Haha! Ah Bull.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 71

Survived camping! So tired! More tomorrow!

so you didn't get eaten by a bear!
hooray!

Nope! There was a sign up at the campground saying "Recent Bear Sighting" in ominous letters, but the park was covered by chilling fog the whole time, so I think any bears must have packed up for warmer climes.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 72
• A* Episode 10, Page 73

Sheesh, 15 hours of sleep last night and I'm still nodding off early tonight; I guess I should've got more sleep before and during the camping trip hmrmrmrm oh well. While I was doing things like jumping up at the crack of dawn and running off to the completely fogged-in beach to feel like the last person on Earth, this little webcomic of mine was getting over 10,000 visitors in a day for the first time ever, which is pretty keen as far as I'm concerned; when this episode started a few months ago, A* was at about 4,000 visitors per day, and I figured maybe if I did this episode right I could get it to like 6,000 by the end, so being three times as far along in half the time (we're at just over the halfway point in the episode, approximately) is super-duper awesome and altogether encouraging.

Okay I'd better wrap this before I doze off again; here's a clickable shortcut to this past weekend's Princess and the Giant comic, which I eked out early under sleep-deprived conditions, resulting in numerous oddities such as rubber duckies and naked flaming skull heads (more on such things in the Princess' discussion thread):

My compliments to the future, for skin-tight pressure suits and sweet killer-babes to wear them !!
ONLY 10,000 ? You've got to be kidding!

Your foggy beach early morning experience is the pinnacle of vacationnicity.

Hah well one man's 10,000 is another man's TEN THOUSAND??!?!? if you know what I mean. ;)

And yeah, the future is totally skin-tight space suits.

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 74
• A* Episode 10, Page 75
• A* Episode 10, Page 76

Okay I wanted to waste some time talking about where I went camping, because eh well I don't get out much, so humor me. :P We went to Grayland Beach State Park, and here's even a satellite view of our exact camping spot. Now, if you zoom that view out and scroll west (left) to the beach, you'll notice a sort of bluish pall over the sand. If you check a street level view from just outside the park, you'll notice a grayish overcastedness to the whole scene. You can see this pall lurking over the whole area as you approach.

So there's a reason this place is called Grayland. ;) The rest of Western Washington was in a 90-degree-plus heat wave this past weekend, but besides the coastal cool, which knocks off maybe ten degrees or so, Grayland has its own misty chill that drops the mercury another oh fifteen degrees maybe, so inside Grayland's magical spell, it was kinda chilly! And the perpetual mist is constantly condensing around you and falling in little scattered droplets perhaps locally known (okay it was a term I overheard while in the bathroom :P) as "mizzle."

By check-out at 1:00 pm the second day, the sun was almost getting through Grayland's low cloud barrier, the mizzle had ceased, and as we went to the beach, with blue sky visible along the horizon inland, I almost thought the fog would burn off and give us clear sunshine. Nope! On the beach, which is really quite impressive--maybe 100 yards of sand to the water at low tide, stretching in both directions as far as you can see, which isn't as far as it would be anywhere else on Earth--you could actually see billows of fresh mist coming in off the ocean, replacing any amount that the afternoon summer sun could burn off. We played frisbee for a while, and my friend who was stationed closest to the water told me the disc would sometimes vanish from his view in mid-flight.

So that was interesting! Pretty good place to be during a heat wave, I guess, but I dunno how comfortable it would be in any other circumstances. The empty and somewhat otherworldly expanse of gray sand and ocean I saw on the beach in the morning gave me some definite thoughts for alien worlds. ;D

(Oh yah, the "Cranberry" you'll see on the road sign there isn't mere local color; there's a huge Ocean Spray facility a little way down the main road.)

10,000 is a lot, but it should be more.
I think you're just getting started. ! )
That beach must have some freaky atmospheric conditions to generate mizzle like that.
I would expect the acoustics to be very strange as well.
Thanks for the info.

Things sounded pretty normal there, despite the fog. The beach had a very gradual slope, which gave the waves a nice gentle sound.

I think A* is just getting started too. It's only been a little over a year since I started putting it out in comic form, and only six months since I started doing it entirely in comic form, which is when it started looking a bit more respectable. So as a dedicated webcomic it's only six months old, which is young in webcomic terms!

And in fact I look upon the whole Vero story--these first 10 episodes--as sort of an introduction. It's helped me find my way gradually toward what I want A* to be in the future in terms of art, story, pacing, format, etc. Episode 11 will be the start of a new--but related--story that will be more action-oriented, wider in scope, darker, and dealing more with some of the central themes of this human civilization at the galactic core. So I'm pretty excited about getting to that start of the comic proper, and hm based on your previous comment I think you'll like where it's going. :D

Oh, but as far as size goes, 10,000 daily viewers seems to be pretty good for a serious sci-fi webcomic. In fact, there's only one serious--by which I mean non-comedic--science fiction webcomic (and I'm not including the numerous ones out there that call themselves sci-fi with fantasy elements, because that's cheating) with a single author out there that's got a larger audience at the moment, as far as I can tell, and that's the luscious, long-running (since May 2006) Crimson Dark.