically, and getting the one lined up with the other was tricky what with me being rusty on his facial topography. It took a few tries, but hopefully he came out reasonably Veroish in the end.
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| Three Selenis close-ups | Nov 12, 2009 5:31 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* comics:Jeepers did that take me a long time to draw! Ungharlaghbluh. =P
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| Terrible Teasers | Nov 11, 2009 12:52 AM PST | url |
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Added 3 new A* comics:Is this where things start to get...weird? ;)
I'm also working on putting together my fourth comic! Yes I may be a little crazy. But this one is cleverly designed to have no need for drawing! How brilliant is that? Eh well we'll see in a few days or so. Actually, the beginning of it is up now, but hidden at a completely logical spot that nobody will ever find. Muhahaha!
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| A* Episode 6, Dailies 86 - 88 | Nov 10, 2009 3:39 AM PST | url |
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Did I ever mention where Vero's last name came from? Hm I think I asked people to guess and that didn't work. Try thinking science, not pirates! Hm.
Added 3 new A* comics:I discovered the foolishness of giving in to the urge to spend a really long time on a single drawing--as I did on Friday--that will have to have other drawings animated from it: those other drawings take a long time to make, too! And to get the Selenis grimaces in I had to draw three lip positions instead of just two for each of them. Note to self: keep is simple--Mondays are frightening enough already. :P
Here's a view of the mouth positions (grimacing/talking/closed), and some eyebrow positions for one of them:
The funky cocked eyebrow I'd drawn initially was bugging me at one point late Friday night, so I tried a couple more straightforward positions, but they weren't as interesting, so I kept it cocked. Aw yeah. I probably won't use those extra eyebrow positions in the final animation, but it's possible I'll find a way to work them in somehow.
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| The Gravity of Massive Heads | Nov 07, 2009 8:50 AM PST | url |
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A week of me fighting a bizarre urge to draw Selenis with a king-size head mercifully comes to a close!
Added 3 new A* comics:Okay so you may be wondering about the head thing. In fact maybe you saw it, but I've been stealth editing the big heads away slowly and steadily: her dome is about down to a respectably non-enormous size in dailies 74 and 82 and the corresponding art gallery entries now. If you did see it: cherish the horrid memories of Alien(s) and peanut-shaped Selenis heads! Hopefully I don't keep doing it anymore, it's a real pain to keep trying to fix. I think it's probably due to me never having tried to draw a woman with a crew-cut before, not to mention at bizarre foreshortened angles: where does the short hair end, and the skull begin? Did I leave enough millimeters for hair above the scalp? If I go back in there and carve out some individual hairs, is it going to shrink her head? Is this scale right? Am I just secretly attracted to girls with Cerebro-scale brains? Maaan the existential questions come thick and fast in this scenario.
While I'm on the subject, lest you thought drawing A* went smoothly even when not having the swelled head problem (*cough*), I present you with another horrifying rendition of the woman:
This was my process of trying to draw her today: I wanted the face toward the viewer, head angled slightly down, eyes glaring out straight ahead. Very often my first attempt fails to capture the look I want, but usually when that happens, I realize it right away. This time, I fought against the goofy expression, too-plain facial layout and too-level angle (top row, left)--not to mention a bizarre stoned vampire look--for a while, and things got worse and worse (top row, right). Egads!
What you have to do in a situation like that is just junk the thing and start over. So I started again (bottom row, left), and this time it went--for me--fairly smoothly, although you'll see that it took me a while and a lot of futzing to settle on the amount of shadow I wanted around the eyes (bottom row, right).
That's all I have to torture you with for now other than these last two gallery entries for the week (and the usual early-Sunday-morning Princess and the Giant update), so have a nice weekend! (Click these for the full-size gallery versions:)
Oh wait here's a brain-puzzler for you that had me pouring over bizarre cosmological phenomena and summaries of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity on Wikipedia this week: How fast is gravity?
(Answer: apparently nobody knows yet! Scientists are assuming it's the speed of light, but haven't had a way to test that theory. What if it's slower than light, even just in certain situations? Massive implications for cosmology! Maybe we aren't headed toward an infinitely expanding universe after all! Maybe all estimates of billions-of-light-years distances are significantly off-target! Maybe we could explain why planes flying by towers and stars at the edges of galaxies move faster than expected, and why the Voyager spacecraft are moving slower than expected as they try to escape the Sun's gravity into interstellar space!
Bonus questions:
- What is gravity? A property of matter? A geometric curvature of spacetime? A force? A particle? A wave?
- Ditto for magnetism! (This one's a *little* easier.)
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| Do those rivets feel lucky? | Nov 06, 2009 5:37 AM PST | url |
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Added Selenis' "Rosie the Riveter" pose to the gallery:
Added 3 new A* comics:
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| Drawing mistakes and experiments | Nov 05, 2009 3:49 AM PST | url |
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Interesting drawing stories about today's dailies! First, the comics:
Added 4 new A* comics:All right, well, these stories are probably only interesting to me, who does the drawing, but hey, this is what you get when you let the artist write the news!
I've put larger versions of today's first and last dailies in the gallery, accessible by clicking these somewhat smaller versions:
If the first looks familiar to you somehow, you might be remembering it from the storyboard version I posted at the beginning of the chapter; that was the first real version of Selenis' unhelmeted face and head that I drew, and I spent a long time on that storyboard, trying to nail down a look. So today when it came time to do the final art, I figured I'd like to keep that look as closely as possible, so I used the storyboard sketch as a direct guide in starting the lasso-drawn version; I wasn't sure how well lassoing over normal brush drawing would work, but it worked pretty well, I think, and it's got a slightly different look to it that I kind of like. So I'll have to think about how to take advantage of that lasso-guided-by-brush idea more in the future, although the down side is that it can end up taking twice as long to get the final drawing! D:
I also used the storyboard of the second view of Selenis as a guide for the final version of that shot, since I'd sketched up a tricky perspective that was hard to recapture exactly otherwise; I let the lasso run much more wild this time, though, so while it took advantage of the layout strength of the original brush storyboard, the final surface definitely looks all shiny and lassoey. So that worked pretty well too, in a slightly different way. Fascinating, isn't it? :D :p
Finally, when I was drawing today's middle scene, I forgot that in the animation, Vero will have moved to his right in his preceding shot (daily 75), so now instead of facing each other perpendicular to the lighting from the front archway, they're directly in line with it. Well, I drew the lighting coming from the wrong angle before I remembered that, and then had to go and redo it. Here you can see the lighting angle change from the original version (coming from the top) to the redrawn version (coming from the right)--click the pic if it isn't animating for you:
Poor Mick had to lay there playing dead in a pool of his own blood while the lighting was re-rigged to the correct angle--that kind of thing is tough on an actor! Well, that's why they get the big bucks, I guess.
Oh yeah, and that drawing ended up being unusual for A* because I ended up using the gradient across the floor as a secondary layer of shading on the characters, sort of punching out highlights, especially on Selenis who's standing in the darkest part of the gradient. That seemed to work decently, although I wouldn't be able to use that sort of shortcut in a scene where the characters are moving around.
I also fixed a certain cone-headed attempt at Selenis' buzz cut from yesterday (*cough* daily 74 *cough*).
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| Walnut-moon Iapetus | Nov 04, 2009 4:24 PM PST | url |
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Imagine you took a chunk of ice, sculpted it into a walnut shape, scored its surface by throwing rocks at it, and coated half of it with dirt in an oblong shape. What would you have? Well, if that chunk of ice was 1500 km in diameter and orbiting Saturn, you'd just about have Iapetus, Saturn's third-largest moon!
(image from NASA)
I wrote an article about freakish moon Iapetus on the A* forum; it's basically a brief summary of the Wikipedia article with fewer words, large in-line pictures, and more exclamation marks! Yesssss!
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| A* Episode 6, Dailies 74 - 75 | Nov 04, 2009 12:15 AM PST | url |
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Vero will start to return to polysyllables--or at least multiple monosyllables--soon, I promise! =p
Added 2 new A* comics:Check out all the glorious detail in Selenis' buzz cut--which I spent way too long drawing today...was kinda fun though :o--in the large version, accessible in the gallery via this slightly smaller version:
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| Femme fatales enter this way I heard | Nov 03, 2009 1:33 AM PST | url |
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Selenis (for that is indeed her) emerges from the shadows for her requisite dramatic entrance:
There's also a big version of today's first daily comic in the gallery; click this tiny one to get to the big one:
Added 2 new A* comics:
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