Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 49

One whole page today, goshhhhhh!

Yesterday's page 47 was I think maybe my best drawing of Selenis' face so far, and it went unusually smoothly, so I figured I'd show you a little animation of the general drawing process (with the Lasso Tool in Photoshop):



Oh although it did skip the first few steps, which in this case was drawing an oval thing for the general head/helmet shape, then squiggling in the two eye shapes with a single lasso loop each. If a drawing looks good to me after that point I'll keep going, otherwise it's time to junk it and start over!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 50
• A* Episode 10, Page 51

A* Breakfast Cereal! Get some radiation in your bowl!

Hey you know A* is on deviantART, where you can comment and collect individual A* drawings and stuff. Anyway, recently I was pulled in as co-founder of an art group there called #Lasso-Tool, which now has quite a few nifty pieces of lasso-generated artwork in its gallery; we even scored a significant coup when superhero comic artist extraordinaire Adam Hughes contributed a piece showing his lasso tool coloring work, gosh! So if you want to see what other people besides me are doing with Photoshop's Lasso Tool these days, check it out!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 52
• A* Episode 10, Page 53

You know, it's kind of hard to draw a person with their face all distorted by loathing and not have them come out really hideous-looking. Hm. Oh well, I guess that's why they tell beauty pageant contestants to tone down the loathing and turn up the smiling.

I've polished off the two volumes of Jeff Hawke I got recently, and they were good fun, and gave me some excellent ideas for how to illustrate science fiction adventures. There's a quote on the back from Dave Gibbons (of Watchmen fame), calling the series a "mix of whimsy, hard science fiction, and stunning draftsmanship." But what with all kinds of wacky aliens, faster-than-light-travel, brain-altering ray-beams, and so forth, calling Jeff Hawke *hard* science fiction is probably not something its authors would have attempted themselves.

I'm mentioning this because as I read the last included story today, "A Test Case," which ran from '62-'63, I came across a rather cringe-worthy case of pseudo-scientific adventuring that...well I don't think it was researched very heavily, and gives some insight into early '60s attitudes toward nuclear weapons. Things had advanced a bit since the heavy nuke testing back in the '40s, but they were still way more cavalier about nuclear weapons and radiation than we are in these post-Cold War, post-Chernobyl, post-Three Mile Island days.

In the story, a British nuclear physicist, equipped with advanced alien technological know-how, destroys a UK nuclear power plant with the disintegration ray he made from a portable electric heater (whose construction treated us to a typical Jeff Hawke summary of alien technological know-how: "If I take a lead from the radio output at this stage, and get all the germanium crystals at a low-frequency resonance... Then use this reflector to concentrate the beam..."). The radioactive gas cloud from the wrecked plant is being blown toward a nearby town. Hawke and his buddy Mac scramble in a fighter jet, get permission from the government to use a nuclear weapon, and Hawke nukes the gas with a lovely mushroom cloud over the English countryside. "I don't get the theory of this!" exclaims Mac. Fortunately, Hawke assures us that nuclear 1 plus 1 equals zero: "It's simple, Mac--we've created an enormous thermal, which is drawing the gas cloud up into the stratosphere!"

'K. Well, even assuming that the nuclear blast would suck up most of the pre-existing radioactive gas into its thermal vortex, instead of just scattering it far and wide sideways across the countryside, sticking dangerous stuff into the stratosphere is *not* what you want to do, because then you turn a local problem into a worldwide problem. For instance, a nuclear-powered US military satellite that burned up on reentry after failing to achieve orbit in 1964 released radioactive plutonium-238--twice as much as had been released by all previous atmospheric nuclear testing combined!--into the stratosphere, resulting in a *global* three-fold increase in plutonium-238 fallout.

And then there's the little fact that you've now added a plentiful new dose of radiation into the mix from the bomb itself, and propelled a good amount of it up into the air so it will scatter down everywhere as fallout.

So yeah, way to go, Hawke! Ahem. Writer Willie Patterson's inspiration for the radiation cloud may have been the 1957 reactor fire at the Windscale nuclear plant in England, which released a radioactive cloud across the countryside, and is estimated to have led to over 200 cancer-related deaths in the area.

Indeed, Wikipedia's List of military nuclear accidents is sobering reading, especially considering that this is only the stuff that militaries have had to own up about! For instance, a dozen or so nuclear bombs or torpedoes have been lost since the '50's, mostly by the US, and never recovered--in the '50s and '60s, nuke-laden bombers were flying and crashing all over the place. Jeesh. Then there's horrible stuff like the accident at the SL-1 reactor in Idaho in 1961, where a reactor went flash-critical, instantly vaporizing its coolant, and the resulting pressure wave blasted its roof off, impaling one operator to the ceiling with a nuclear control rod; his body--still pinned to the ceiling above the ruined reactor--wasn't found and recovered until six days later. :o

And finally, I'll expose you to Operation Emery, a series of underground nuclear tests from '70 to '71 in Nevada, during which six percent of one detonation's radioactive products unexpectedly vented to the surface through fissures, raining down on workers at the surface:



It got into winter storms, falling as radioactive snow in five states, and was carried by three jet streams to Canada, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean. Buuuut I'm sure it was all harmless way up there in the atmosphere like that, as Jeff Hawke explained to Mac. Whew.

Have been / will be out all afternoon and evening today, so it's another super-late single-page Friday for A*! :p (SLSPFFA*?) Blar! This once-a-week afternoon errand that's been taking some of my time will probably continue for another month or two. On the personal plus side, I did get a vastly overdue oil change too, whee.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 54

I made a grayed-up version of this, but somehow it just wanted to be straight black and white, so there you have it!

Say did you know I'm hip to the crazy Internet stuff all the kids are into these days? Facebook and Twitter and...eh...things? It's true! At least, you can follow A* on Facebook and/or A* on Twitter.

I suppose I should put those links on the front page permanently like all the other webcomics do but I seem to have some sort of allergy to corporate logos, so they'll stay tucked away on the "about" page for the most part. But fear not! I'm constantly updating them with A*...updates! Ah-yep.

Okay and for being a good sport and reading this far, you get the bonus alternate caption version of today's page:



Can you even believe that just happened!? (By the way, in the main version he's actually air-typing commands to his ship using little contact buttons on the inside of his suit's fingertips, not casting spells--but isn't it just the same thing really?) Continue having a nice weekend and stuff!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 55
• A* Episode 10, Page 56

I blabbered on about temperature in space a bit last week, and we're still dealing with it this week, so I was interested when a friend on Facebook pointed out to me that temperatures on the International Space Station can vary from 250 degrees F on the sunny side, to -250 degrees F on the shady side (that's 121 to -157 C--it's such a nice even coincidence in F, though!) .

Annoyingly, I can't find an explanation for that particular temperature range. If you Google this stuff you come upon black body calculations for temperature per distance from the Sun, but those give you a pretty cool temperature mostly in the middle of the 250 to -250 range the ISS's hull experiences. So obviously the ISS isn't a perfect black body, and I guess its hull temperatures have to do with what it's made out of, how it's shaped, mass to surface area ratio, and so forth; you'd think the Internet would have some page talking about calculations for spacecraft hull temperatures in space, but darned if I can find them. *sigh* So I suppose if I was desperate to get a rough approximation of a spacecraft's hull temp at some distance from a Sun-like star, I could use 250/-250 as a basis, then multiply that by the black body equation's distance section, which is (2*distance)^0.5, and, um, hopefully things would work out. :P

Not so coincidentally, this came up because an ammonia coolant pump broke on the ISS last week; that system circulates ammonia throughout the hull, balancing the temperature from the sunny side and shady side, and it's pretty important for preserving life-supporting conditions in the ship. The good news is they don't think it will be too tough to fix.

While flailing around trying to find actual info so I wouldn't have to do math myself, I came across some interesting related things, like:

- The silica tiles the space shuttle uses as a shield from the heat of atmospheric re-entry are so bad at conducting heat that you can hold a red-hot one in your hand without getting burned:


image by NASA (source)

- Some spacecraft, including the ISS, use Whipple shielding, which is basically the principle of having a thin surface separated from the main hull; an incoming hypervelocity object will go through it, but will have broken into pieces, so the impact energy is spread out over a much wider area on the hull than it would have been, greatly reducing the threat of hull penetration. Because, although it might look pretty


image by NASA (source)

you really don't want the hypervelocity thingy hitting you intact.

- In 2015, NASA will launch Solar Probe+, a robot probe that will get within 8.5 solar radii of the Sun, much closer than the previous record-holder: Helios came within 65 solar radii in the 70's. At 8.5 solar radii, a 15 cm-thick carbon-composite heat shield on the probe's sunny side will heat up to 1400 degrees C (2600 F). (No, don't go watch the movie Sunshine, it's very misleading. :P)

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 57
• A* Episode 10, Page 58
• A* Episode 10, Page 59

Is it the start of Selenis' high fashion career?

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I gotta thank the authors of Harmonic Resonance for putting both A* and The Princess and the Giant in their site's link list. Thanks, harmonizers! It's very helpful, and I've already gotten some traffic from over there. :)

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Speaking of La Princesse, there was a new page of that fairy tale comic of mine this weekend, and if you haven't seen it yet, here's a link banner for you to use to jump over and check it out:



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And thanks to Matrix Online fans for alerting me on the forum that Sony Online Entertainment finally got around to removing my billions of screenshot sequence stories, and my hand-drawn cinematics, that I made for MXO when I was working there as a game designer--which is what I was doing before I started doing comics. So I had to update A*'s about page to remove the links I had to that deleted stuff, and while I was at it I condensed some of my rambling about myself, removed another dead link (Comic Planet is no more), and added a little timeline charting the development of A*, starting with the release of the first, silent, animated episode back on March 18th of last year, and ending with the last significant format change to date, which was switching from gradients to sharp lasso-carved shadows on April 9th of this year, with episode 8, page 98. The timeline is mostly for my own satisfaction, because I've been wanting to get this stuff written down before I start forgetting the specific changes I've made along the way, but I guess you can read it too, if you want.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 60
• A* Episode 10, Page 61

A couple of my old horizontal banners were in dire need of an update, and we had a horizontal action shot of our poster girl today, so you know what that means--new banner blitz!









Oh yeah, and if you caught page 61 when I first updated it, you might have noticed it looked a little different in one particular area. Specifically:



Yep, a little reduction surgery; the ol' drawing hand gets a little carried away sometimes. It's just easier to draw big curves than small curves. Ehh. :P

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 62
• A* Episode 10, Page 63

Hey compared to that one all-black page I did a while back, this latest one isn't minimalist at all! ... You gotta do a lot of A-to-B pictures when you've decided not to insert a narrator. :P

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 64
• A* Episode 10, Page 65

Vero's new "hell" will have to wait until Monday, but I did draw this past page at twice my usual size--which is itself twice what you actually see on the web site--so I stuck a super-big version of it in the gallery, just...in case you wanted a big version. Yeah! You can click this tiny version to get to it, because I'm tricky like that:



And, yes, the inevitable banner versions, because I like banners:





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Need more comics? Well, the "Tale of Death Boy" in my whimsical daily comic Sketchy is getting totally crazy, as you can see



so I'm sure you'll want to go see what that's all about. >_>

Aaaand have a good weekend!