Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 24
• A* Episode 10, Page 25

Super complicated pages today! =P I would'a done more but I have to get up relatively early for an errand tomorrow, yick.

I came across an interesting Winston Churchill quote yesterday that I thought sort of fit with A*, so I tried it:



That's kept here in the episode 10 gallery. The quote is from a speech he made in 1940, specifically from right before his famous "their finest hour" bit. And he was talking about Nazis (and presumably their nutty theories about racial superiority so on?) rather than the dark mysteries of secretive space corporations, but hey.

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Noticed from some hits coming in that someone wrote a review of A* back in April of last year! My first review, whee! That's so long ago, all I had at the time were the first two episodes, as Flash movies. Still, they seem to have liked it, although the funny thing is, they really misinterpreted it; somehow they got the idea that it was about ships fighting on the event horizon of a large black hole, despite the fact that black holes aren't mentioned at all in those episodes! Huh. But they still liked it, so...maybe this means I need to write a storyline about two ships really improbably fighting on the edge of a black hole! >_>

Okay I have a real treat to post about but it's so treat-y that I'm gonna give it its own news post...

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 26

Well darn only one page today! It sure is nice to get out of the gloomy "black system" outdoors and into some interior lighting again--haven't had this many lights to play with since Niels' place way back in episode 8. So hopefully today's lone page at least came out relatively nice looking.

I stealth edited episode 10 page 9--his eyes were too low, umgh--and after doing that somehow got the idea to count how many A* comics we're up to now, and hey, it's over 1000! 1017, to be exact; episode 10 page 9 was in fact the 1000th A* comic! Whee! (Funny how I've been finding things to celebrate after the fact lately. ;)

Hey BC, Im really really liking the artwork lately. That last frame is awesome!!!

Its looks smoother and cleaner...nice.

Thanks man! I do think it was one of my moments of relative clarity... But also I think getting some action and dramatic lighting going really helps get me motivated about the drawing; that murky outside lighting was starting to get me down, as was all the sitting around in ship cockpits in the previous episodes; I was even really rusty drawing full-length character figures at the start of this episode, because I'd been stuck drawing people just from the waist or chin up for son long. ;P So I gotta be careful to plan my future stories out so that they have healthy doses of action and interesting lighting situations to keep my energy levels up. Fortunately the rest of this episode should do that pretty well. :D

Today is shaping up to be another one of my really-late-single-page Fridays, dar! :P

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 27

Yep, just one page again; I am getting really bad at Fridays lately, grr.

It's so hot here that even when working in the middle of the night, the rubbery pad cover on my Wacom drawing tablet is sticking to my palm and peeling up when I raise it. :o

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 28
• A* Episode 10, Page 29

An interesting coincidence as I ate my omelet this morning led me to an important comic history discovery!

So last night, in a sort of tired excited state, not knowing what to do with myself, I was clicking "Random article" on Wikipedia, and, as is probably inevitable, I ended up on Jack Kirby, whose 12-13 penciled pages per day max output made me feel very unproductive. Anyway, I noticed a mention of something called Kirby Krackle, and went to see what it was. Basically it's the black balls he'd throw around to make things like energy or space or whatnot, like so



And Wikipedia linked to this big article with this comic pundit guy talking about how Kirby invented the "krackle" dots and all that, tracing it back through all his comics to establish that he first used it without doubt in 1966, and maybe he got it from the first astronomical picture of a quasar (which is, by the way, the energy given off by a feeding supermassive black hole, although they didn't know that at the time) in 1963.

Well, that's an interesting theory and all, and could be right, who knows, but the article's concluding quote is not right:

"People who have never heard of Jack Kirby use a form of Kirby Krackle. But until 1966, there was no such thing. And it was Kirby who found it."

How do I know this is incorrect? Because over breakfast today I was reading my Sydney Jordan's Jeff Hawke collection that just arrived, and, in the story "Overlord," printed in 1960, I noticed



And it continued, all over that page.

Now, I don't know if Jordan was the first to use this graphic technique--odds are he wasn't--but obviously it was used to render exciting space scenes at least six years before Kirby started in with it.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 30
• A* Episode 10, Page 31

Bring your iodine tablets, because tomorrow we might be going just a little nuclear.

Say, yesterday I was so excited about Krackle history that I forgot to put up a banner link to the new page I did for my fairy tale comic, "The Princess and the Giant," over the weekend. This one came out a little funny, but hey, that happens sometimes in comics:

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 32
• A* Episode 10, Page 33
• A* Episode 10, Page 34

Hey, a three-page day at last! :) I think it helped that they were largely abstract (drawing explosions takes less time than drawing people), but it's been so long since I did a predominately abstract A* page that each of the last two took me about three tries. And in my endless quest to entertain you, here are the rejects!

Page 33 rejects:




First I tried hand-drawing the shakes, but they came out a little weak and dodgy. So I tried the ol' clone-and-offset-transparent-layer trick, and even uploaded that one, but then I decided it just felt too artificial. So for the final version I redrew the vibrations, but this time with more oomph.

Page 34 rejects:




I'd planned to do pretty much just a character silhouette, representing Vero being tossed around in the dark by the shocks from the explosion, but then I thought maybe that was too plain, so I did a sort of negative highlight on the body (and then even a second, edge highlight around his outline, which I didn't include here for some reason). But that looked too much like he was getting irradiated, and the scene wasn't dark enough, either, so I took out that highlight and started laying in shadows over everything. Then I realized that I wanted him "descending into shadow," as it were, and I had the abstract light backwards for that, so I reversed it and mucked around with it some more for the final version.

All part of my little "comedy of errors" style of drawing. =p

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 35
• A* Episode 10, Page 36
• A* Episode 10, Page 37

Ah, good ol' page 35. Yes, that is an all-black page (actually it's an army of crows fighting the panther rebellion at midnight deep in the jungle during a storm), betcha it'll be my all-time print best seller! =p

On a completely different topic that I just feel like sharing, check out this awesome painting by German painter Hans Holbein the Younger, his Portrait of Thomas More (<- click that for the source and a much larger version):



Man, what a painting! This was in 1527, before More became Chancellor of England (1529) and started burning heretics and stuff (and eventually resigned and got himself executed in 1535 because he refused to go along with Henry VIII inventing his own religion)--still pretty intense. What's interesting too is that while Holbein did do plenty of portraits of royalty, his portraits of lower ranking officials--More was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster at the time of his portrait--and private citizens are by and large much, much better; I think he must have felt a lot of constraints when painting kings and queens.