Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 18

Late last week there was a pretty gorgeous sunset--almost looked like something from a Hubble space photo! So I rushed in, got my camera, and some of the photos actually came out:



Now that is obviously the Space Fetus Nebula, hovering conveniently in the skies just west of my apartment. Wider shots:

Isn't it amazing how, when you're staring up in awe at the sunset, you don't even notice the cables crisscrossing the sky; but when you look at the pictures, you can hardly see anything else?

Our minds have this incredible ability to filter out whatever is not the thing we wish to perceive and focus exclusively on that thing which has our attention. That singleness of purpose is what enables the Einsteins and Edisons or our world to bring us great new inventions (thoughts or things).

Yeah! I didn't really see 'em until I had the photos in Photoshop, and then it seemed like suddenly there were wires everywhere :o.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 17, Page 19
• A* Episode 17, Page 20

Got a lot done on the A* subscription mode over the weekend, in fact all that's really left now is tidying up, filling out a subscriber FAQ type of thing, and a final test run or two. So it should be pretty darn close to roll-out! Here's a screenshot of what the front page would look like to a logged-in subscriber:



^ So as you can see the ads and big colorful social networking buttons are removed in the subscriber's view (the social networking links are still on the "about" page, should you need them). You may also notice a few small changes around the UI there, which even non-subscribers will see. They won't have the subscribers' "view larger" link at the lower right corner of the comic, though, which will load up the 1080p version of the artwork; and since the last selected view mode (large or small) and your login status is saved by your browser, the next time you visit the site, it will come right up without ads, and displaying the comic in your viewing mode of choice--unless you logged out or cleared your browser's cookies in the meantime, of course.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 17, Page 21
• A* Episode 17, Page 22

The first attempt at 22 was a real wash-out (which none shall see! unless you buy the original of 22, which has it on the back, because why waste paper? :P) and I was generally frustrated with gray ink washes, so there's some unadulterated ol' black and white for you. I even briefly went on a web search for stick-on tone sheets, but man those are pricey! Anyway they probably don't scan that well. Then I was messing around with generating halftone dot patterns in Photoshop until I came to my senses. :P

A contributing factor to this momentary confusion may have been today's new brush! Yeah, I already got a new brush at the beginning of the week, the Yasutomo "Haboku Artist Brush," size S ("Small"), which was way bigger than the European sable brushes I'd been using, but yesterday evening I got to thinking... If this bigger brush was better, maybe I should try the biggest Haboku, size "X" (they go S, M, L, X). So I got one! It was about $13 instead of $8, but that's still a pretty good bargain in the ink brush world; sable brushes, come to think of it, seem to scale up in price almost exponentially as you go larger. As you can see here, the Haboku X is about half-again as large as the S--the head of the X is about 1 and 7/8 inches long:



And yeah I cut off the end again for balance. Although I noticed some things over the past few days with the S that also probably apply to the X as far as I can tell so far:

- Trying to hold these larger brushes like I'd hold a pencil or small brush makes my wrist hurt for some reason, so it's actually been more comfortable to let my elbow and hand up off the table somewhat. Still working on exactly the best way to hold 'em, but it's getting better gradually.

- I mentioned some red color rubbing off the S brush on the first day; I think that's a sort of undercoating on the brushes, not the actual outer layer of paint on their handle--but that outer layer of paint doesn't quite cover the brush end of the bamboo, so I think a little reddish stuff bled off there. I didn't see it again after the first day.

- I also mentioned losing at least a half-dozen of the outer horse hairs on the first day with the S brush. Fortunately I didn't notice any more falling out in the succeeding days, and in fact I didn't see any fall out of the X brush. So that's encouraging as far as their potential longevity is concerned. And since synthetic bristles tend to be pretty durable, and the Japanese-style inward-pointing conical tips naturally hold their shape well, I'm thinking these brushes may prove fairly long lasting--but we'll see.

- I noticed a single, unpacked Haboku Stroke Brush at the store, sort of laying next to the packaged Haboku Artist Brushes. Remember, I was saying earlier in the week that the Stroke Brushes look pretty much identical as far as their shape and head go, but they're like four times as expensive for some reason. This bristles of this one certainly felt just like those of the Artist Brushes, so I'm still not sure what their deal is; it was only about twice the price of an Artist Brush, though. I wonder if they're sort of being phased out in favor of the Artist Brushes, which may be directed more at the English-speaking market, since they have English printed down their sides rather than Japanese (or Chinese?) characters.

- The handle of the X was much easier to cut than that of the S, even though the bamboo used in the X's handle is thicker--but it cut evenly rather than splintering like the thinner bamboo of the S's handle did.

- The S was so "thirsty" that when I dipped it in ink, I could see the little bubbles on the ink's surface getting sucked over and into the brush!

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One reader suggested these brush size upgrades mean I'm probably heading for the big time in terms of brush footage. ;) The X is prrrrrrobably about as big as I can handle, really; come to think of it, part of my problem with the washes earlier was probably just because I sucked up too much ink wash into the brush, and it was kind of going all over the place on the paper. Gotta watch that.

And in any case, I'm not aware of any larger brushes made stiff like the Haboku brushes; I've seen these big, white, fist-sized Japanese brushes around, but they're all floppy--like the one in that video, in fact, which is apparently all horsehair; and the horsehair outer coating on the Haboku is indeed pretty floppy on its own, but works great when backed with the stronger inner core of synthetic bristles.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 17, Page 23
• A* Episode 17, Page 24

Man this is a long conversation! Gonna go through next week, too. What more will we learn about trees?!? Anyway after that the ultra-violence starts and lasts for pretty much the rest of the episode, so maybe I should have more patience for these little chunks of civility. :P

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There is a new theory on the event horizon around a black hole--the radius from their central singularity past which not even light can escape their gravitational pull--that stuff falling through the event horizon doesn't just sort of go through without much happening (in that split-second, anyway; because momentarily, as the object gets close to the singularity, it's supposed to be pulled apart in long strands ("spaghettification" :P) by the stress of differences in the gravitational force across it), but instead more or less gets destroyed at or maybe just past the event horizon. Two research papers on this have slightly different ideas of exactly where/when that destruction would take place; they can be found here and here (I got those links from this Sixty Symbols video on the topic, but I can't really recommend that one as it meanders awfully and is not very clear.)

This idea that the event horizon is destructive came from thinking about the quantum properties of the Hawking radiation emitted by black holes--that's where a particle/antiparticle pair spontaneously appears right next to the horizon (these are also appearing everywhere in the universe at all times as far as we know, even RIGHT BEHIND YOU AAAUGH), but instead of annihilating each other instantly, as usually happens in the rest of space, one gets sucked into the the event horizon, while the other is flung away--so one is eaten by the black hole while the other escapes, and these escaping particles are what form this theoretical Hawking radiation.

But these two particles, because they were created by the same event, or something, are also entangled, which means that if one is acted upon and undergoes a change of some kind, its entangled pair particle, no matter where it is in space, also undergoes that change. Pretty wild and not really understood well, but this "quantum teleportation" has been verified experimentally.

The particle that got sucked into the black hole should in theory be accelerating at an incredible rate and having all sorts of ridiculously energetic things happening to it as it approaches the singularity, and so its entangled partner should also be getting supercharged or something, even though it's just drifting through space away from the hole. So the theory (to the small extent that I can fathom it, at least) goes that around the event horizon of an "old" black hole--one that's had time to expel an appreciable amount of these entangled particles as Hawking radiation--you'll have all these supercharged Hawking particles forming a veritable "firewall" around the event horizon, powerful enough to atomize anything falling in more or less immediately.

Or possibly I've read all that wrong! In any case, if you were planning on doing some black hole diving any time soon, you may want to wade carefully.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 17, Page 25
• A* Episode 17, Page 26

Page 25 is one of those pages that really makes me irritated with myself afterward, when I belated realized that it was much more stiff and picked at than I want to these pages to be. Then I took a few stabs at page 26, wasted both sides of a piece of paper in equally stiff layouts, and decided I'd better try loosening up with some sketches in the remaining white space. This one seemed to start going into the more expressive territory I would like to be in



and sure enough when I went and tried another layout for page 26, it flowed along much more successfully than the previous attempts.

I read about a lot of artists saying they do like a daily warmup sketch or something to loosen up--I suppose a Monday after not having drawn all weekend would be a particularly useful time for such an exercise. I've thought about doing more regular warmup sketches before, but I'm always worried that--knowing me--I'd get too into them and they'd start taking up way too much time; like, if I wasn't doing the sketch I'd be able to get another A* page done or something. So I guess I'm still waffling about committing to something like that. They do seem handy sometimes though.

The gray tones in that sketch (and, for instance, in the hair of page 26) kind of happen accidentally with this big brush I'm using now: it's so thick that it's hard to dry thoroughly after rinsing, so especially when I first start using it I sometimes tend not to towel it off very thoroughly, dip the tip in ink, and then start drawing; this starts out drawing deep black from the pure ink at the tip, but gradually rinse water from the inner depths of the brush starts working its way down to the tip, so the painted line gets gradually lighter and lighter. It can be pretty handy, actually! And stuff like that is a big part of sumi-e painting (that's the type of brush this is), at least according to the little booklet they had at the store: in fact, in sumi-e you're supposed to be able to get really sophisticated and, like, triple-layer your brush in different tones of wash, so you start a stroke with one and then it shades to the other, and eventually the third, or something.

... I'm probably not going to try that. :P

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 17, Page 27
• A* Episode 17, Page 28

Here's the back of this page:



It was one of those where I wasn't sure about the initial layout, and turned the page over and did another, then couldn't decide between the two, so I kept flipping the page back and forth and working on both of them until one finally won out. :P This piece of paper got a pretty good going over!

~~~~~~~~~

I was thinking today, not for the first time, about putting A* pages together into PDF files for digital download--for reading offline or on the go or whatever people are supposedly doing these days. Something like about 40 pages--give or take--for $2 of the recent, traditionally done stuff--and those would be the 1080p high-resolution versions. And for the smaller, digital pages before those, maybe something like 80 pages for $1--so episode 1, which is 70-some pages, would be $1 for the whole episode, for instance. How does that sound? I haven't done digital downloads before so maybe that's all wrong, I dunno. Oh and subscribers--to A*'s subscriber mode of high-definition, ad-free comics, which isn't too far off now--who would have already paid $25 for a year's subscription, would always be able to download the latest PDF for free; since 40 pages is *about* what I do in a month now, that means the subscription would essentially include $24-worth of PDF downloads, I guess, for no additional charge.

Too crazy? :o

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 17, Page 29
• A* Episode 17, Page 30

After working happily all day my internet sort of went on the fritz just as I wanted to upload this last page, wouldn't you know it. While assiduously unplugging and replugging my cable modem a few times, I was having nightmares of half a page having uploaded. :P And at one point downloading was working, but uploading wasn't--haven't seen *that* before in what over a decade of having a cable modem?

Umm so what can I get in here before beddy-bye... I got some positive feedback on the "A* comics as downloadable PDFs" scheme I was talking about yesterday--by which I mean, a few positive Twitter replies and a Like on Facebook ;)--so I will probably be doing those! They should launch simultaneously with the subscription service, I guess, that would be tidy. Payments would (will?) just be via PayPal, since that's what I kind of know how to use, so hopefully that would work for people.

Ooh I had something else to ramble about, what was that... Ah, yeah, see I was getting a little distressed about what to keep drawing for this non-actiony, rather lengthy conversation we're in the middle of (hm no more like 3/4ths+ of the way through now...eh...six more pages, to be precise), and then I thought you know, it's my comic, I can draw whatever the heck I want. So that's sort of what I'm doing now; that is, possibly making the drawing a little more dramatic than it needs to be, but it's a lot more fun to draw that way. ":) And hopefully more fun to read!

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 17, Page 31
• A* Episode 17, Page 32

Page 32 was one of those pages that took a bunch of tries and wasted sides of paper until something non-completely-awful would come out. O won't someone think of the trees! ;_;

And I didn't plan it this way at all but after I pretty much had it finished I noticed that it bore something of a similarity--in a very poor and feeble way--to another painting someone did once...



:P Man! This just got complicated. :PPP

(Also you will note that Michelangelo, like a lot of clever and professional cartoonists, did not attempt some sort of goofy perspective there, like I am always tempted to. >_<)