Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 57
• A* Episode 9, Page 58

Boy, you don't wanna know how many permutations of shading I tried on page 58 there. I seem to have gotten awfully fiddly with the art this week, and it's slowing me down even after the activities earlier in the week that kept me from getting much drawing in, but I *think* that at least the pages I have finished this week have come out looking fairly decent, for the most part.

The icons I use for A* on other sites were still using episode 8 art (Niels), so I made some updated episode 9 ones:

Ohh wait I know why; I always slow down when I get to drawing Selenis, since she's the A* poster girl and I'm paranoid about having her look her best. =P

Say that reminds me of something about the prints we took to Local Color (coffee joint at the Pike Place Market, Seattle) for them to sell: the owner had selected the ones she liked most from the print portfolio--which had A* art of a bunch of different characters, plus stuff from my other comics, too--and the ones she chose were all of Selenis; she said she liked the "James Bond" spy look of them, or something.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 59
• A* Episode 9, Page 60

Aaand the very next comic, which will be here Monday, will reveal just what it is he thinks he's found, but if you remember his convo with Niels from the previous episode, maybe you can figure it out ahead of time!

A* art prints going on public display ate into my comic production time early in the week and somehow created a hole from which it didn't recover, but the forecast calls for fewer distractions next week, so A* comic output should get back to par. And I was so distracted by all the A*-related excitement in my life at the beginning of the week that I neglected to pimp last weekend's update to my comic The Princess and the Giant, which will again be receiving its usual weekly update this Sunday. Here's the banner link to last week's installment to catch you up on what the Princess is up to:

Ohh yeah I was also gonna mention that Google's current playable Pac-Man logo is pretty rad. :D

Added 5 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 61
• A* Episode 9, Page 62
• A* Episode 9, Page 63
• A* Episode 9, Page 64
• A* Episode 9, Page 65

Hey, it's the very first (okay I guess this is a minor *SPOILER* if you haven't read today's page 63 yet) black hole to appear in Supermassive Black Hole A*! Took me a while to approximate the gravitational lensing effect I wanted on it; in the end it was just a careful application (actually 4) of Photoshop's good ol' "Spherize" filter.

And actually Vero's using some poetic license there, because black holes aren't entire "black": in theory they emit tiny, tiny amounts of radiation called Hawking radiation, after Stephen Hawking who figured that if a "virtual" particle/anti-particle pair pops into existence--as they are doing constantly throughout the universe via quantum tunneling or something I don't much understand--right on the edge of a black hole's event horizon, then instead of annihilating each other instantly as they usually do, one could get sucked into the hole while the other drifts away, and it's those that escape that might form this radiation.

While I'm on the topic, I may as well mention that to me the most interesting part of Hawking's recent Into the Universe "documentary," which was otherwise mostly surprisingly awful, was a bit where he mentioned that smaller black holes should emit more of that radiation than large ones, to the point that really, really tiny quantum-sized black holes might be white rather than black, due to all the Hawking radiation they would emit. Huh! (Actually that puzzled me at the time, since emission will be increased with surface area of the hole's Schwarzchild radius, which means bigger holes should emit more...so now that I re-read the Wikipedia article to confirm that, I think it was something of a misstatement, as were many things in the show, and what he meant was that smaller holes could be larger *net* emitters, because larger holes will be absorbing more in cosmic background radiation energy than they emit as Hawking radiation.)

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This weekend was the first anniversary of my weekly fairy tale comic, The Princess and the Giant, and I sorta celebrated with a special gray-scale edition that actually turned out surprisingly Disneyesque, if Disney had ever produced a b&w cel-shaded movie--which I don't think they did? Anyway, you can check it out by clicking this handy-dandy icon:



And it ended up being a coincidence that a planned right-looking profile image of Selenis was due today (A* episode 9, page 65), and it kind of fit with the Princess profile (and I learned some stuff drawing that Princess profile that helped with the Selenis one), so I couldn't resist doing a mash-up versions, with my sci-fi and fantasy universes colliding! :o



Maybe we can call this one "The Princess and the Bounty Hunter" (which reminds me that I still haven't seen Disney's recent "Princess and the Frog"--P&tBH sounds like it would be a cooler movie, though :p). It resides in the episode 9 gallery should you ever wish to track it down at a later date, or order a print of it :p, etc.

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Oh yeah, and you may notice that Selenis' hair just got longer since they showed up in "the black system." Can anyone guess why that is (and why it hadn't gotten much longer between, say, the last time we saw her near Lode, and when she found Vero just a little while ago off Tempus)? (And no it isn't because the black hole is pulling it out of her scalp faster. :P)

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 66
• A* Episode 9, Page 67
• A* Episode 9, Page 68

I made some new banners today out of recent art because eh I think it looks better than most of the older art that most of my older banners used! These are on the icons page along with lots of other tiny little pictures cut from bigger pictures.

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 69
• A* Episode 9, Page 70
• A* Episode 9, Page 71

Yay! It isn't a real episode until something explodes.

Those funky Core Sys fighter screens with the dots and the curves are starting to get on my nerves; when I came up with them during a dot/curve phase around the start of episode 8, I wasn't really thinking ahead too much to just what a pain it is to draw stuff on curved screens, or how much those halftone patterns distract from the rest of the image. I shake my fist at you, halftones! But I do believe we won't be seeing those screens again after this episode, phew!

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 72
• A* Episode 9, Page 73
• A* Episode 9, Page 74

Ah, missiles and explosions, where would modern entertainment be without you?

I added yet another banner to the icons page:

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 9, Page 75
• A* Episode 9, Page 76

Now I gotta go get those fancy banners I made this week into circulation, so Fizer's revenge will have to wait until next week! Have a nice weekend, and don't forget to stop by for a new Princess and the Giant on Sunday if you're stuck with nothing better to do. :D