Another Friday, another of my usual "really late single page" performances, yep!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 38

Yep just one big fat page; probably just have one late page Monday, too, since my friends want to try another "beach party" on that day (yes they party on Mondays :P). :o Going to have to see if I can avoid touching hot metal objects such as campfire holding thingies this time, because that didn't work out so well last time.

Say, in my other daily comic, Sketchy, I've rudely interrupted the main "story," as it were, with a little short story, sort of an old-fashioned sci-fi "what if" type of thing. "The Tale of Death Boy" began here this past week, and here's a tiny sample:



Super dramatic, am I right?! :o

By the way, were you wondering what Selenis in today's A* page might look like rightside-up, or maybe the other way 'round, and didn't want to risk your fragile monitor or neck by rotating things? Well fear not, for the solution is upon you in the form of these little banners I just whipped up:





Necks & monitors = saved! I'll admit that if I do have a character who's upside-down or sideways or something in a picture, I generally rotate the canvas in Photoshop and draw them rightside-up, then rotate it back--because it's pretty dang hard to draw people upside-down if you haven't practiced drawing them that way all along...which I haven't. :P Leonardo da Vinci probably could've done it just fine, though; darn him and his mirror writing.

Well somebody set off a hand grenade or something and the cops shut down the beach, so I got to get home an hour or two early to start drawing a comic for today, which is good because while initially I had thought the next one was a close-up of Vero's helmet, which would be relatively quick to draw, when I was thinking about it earlier this afternoon I realized that I'd stuck the line that page was supposed to have, "Is she--," on *Friday's* comic, which in my script and storyboards had been planned to be silent. So there's no use for the Vero close-up page after all, which means I get to skip to the next page, which will take longer to draw because it has a girl in it. And just so I'm not rippin' you off, here's a suuuuper bonus of the skipped page's storyboard!



Wowwwwww, check out that cube and Pac-Man ghost and stuff. :o|D

I was checking out the site on my brother's fancy-schmancy new Android phone thingy at the beach, and it actually works pretty well in that thing's browser. I was thinking that the prev/next text links were a little on the tiny side, but for one thing the browser lets you increase font size anyway, and for another, you can totally just click on each comic image to move to the next one, which is a feature of my own comic that I keep forgetting about. ;)

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 39

Oh gray backgrounds, why do you keep tempting me? The combination of gray rear wall and gray foreground shadows proved really not well suited to quick execution with my drawing method. I gotta get this weird gray urge outta my head, rarrarararh.

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Late on Sunday I for some reason started messing around with that page from episode 9 on which a drawing of Selenis came out looking oddly like Marilyn Monroe, or anyway not really like Selenis does usually. I tried angling it a bit and making it into a banner



but I dunno, it's a little rough and I think not quite the thing. Then I thought hey if I'm making like it's Monroe then why not Warhol it up a little, from which resulted this thing, a larger version of which you can get to in the episode 9 gallery by clicking on this smallish version:



/shrug :P

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 40
• A* Episode 10, Page 41

Two whole pages, and aren't they a lovely couple? <3

Byeeeee the way, did you happen to check out the new page of my fairy tale comic "The Princess and the Giant" that went up over the weekend? Because if you didn't, here's a handy link/preview for your clicking pleasure:

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 42
• A* Episode 10, Page 43

Things are hotting up, as the British say so charmingly.

Seems like I've been doing a lot of experimenting with my grays this week; one thing I've wanted to get more comfortable with is using them on their own, without black behind them. This seems to work well for Selenis' hair, for instance; in page 43 I drew her hair outlines in black, but the drawing was much clearer when I converted them to gray. And before that on page 42 I'd learned a good lesson, because at first I had three pretty complicated gray layers in the interiors of the figures--I think I was insecure about using them without black backing them up, so I kept piling them on--but that got confusing to look at, too, so I added a fourth layer of gray in broad, simpler shapes, and that came out so well on its own that I was able to ditch the previous gray layers and just go with the one simple one.

Say I made another important art history discovery in my perusal of Sydney Jordan's Jeff Hawke: he uses this devious intergalactic criminal "Chalcedon" in a few stories, and he doesn't draw attention to it, but he gave the character a special physical characteristic, aside from his unusual face:



Quick ma, how many fingers? As you can see on the left, Jordan drew Chalcedon with six fingers per hand; but apparently the artist they got to draw the covers for the two volumes in this recent compilation, Brian Bolland, didn't notice that, and oops his rendering of Chalcedon for the cover, on the right there, is a few fingers short. Strange that everyone missed that, and particularly Bolland, who even collaborated with Jordan as ghost-illustrator of an unpublished Jeff Hawke story in 1977. And although Bolland is okay, wouldn't it have been both cheaper and closer to the spirit of the collection to blow up some of the old, actual Jordan art for the cover?

Well, here's some more Jordan art, just a panel I particularly liked:



Jordan, good as he is at drawing men, seems less comfortable rendering women, and tends to give them shoulders like linebackers, but I still love the composition, lighting, and abstract ring of dots around the airlock in that panel from the 1961-62 story "Counsel for the Defense."

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 44
• A* Episode 10, Page 45

Topside! >_> I dunno, it sounded good. :P

And is that a dangerous way for Selenis to fly with her arm jet, or what? But it looks bad-ass, and that's what matters... Because she really wants to impress Vero, yeah, that's it. Ahem.

Speaking of her impressing, the universe told me to make two more banner variants of that page 38 image of her:



I think the whitish one on the right is probably more eye-catching, but the black background one is easier on the eyes. Hm.

I gotta be out of my cozy comic-drawing nook pretty much all afternoon and evening, so it's gonna be another super-late-single-page Friday (okay maybe technically falling on Saturday but who's looking at clocks anyway) update.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 46

One page and man, way too involved in the making!


I do like how Selenis came out in this, though--the hard, slender face and body type suits her I think. Also concentrated a bit more on adding some folds to her costume to give it a sense of being a suit, rather than just being a second skin. And of course you didn't see this coming at ALL but I made a banner version:



Now if you caught this page just as it uploaded, you actually saw a completely different drawing of Vero:



and it wasn't until after I thought I was all done that I realized I didn't like his pose--the head had got turned wrong from how I had had it--and rather liked it--in the original storyboard:



So...I redrew him completely for what's hopefully the final version currently in place. :P Both of these started as a rough trace of the storyboard; I don't like to do that most of the time, but sometimes if I have a storyboard that just came out really neat in terms of layout, capturing that layout for the final version is impossible by any other means. Still, tracing can deaden things--you aren't generating new inspiration while you do it, ya see--so in the rare times I feel I have to do it, I try to keep it very general and loose. But that ended up steering me wrong in the first try, AND it was way, way late by the time I decided to redraw it, so the second attempt was a much tighter trace for the outline, and I guess it ended up working out okay. Pshaw. Dont' worry though, I still spent waaaay more time on that tiny little Selenis in the corner. ;)

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Heat in space is an interesting phenomenon, because although space itself, by and large, is very cold--just a few degrees above the coldest anything can possibly get--space is also empty, so heat that does occur doesn't have much place to go. This means that cooling, not heating, is the main concern for climate control in space suits and space ships, because they have to find some way to offset their accumulation of body and mechanical heat: any heat that does happen, such as radiating from a human, just stays around in the space station, otherwise, because there's no material in the vacuum to which the heat would transfer--unlike, as we are, in Earth's atmosphere, where heat can always transfer away into the air.

I figure the nuclear overload and detonation of Fizer's fighter probably kicked a good deal of heat energy into this fairly large, heavy metal asteroid. With no atmosphere to leak out into, the area around the blast site will take a while to cool down (on the other hand, with no atmosphere to carry it and no effective gravity to hold it, there's no real danger of radioactive fallout, at least; I think the asteroid surface would still have absorbed and be re-emitting pretty hefty amounts of hard radiation for a while, though, which is mostly what Vero was worried about when he wanted to wait a while before going out there).

The complex Vero and Selenis have broken into is pressurized--has an atmosphere, even though they haven't tried breathing it (Vero's hand and foot gas propulsion units suck it in and use it for their jets, though, so they don't have to waste their own reserves of pressurized gas)--and while some of that atmosphere is leaking out through unsealed cracks somewhere caused by the explosion, it's also absorbing some of the heat from the explosion that's sitting around in the asteroid.

Eh or such is my theory, it's not like I try learning the math for all this. :D This chart, which I linked once before, shows that at ground zero of a 1 megaton nuclear blast, which is very tiny by today's nuclear weapon standards, but might not be all that far off from what an overloading single-person fighter's reactor might have done (maybe I'd call it more like 5-10 MT just for fun? Oh I dunno), each square centimeter of ground, if it was water, would absorb 3500 calories of heat energy; a calorie is the energy required to heat a cubic centimeter (milliliter) of water by one degree Celsius. So, pretty toasty warm. Although a lot of the hottest ground-zero material would have been kicked out into space, I suppose.

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You know what else is hotting up is that "Death Boy" story in my other daily comic, "Sketchy," which started a couple weeks ago here and, if you caught my last link about it last week, continued at the beginning of this week starting here. Power of a very different kind is about to be unleashed there, whee!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 47
• A* Episode 10, Page 48

Speaking of things drifting away, NASA posted an article this past Friday about star HE 0437-5439, classified as a "blue straggler": it's a massive, hot blue star 200,000 miles from the center of our galaxy, and high above the galactic plane. It's so far away that it's actually closer to some of our tiny neighboring galaxies, and scientists had initially thought it had come from one of them, but now by comparing its position in current and 3-year-old Hubble photographs, they've been able to determine that it's moving away from the center of our galaxy. (To give you an idea of the scant evidence astronomers are used to working with: even in Hubble's high-resolution images, the star had moved only 4% of a single pixel!)

This raised some questions: namely, how did it acquire its unusually high rate of speed--1.6 million mph (2.5 million kph -- by way of reference, the speed of light is about 1 billion kph)--and how did a blue giant, which should only live for 20 million years, survive to what appears to be a 100 million year point in its voyage from the center of our galaxy?


image by NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

NASA's current theory is that it is the remnant of what was originally a triple star system--a binary and a large primary--that moved too close to our galaxy's central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*: the large primary star in the system got sucked into A*, and the binary was flung away at very high speed. Then at some point in their voyage, the stars in the perturbed binary merged to form the blue giant we see today.

Which all just goes to show that even triple star systems shouldn't mess with A*. By the way, I don't think the depiction of A* and the area around it in that diagram above is really supposed to be to-scale/realistic; its event horizon is way smaller than that relative to the rest of the galaxy, and anyway it's surrounded by loads and loads of dust and gas that would prevent you from seeing the hole--not that you can really see black holes anyway. I do find it interesting that in this picture they made the stuff around it red; I wonder if that's meant to reflect the idea that as things fall into the event horizon, the light they give off gets stretched out, getting ever redder and fainter, until it fades out entirely as they cross the event horizon.

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There's a new Princess and the Giant page up if you're interested in catching the latest from my weekly fairy tale comic. This one came out kind of weird--I seem to have been going through a Mannerist phase or something, ew--and also kept me up all night with the drawing of it, which has been the case more often than not lately; so I was stumbling around all sleep-deprived and sort of irritated with myself, when by some happy chance I found a Frank Frazetta picture book that I had bought some three years ago and immediately misplaced and forgot--it was still in its shrink wrap! So looking through that cheered me up; his work is so inspiring. And it reminded me that he spent his first nine years as a commercial artist working on comics! I'd love to see one of those collections of his Li'l Abner work from that period.