Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 9
• A* Episode 10, Page 10

Hm I kind of like the cel-shaded silhouette thing going on in page 10 there, I'll hafta keep an eye open for other places where it might work.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 11

A single solitary page for Friday! My output Monday will likely be similarly curtailed; it seems my fine friends have determined a beach party would be just the thing to take the edge off the opening of the week. :o Yes, they are wonderfully silly people.

Have a lovely weekend, and keep an eye out for Sunday's Princess and the Giant update, if you're into it.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 12

Survived the beach party, only two burned fingers, and on my non-drawing hand. :)

And here's a teaser to get you to go visit the latest page of my Sunday fairy tale comic:

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 13
• A* Episode 10, Page 14

Ah, gunfire's always a good excuse to get back to some nice stark black and white. I also made an alternate black and white version of page 13, which I stuck in the gallery--bigger version available under this smaller version:



And another banner to feed my banner obsession:

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 15
• A* Episode 10, Page 16

Yay more shooting!

Thanks to the owner of this page (Charles Englert, maybe?) for adding my Princess and the Giant comic to their comic link list; I got a pretty good number of click-throughs from that simple list yesterday, so huzzah! And thanks to anyone else who links to one of my comics (I think I've covered them all in the past, but if I'm missing yours, let me know), it's the best way for them to grow.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 17
• A* Episode 10, Page 18

Okay now when I look at page 18 I can only think that they're both gigging in a music video. Sexy dance poses, everyone! Work that door! Work it!

This is probably why I shouldn't post pages so late at night...

Bluh, stuck in the midst of errands that have taken up all afternoon. Probably gonna be one of those single-page, late-night update affairs today. =P

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 19

"Wait"...for next week, when hopefully I don't have so many distractions and can get more comics done! =p

I suppose I'm also slowing down a bit because I want to raise the quality level of the artwork. For a while there I was holding steady at about 3-4 pages per day (usually the 4s would be Mon and Wed when I don't go to the gym and thus have more time to sit and draw :D), but now that I've gotten pickier about the final images it seems to be more like 2 a day. I think in theory I can maybe get out 3 a day on a full uninterrupted Monday or Wednesday if I'm not caught up doing something else. Gotta work on that. ;)

Hopefully you've noticed the artwork being a teensy weensy bit more developed of late, though! (Or at least might be persuaded to think you've noticed it, now that I've mentioned it. LOOK DEEPLY INTO MY EYES!~~) I guess my goal has been to bring it closer to the quality level of my one-page-per-week Princess and the Giant. Those pages though, which are a little less than twice the size of an A* page, have been taking me something along the lines of 8-12 hours each lately! 8o I know that seems ridiculous, I guess I've just got into this odd drawing method where I actually sorta try to avoid following a structured scheme that would speed things up--like creating figures from stick men or simple geometric forms, for instance; instead, I just sort of build up and shave down blobs of black and white until they start looking like I want them to. It's fun, but kind of slow, at least if I really want a polished-looking final result. Buuut hopefully it at least looks different than most any other art you'll find out there... I do like to be different. :)

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 20
• A* Episode 10, Page 21

Yep it was a national holiday--or day off for a Sunday holiday, anyway--today (well, Monday) in the States but why take a holiday when you could be making webcomics, amirightorwhathahahaherr... So anyway we finally we catch back up to what was happening right at the end of episode 9! Darn this non-linearity!

Hey you can also check out the latest page of my Sunday fairy tale comic, "The Princess and the Giant," hot off the presses as it were, by clicking this spiffy preview banner:



~~~~~~~~

I came across a Time article on the NASA / US Military hypersonic research craft, the X-51A Waverider; after six years and $250 million, this unmanned drone with a scramjet engine completed its first independent flight in late May, flying for 200 seconds and reaching Mach 5. It was supposed to fly for 300 seconds, so I guess they've still got a lot of work to do. The speed record for this type of "air-eating" craft is "Mach 9.8 (12,144 km/h, 7,546 mph)," set by an earlier prototype, the X-43. (The "X," by the way, stands for "eXperimental.")

These things have scramjet ("Supersonic Combustion RAMJET") engines, where somewhere around Mach 4.5, they can start combusting the atmospheric oxygen, moving at supersonic speeds through their engines, after combining it with their on-board hydrogen. The X-51 used only about 1 kg of hydrogen fuel in its flight to Mach 5, which is pretty decent fuel economy I guess, even for a slim little 7.9 meter craft. Oh yeah here's a fancy Air Force render of an X-51 model:


image by USAF (source)

It's called "Waverider" because its sharp nose and winglet surfaces "ride" on the atmospheric shockwave it generates as it rips through the air, using it for lift. At the speeds they get up to in atmosphere, those leading metal parts can get hot enough to melt, so they're cooled with liquid circulating under the skin; in the X-51 it's been water, but there's talk of using the craft's own fuel to do it, on its way to the engine, so you don't have to waste space on additional coolant.

Well isn't that all nifty. The military of course wants to use the technology to drop missiles on people faster. ;P

~~~~~~~~~

Relatively speaking, it was a crazy day in my little webcomic neck of the woods! One site I mirror A* on was ruled an "attack site" by Google, so Firefox doesn't want to go there... Guess I'll wait and see if they can clean up their act before posting more comics there! And a site that tracks updates to my and many other comics, WebcomicZ, had its domain registration expire, so it was down for a while with a nasty GoDaddy expiration page showing. My heart! What else... Oh yeah, I found and reported some bugs I encountered while putting comics up on another mirror site, Comic Fury, and also I PM'd a fellow webcomic author about some little bugs I found on their site... Hmm... And The Webcomic List's forum scared me when I hit 1000 posts on it. Phew.

Oh! And I fixed the proportions of Selenis' gun arm back on episode 10's page 13. It was a little too long, but at first I overdid things and made it a little too short, so then I had to readjust it again to just right. Crisis...averted.

And I have more stuff too! But I'll save it for the next day or two's blog posts I guess (Oh god this *is* a blog, isn't it? shameful, just shameful).

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 22
• A* Episode 10, Page 23

Seeing as how that's Fizer's gun, you may be wondering where she got additional ammo for it. Well, you haven't seen the arsenal she's got in her ship, let me tell you! So yeah. She's just taken a perverse shine to Fizer's gun, apparently.

Trying to get in on the increasingly popular vertical advertising all the kids are doing, I took a shot at some A* "skyscraper" type banners:



Hm. Well, we'll see how they do. There are more A* icons and banners than you could ever want on the icons page, which I tidied up a bit, so there are actually less now than there were, believe it or not.