Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 81

Some sketchy design sketches for the space suits of these guys--decided to go with the more retro fishbowl-style helmets ;):



~~~~~~~~~

Hm I think I *may* have ruined a brush in my art supply experiments after all. ;) See a few pages back I went back to using relatively small sable brushes for detail work, instead of the big synthetic/horsehair brush I'd been using for everything for most of this episode. The handle on the sable brush is a lot thinner, and I was afraid I'd start to get wrist stiffness / forearm soreness like I used to get before I switched to the larger brush. But then I happened to notice that the handle of the sable brush can just about fit through the hollow bamboo handle of the big brush; the first bamboo handle section I tried was just a *little* too narrow, but I found that soaking it in water--which I had to do anyway to get the red dye covering the inside to go away (that's what was going on in that photo I posted a couple days ago with that jar of red water)--caused the bamboo to expand enough that the sable brush's handle fit through the bamboo handle with room to spare. So I squirted some Elmer's "Wood Glue MAX" down one of the bamboo handle sections I cut off to balance the big brushes out anyway, stuck the small sable brush through it end-first, let it set for 24 hours, and I had me a Frankenbrush--a small-tipped brush with a nice thick handle:



I used it for the details in today's page, aaaand it seemed to irritate my wrist--way more than it had been irritated using a normal thin-handled sable brush yesterday. Now, it seems to take my arms two or three days to adjust to new tools anyway, so maybe it'll get better, but I'm starting to think that it's more to do with my wrist and arm position as I hold the brush than it is with the girth of the brush handle--with the big handle on, I think I just started to hold it differently. But with the big bamboo brushes, I unconsciously tend to hold those more sideways, because the brushy tip tends to bend to one side a little anyway, and plus to do bigger dry-brush effects you'd want hold it further sideways.

Anyway I guess I'll try Frankenbrush more next week and see if it gets better. It does at least seem to be bonded together pretty solidly. :P

~~~~~~~~

I stuck a "Top Webcomics" voting link widget in the left end of the social networking bar found under the ad section on the comic pages; I've had A*'s TWC links solely as text links on the site's "about" page for years because I felt that TWC is more of an ad for TWC than it really is for the webcomics striving to raise their rank and theoretical visibility in its list, and also I didn't want readers to feel like they need to be doing anything more than reading the comic. And in fact even just with the text links tucked away on the "about" page, some kindly folks have made a habit of voting for A* on TWC, and often get A* hovering somewhere in the mid-200's in TWC's ranking (which resets every month), and that actually has brought in a decent amount of additional traffic to the site. So, while I don't like to shill for TWC or whoever, if putting their widget on my front page helps get me a few new readers, I guess it's silly not to do it. I guess I'll try it there for a few months, and if it doesn't get A* up into the more visible part of the ranking (like into the 100's), I can just remove it. :P

~~~~~~~~

I've been playing around on A*'s Tumblr since I recently created it, having a surprising amount of fun browsing around and posting neat art and science things that I find--in addition to A* stuff of course! For instance, near the top just now you'll several interesting supernova articles and photos, a space adventure comic story by Al Williamson, inked by Frank Frazetta, and an old Radio Shack ad in which Isaac Asimov and his huge bushy white sideburns extoll the merits of the new TRS-80 Color Computer--along with a bunch of other fun stuff! So check that out, follow it if you like it, tell your friends, and here's that huge link button to it again, just to be gratuitous:



In any case, thanks to everyone who's gone out of their way to give me some feedback on the comic, whether it's been by emailing me, tweeting me, adding a message when buying something from the store, getting in touch on deviantART, Liking my A* posts on Facebook, giving a +1 on Google+ or a <3 on Tumblr, voting for A* in some poll thing, dropping a thoughtful comment here or there, or whatever--it means a lot to me to get each and every one of those... I guess it seems a little silly but they really do encourage me quite a bit! So thank you. :)

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 82

Believe it or not, in what is nearly a year now of working with ink on a daily basis--in my ancient brown shag carpeted apartment--I hadn't had a single ink spill...until today, when I had two. I don't know if it was excitement/perturbation caused by getting a call from my dad to say that a place he'd scouted months and month ago for showing my art had suddenly gotten back to him with a surprise vacancy in their schedule, and could we get some art over there and hung up before this Friday or what, but man, the carpet got it good today.

On the plus side, the sections of carpet that I scrubbed the ink out of probably haven't been this clean in a decade. And while I thought at first my drawing board was irreparably warped--having absorbed about 2/3rds of an ink bottle from a direct hit in the first spill, it had so much pigment on it that I felt I had to scrub it off, even though I suspected that wetting would risk warping the thin, light wood--it seems to be straightening out all right under some boards and books. So huzzah!

Here's the almost immediate aftermath of the first spill--got a good long splash going right over the table, drawing table, chair, and carpet:



Pencils for today's page--if I was better at inking I wouldn't have had to re-try Selenis' face over and over, and spend hours puzzling over how much black coverage to give to her space suit:



Another good side of the first spill: the ink I spilled was experimental ink, I guess the last of the current wave of art supply experiments I've been running. Maybe I'll be able to show you the results in the next day or two. Anyway it wasn't great ink for my purposes so no loss there. :P

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 83

Well it's official: A* artwork, mostly framed original art, will be showing at Couth Buzzard at 83rd and Greenwood in Seattle from this Friday through the end of October. Here is a saucy logo thing you can click on to get to their site if that text link was too boring:



It's a combo used bookstore / espresso joint! This is something of a surprise show--my dad just found out they had a spot for me yesterday--so I won't have any originals there that you wouldn't have seen if you came to my show earlier in the summer, but if you *didn't* make it to that one, well now you've got a couple months to catch them at the Buzzard.

~~~~~~~

A couple science things happened!

- Explosion on Jupiter - An amateur astronomer spotted a several-second-long flash on Jupiter, which he guesses was an impact, possibly from a small, unknown comet. This is the fourth impact observed on Jupiter since 2009; they haven't been nearly as spectacular as the massive Shoemaker-Levy comet impact of 1994, which hit Jupiter with an energy equivalent to the output of about 11 million thermonuclear warheads--I calculated that for an A* thing a few years ago--leaving huge black spots on top cloud layers of the gas giant.

- A new theory points out that the geologic formations seen on Mars that have long been thought to show traces of erosion by ancient waterways or seas could actually have been formed by cooling magma rather than water--there's a region of French Polynesia with clays similar in composition to Martian ones, and these Polynesian ones were shown four years ago to have been formed by rapidly cooling magma, rather than by slow erosion by water. Still, scientists are pretty confident that water has played a role in the geology and chemistry of Mars, so this apparently doesn't shoot down the possibility of past Martian water-dependent life, which people are always hopeful of finding for some reason.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 84

A large flat package waiting on my porch today pretty much made my day because it turned out to be an item from A*'s Amazon Wish List that a very kind reader had sent to me--they even had it gift-wrapped! =o I've learned that not everyone wants their name given to the internet at large, so I'll just say thank you very much, lovely reader. :)

And I'll share! Because this isn't just any book, but the very large and colorful Definitive Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim Volume 1, which begins the task of collecting all of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim newspaper strips; volume 1 starts with the very first strips for each series, which debuted in 1934, and gets as far as 1936 with them.

It's a large book--16 inches high! (Amazon appears to have the dimensions all wrong. And did you know that 16" is the width of a cropped-for-the-web A* illustration? Hm!) And hardcover, but not sporting one of those annoying dust jacket things over blank cardboard covers; no, this has some wacky and highly colorful graphics on it, unhelpfully blocked here by some photo-bombing doofus' hand:



Jungle Jim was a "topper" for Flash Gordon, meaning it ran above it on the comics page when the strips came out every Sunday. Jim was meant to ape (har) the success of the Hal Foster-illustrated Tarzan, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' immensely popular pulp adventure series, and already incredibly popular in its own right. Flash, meanwhile, was meant to compete with the immensely popular sci-fi strip Buck Rogers; interestingly, both Tarzan and Buck had begun on the same day: January 7, 1929.

Well, Raymond's Jungle Jim and Flash Gordon hit the funny pages exactly five years later, on January 7th, 1934. Here's the first strips, and you can see their "topper" layout:



The intro to the book has a lot of interesting info about the strips; that first Flash comic, for instance, was Raymond's third try; the first two, rejected by the syndicate, had Flash as part of a four-man crew whose ship, designed to be the first to orbit the Earth, had malfunctioned, leaving them stranded in space. It was more sciencey and less fantasy, apparently; but the editor finally went for this third try, which included such crowd-pleasers as an impending apocalypse, a mad scientist, and a beautiful young woman in distress--all in one Sunday page!

For a period in '35, it was decided to run the funnies in a "tabloid-style" insert, and both Jim and Flash got their own full page; you can see that already, just one year later, Raymond's art has become much more polished, graceful, and dynamic, and he's moved to working in fewer, larger panels; Jim, though, is noticeably lower detail than Flash--you can even see some quicky dry brush work in Jim's shading:



Raymond, incidentally, did not usually handle the coloring of the strip. He was no newcomer to comic drawing, however: the book's introduction tells how he got his break in 1931, when at the age of 22 he began assisting neighbor Russell Westover on Westover's Tillie the Toiler comic strip; and it really was a break for the newly married Raymond, whose job at a Wall Street brokerage firm--he'd turned down a Notre Dame football scholarship after the death of his father in 1922 to work on Wall Street and help support the rest of his family, which included six other siblings--had dissolved shortly after the stock market crash in '29. Westover's syndication connection got the otherwise self-taught Raymond a job at the King Features syndicate's art department, from which he was eventually hired as assistant by Chic Young, creator of the fledgling strip Blondie. Chic's brother Lyman also had a strip--Tim Tyler's Luck--which by '33 Raymond was ghost-illustrating in eye-catching fashion, a fact that hardly escaped the eyes of the ambitious King Features editors.

Anyway, skipping back ahead to Flash, by March 1936 it was back to its initial configuration with Jim as the topper, and you can see also that Raymond's style was well on its way to the intricate patterns of curving, space-and-light-defining lines for which his Flash work would be most known:



So as a comparison, here are a couple panels from the bottom left of a Flash strip from May 20th, 1934



vs a couple from the bottom left of the last strip in Volume 1, from just over two years later--May 31st, 1936:



Just look at that print quality, too. This is a really lovely book!

Bonus factoids! Raymond had also been given a THIRD strip: Secret Agent X-9 was to be the big one; written by Dashiell Hammett, famed hard-boiled crime story writer of The Maltese Falcon (Sam Spade and all that, you know), X-9 was set to steal some of the thunder (so creative they were at King Features back then :P) of the very popular Dick Tracy comic strip, which had begun on October 4th, 1931. Raymond stopped working on it in '35, and Hammett didn't stay long, either; X-9 went on under various creators and names, though--it was renamed "Secret Agent Corrigan" in later decades--and didn't stop until 1996! I wonder if I ever saw it in a paper... Can't say I remember it! Another interesting factoid: Al Williamson illustrated Corrigan in the '70's; Williamson had also been an assistant on the strip Raymond started after WWII, Rip Kirby, AND had done later Flash Gordon illustration work--you can see some nice examples of both his Corrigan and Flash work on that Wikipedia page I've linked there. And incidentally, Williamson had also collaborated on comic work with another inspiring artist I've happened to mention more than a few times, Frank Frazetta.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 85

My dad and I got my artwork hung on a prominently placed, coffee-hued wall at Couth Buzzard Books at 83rd and Greenwood in Seattle today--the art will be on display (and sale!) there through October. It's mostly some of what I think are the nicer A* original pages, all framed and matted:



The local "art walk" thingy is tomorrow (Friday, anyway) evening, and I'll be hanging out at the Buzzard from about 7 to 7:30 pm. I hope they have snacks. >_> You could come and help me find them! Or you may find me with my nose buried in a book, because there's both a Philip K. Dick and a Heinlein book on top of the bookshelf directly below my artwork. :) Oh so yeah that's Couth Buzzard Books, they also have a little espresso/pizza shop in there, and I believe they said they'd probably have live music of some kind as well. Clicking the following colorful logo will take you to their web site:



~~~~~~~~~

You've probably noticed that I haven't managed more than a page a day since I went back to using pencils and a small brush and all that about a week ago. It just takes more time to do pages this way, so I think we'll be stuck at this rate for a while; I wouldn't do it except that I think the improvement in art quality makes it worth the slower pace--hopefully my readers agree! =o

Anyway, the one thing I've actually been able to sell in with A* has been art, so currently my hope of achieving vast fortune and eventual galactic domination hinges on my getting the art to improve to the point where I can make some decent dough doing commissions and freelance work on the side--in addition to selling the original A* art, of course. So improving the artwork is a top priority! Hopefully in another year or so I'll be ready for the commercial market. :o Once I get the original-art-ordering system done--it's coming along pretty well, in fact--I intend to start getting in some regular freewheeling arting on weekends; I'd like to do some paintings/sketches/illustrations in different formats in terms of size, dimension, color, etc, just to practice and I suppose work up a varied portfolio. Although I imagine I'll mostly end up drawing (or trying to draw, I mean) pretty women. >_> I hope that's okay with everyone.

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Oh man art stuff! You may have noticed that the art style has varied slightly over the past week... I'm trying to hit the right balance between clearly delineating everything--the usual black outlines around everything that other comics use do that quite well--and rendering things in more of an expressive, impressionist manner where there *aren't* lines around everything. I've kind of been bouncing back and forth; also I could stand to improve in each type, from a technical standpoint. I think maybe the figure of Caines on page 82 is the closest I've come to success so far--there's actually kind of a mix of delineation and impressionism going on with him there, and it's proving a tricky balance to strike consistently I guess. In today's page, for instance, I wish I'd been able to capture the gray tones of the face more boldly--like, on the first stroke, rather than having to build them up in a few layers and getting a bit smudgy. Ah well, plenty to work on!

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 86

I gotta go easy on all this microscopic cross-hatching before I kill my wrist. :P Or at least learn to rotate the paper so I'm hatching in a natural direction, gosh.

I won't be drawing this weekend, though--I'll be putting in some more work on getting the system for selling A* original art online. Here's what a sample "buy" page looks like so far:



So mostly I just have to get the comic displaying script to show a "buy" link for the current comic page if the original art for it hasn't been sold yet, and then I gotta have my little script that listens to PayPal's feedback messages take a page off the market once its original art has been sold. Shouldn't be too tough.

You'll notice the price in that sample page display says $50! I've mentioned $100 as the price for original art before, and I still think that's what the price will be eventually, but I think--I suppose my thinking on this could change before I roll this out, but this is what it is currently--initially I'm going to offer them at the murderously low introductory price of $50 to stimulate sales and cut into the eh going on 300 pages or so pile of original art I've accumulated here in my little apartment since I started drawing them by hand almost a year ago. So if you were considering buying a page before, well now you'll be able to get two! Anyway I think I'll have that ready to roll out within a month or so.

~~~~~~~

Speaking of A* original art, at my latest art show opening this evening, before anyone showed up I wormed my way into the "graphic novel" aisle of the shop, and what did a find but a cheap copy of Frank Miller's "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For." I've read it before, of course, but never had my own copy--so now I do! Which is handy because sometimes I'm sitting around thinking "gosh how would Miller have tackled this drawing dilemma" and there really isn't that much that turns up in Google image searches for his art, rather surprisingly. Not that I want to draw like him, exactly, but you have to admit he had some good ideas of how to handle black and white artwork. And overall (I keep telling myself this from time to time but then I forget) I think I should be doing more black and white, and less gray, so a dose of Miller tonight was a good reminder of that. This episode will be getting progressively darker, anyhow, I think.

Oh, and I got the urge to look up Miller on Wikipedia to see if it says what he's been up to since his last movie crashed and burned; it doesn't, but it did have a link to this extremely extensive article analyzing his work on what is probably still my favorite graphic novel: Reading Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. The middle section is a little slow--an almost frame-by-frame analysis of each of the TDKR's four chapters--although it does have quite a bit of his art to look at--but the beginning and end sections, which look at Miller's career up to that point, and the techniques he and colorist Lynn Varley (I don't think I realized they'd married--and then divorced in 2005, an event which some speculate helped precipitate Miller's rather public flameout :P, although...well, enough on that topic :PP) pioneered in order to achieve a print quality that just hadn't been used for American comics before that point--using high quality paper and printers that could capture the delicate line variation of his German inker Klaus Janson, and a color process that could reproduce the subtle hues of Varley's gouache paints--are quite interesting.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 87

Science news that grabbed me!

- This article has various theories about origin of the mass extinction marking the divide between the Triassic and Jurassic 200 million years ago--what caused half the species on Earth to die over the course of 100,000 years?--and how this might have led to the rise of the dinosaurs; dinosaurs had evolved about 25 million years earlier, but were, up to that point, dominated by other creatures, including "extinct relatives of modern crocodilians, such as the large and carnivorous land-based rauisuchians and semiaquatic phytosaurs as well as plant-eating aetosaurs and revueltosaurs."

One theory about the extinction cause is that the rifting of the supercontinent Pangaea at that time triggered 20,000 years of tremendous volcanic eruptions, which "coated what was to become Africa and the Americas with a million cubic kilometers of lava and doubled the level of carbon dioxide in the air causing massive global warming, 'about a 3- degree Celsius increase on average in temperature, if the climate system was as sensitive as models suggest.'" But then sulfur blasted into the atmosphere in the eruptions could also cause significant cooling by reflecting sunlight. And this could all have caused plants to start dying off, then the species who lived on them, and the species who lived on those species, etc.

But another theory is that it was yet another disastrous meteor strike that cause this extinction--for evidence of which various craters have been examined, such as the Manicouagan Crater in what is now Quebec (that was a million years too early), and "a hole about 40 kilometers wide discovered in France at Rochechouart."

- This article says that analysis of data collected by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter between 2006 and 2007 has revealed carbon dioxide snow clouds over the Martian south pole--which could very likely explain how there comes to be a year-round carbon dioxide--"dry ice"--polar cap there.

That would be the first-ever detection of natural dry ice snowfall--and that isn't even the only kind of snow that's been seen on Mars! "In 2008, NASA's Phoenix lander observed water-ice snow — the stuff we're familiar with here on Earth — falling near the Red Planet's north pole."

The carbon dioxide snow, of course, requires conditions that fortunately for us do not exist here on Earth: "Dry ice requires temperatures of about minus 193 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 125 Celsius) to fall." (The lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth "was −89.2 °C (−128.6 °F; 184.0 K) at the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica, on July 21, 1983"--that's cool enough to freeze dry ice, but apparently not nearly cold enough for it to condense and fall as snow from the atmosphere.

~~~~~

Boy I dunno if I'll try inking a page like I inked today's again any time soon! I've been using my old non-waterproof white ink--which I've always used for stars--for general white-overing again lately, since it spreads easier than the waterproof white ink, and since I don't have to worry too much about having to disturb it later due to a correction mistake, since I'm now back to working from pencil sketches again. Well, that breaks down when you change your mind midway through inking a page, as happened today, when I realized that a start-with-grays approach had run into trouble. So that triggered a lot of inking over and then re-inking over, because by then of course I'd lost my original lines--eventually had to repaint both eyes, even. Eeg! I dunno why I thought the gray-in approach would work, since it hasn't before, but hope springs eternal in my subconscious, I guess. :P

I suppose it was partly because the pencils had gone so well--which is often troublesome since then I get nervous about screwing them up with ink, so I told myself well, just face the fact you're going to screw them up, and put some effort into it and really go to town and screw up royally, at least. So I tried the different approach, what the heck. And it didn't work, but such is life, and I did get to experiment a bit with blending (or trying to blend) the white ink into black ink. I don't think the results are as attractive as a straightforward black ink then black washes approach could have attained, and they certainly took more time--and I should try to remember this so I don't fall into this again. :PP

Anyway I kinda knew something weird would happen so I thought ahead and preserved the nice pencils in a photo:



^ I actually like how the lighting happened to work out in that photo, especially with the resulting digital camera grain being accentuated when I contrast-adjusted the (fairly poorly lit) photo in Photoshop to make the pencil lines visible. Kinda tempting to get some really dark pencils and try working all in photographed pencil drawings...almost. :P

So I tried starting out with middle-gray lines to replace the pencils



which *seemed* to be working, but then as I started to fill in things like the face, again with light to medium grays, which also *seemed* to work okay



I eventually realized that the washes weren't solid enough to keep the lines/shapes preserved tightly, and that I'd now effectively lost the ability to ink in important original details like the eyes--and that areas that had been somewhat vague in the pencils, such as the cheek/hair on the right, were now pretty darn confusing. I kept on for a while, filling things in more with darker and darker washes, then tried black, then white, contemplated chucking the whole thing and starting over, but it was quite late by that time and besides I'd probably be haunted by the success of the first drawing and just struggle to try to recapture it in any further drawing, so I set out to salvage what I could via liberal application and mingling of black and white inks. Which worked better than I'd thought it would at the worst point, I guess, but hm yeah probably aren't the way I'd want to try going again.

~~~~~

Lots of progress made over the weekend on making A*'s original artwork available for sale through the web site--in fact I got really ambitious and just went to town on it, and the stuff for selling the original artwork behind the daily comic pages is ready to roll. I'm not rolling it out to the site yet, though--I had to fight myself over this repeatedly :P because I hate sitting on stuff--because I'm still accumulating my arsenal of secure art shipping supplies--my skinny boxes arrived today! :D--and because at some point I want to be able to sell select items from the episode art galleries as well, and those will run through the same scripts that selling the comic pages does, so I might as well get that all done at once before inflicting it on the public, since going back to work on adding the gallery-sale stuff will probably make a temporary mess of comic-selling stuff while I'm working at it. :P Mmm so yah, might be able to get it all worked out next weekend, we'll see.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 88

I saw a funny article today about a warp drive being more feasible than initially thought--the point the article doesn't really make is that more feasible than impossibly unfeasible is still pretty much impossibly unfeasible! The "warp drive" in question is the physics concept for what would be in effect faster-than-light travel made by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994; the Alcubierre drive is, in principle, a ring of "exotic matter" around a space ship, of such energy/mass that it compresses space/time in the desired direction of travel, and expands it behind--and this would supposedly allow the ship to move much faster than normal, relative to the unwarped idea of space--up to 10 times the speed of light.

Well that's a fun concept to think about, maybe, and supposedly fits some mathematical models of physics and so forth--we do know that mass/energy can stretch spacetime; or at least, Einstein's equations say it can, and various things like the measured apparent expansion of the universe, measurements of time dilation due to velocity and gravity (time slows down for those moving faster, or closer to a larger mass), and so forth, seem to back the notion up--but there is no actual way to construct such a "drive."

That first article, for instance, was saying that a breakthrough idea has been made for the concept: by altering the shape of the warping ring, instead of requiring the equivalent of all the energy in a mass the size of Jupiter to warp space, the thing would only require an energy equivalent of a mass the size of the Voyager 1 probe. And gosh, that's just a tiny thing!

But the energy even in a tiny thing is vast, as Einstein and nuclear bombs have taught us--and nukes are even relatively inefficient in terms of matter to energy conversion, as opposed to something like the pure conversion of a matter/antimatter collision, which is something like 1000 times more efficient. So let's do some E=mc^2 on this Voyager 1 mass and see just how much energy that is:

Voyager 1 is 721.9 kg--that's our mass, "m." Now we multiply that by the square of the speed of light ("c") in meters per second: 300,000,000 squared is 90,000,000,000,000,000, times our mass 721.9, gives us 64,971,000,000,000,000,000, and the unit for that is Joules. So all the energy they say we need now to power this "warp drive" is about 65 quintillion Joules.

That sounds like a lot of energy. Is it? Oh yes. It's about 16 gigatons of TNT--ie, the equivalent of the combined explosive force of 16 billion tons of TNT; that's over three times the combined destructive power of all the world's nuclear arsenals (which clock in at about 5 gigatons altogether).

So that would be a tough amount of energy for puny humans to come up with. But that's the most feasible part of the idea, really.

Don't forget that the ring has to be composed of exotic matter, which is a fancy way of saying that it has to be made of extremely powerful magical stuff that we don't really understand or are even sure exists. The closest we come to knowing about something that would qualify as "exotic matter," maybe, is theoretical, unconfirmed quark-gluon plasma that may be generated in trace amounts in the 4 trillion degree C quantum conditions seen for split seconds at the center of particle collisions in really powerful particle accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Good luck coming up with enough of that stuff for a ring big enough to surround a spacecraft--much less being able to hold it together, or keep it from spontaneously decaying, for that matter. Or zapping it with 65 quintillion Joules. Or having a spacecraft survive in the middle of all of that. Or of somehow causing that to warp space-time in the direction you want.

But those kinds of petty considerations needn't bother theoretical physicists much, thank goodness!

~~~~~

I saw something about a US scientific group making a deal with China to get some experiment time with the robotic lander that China plans to land on the Moon next year as part of their Chang'e 3 mission. They already got an unmanned orbiter around the Moon a few years ago; if they can get this robot on the Moon, it'll be the first "soft landing" on the Moon in 37 years, since the Soviet Union's Luna 24 touched down there in 1976.

A "soft landing" means not a crash--we've crashed loads of things into the Moon for various experimental reasons, like the rocket piece smacked into the poor Moon a few years ago to kick up lunar dust for studying how much water ice was in it. In an interesting coincidence, one of the experiments conducted by the Luna 24 probe in '76 returned data that Soviet scientists used, two years later, to conclude that the lunar soil they studied was 0.1% water by weight--the first real measurement of water on the Moon, but it was ignored and forgotten somehow; today, measuring water on the Moon, as something that would considerably enhance the feasibility of a manned lunar base, is a pretty hot topic!

~~~~~

Thanks to Checkpoint Interviews for posting a notice about A*'s new-ish subscriptions and e-books! I was interviewed by them before, and they've also got interviews with other comics folk--most way better known than me!

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Brian Bendis, who as far as I can tell writes at least half of Marvel Comics these days :P, is pretty active on tumblr, and I piggy-backed on a post of his of some Jack Kirby pencil art from Fantastic Four #49 (the classic series, you have to say in these latter days of reboots argh), to compare it against the same artwork once it had been inked and colored by the rest of the team of artists working on FF at the time. That combined photo post is here on my Tumblr, and I did it because I wanted to show just how little we really got to see of Kirby's art, which was far more subtle and refined than the inked pages we see ever showed. Because if you look at that post you'll see in his pencil work that he had all kinds of intricate, subtle variation of tone--the rocky faces on the back of the Thing's carapace, for instance, fade beautifully through a range of grays as they curve away from the light source, and the folds of the Watcher's cloak are rendered in a delicate selection of cross-hatched gray patterning, not to mention the delicate feathering of reflected lines on Galactus' armored body. Yet all of that marvelous detail was completely obliterated under the care of the inker--in this case Joe Sinnott, but they all did this--all of Kirby's tones, feathering, crosshatching and so forth were simply turned to flat black.

Even the fairly isolated, incredibly hard-working Kirby must have caught at least glimpses of the finished Marvel products from time to time, so I'm sure he knew of the massacre that was being inflicted on his art; and pencils I've seen from later in his career have seemed to streamline most of that detail, so perhaps he got used to it and stopped bothering to do the lovely touches that would always be totally blacked out by the inkers. But it makes me wonder what he thought of it, and why it was done, and what his art might have looked like under the hands of an inker who was actually interested in capturing the true range of his pencil work; Kirby's mystique was such that, at least today, all the inking talk I've seen about him is obsessed with this idea of his art's "power"--this was based at least in part on low-quality copies of his pencils that did not preserve the intricacies--and nobody even thinks about inking him with anything more refined than the inking equivalent of a sledgehammer. Sheesh.

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Speaking of inking with sledgehammers, today's page was an interesting one for me because I ended up more or less re-drawing it piece by piece. I knew it was a scene of Selenis rushing down a hall, and my sort of default take on this was, apparently, to put her in the typical cartoonish, super-actiony running stance drilled into my impressionable youth by Marvel comics; you know the one: arms cranked up and down in opposite directions, body leaning almost horizontally forward, one knee cocked up almost as high as the chest, with its foot bent all the way back up under the hindquarters, the other leg shooting straight out behind and down into the floor, foot fully extended, knee not bent at all, exaggerated foreshortening everywhere, and so on.

It came out all right as far as those things go, but it was bothering me, and as I started to fiddle with parts here and there, it eventually dawned on me that the problem I was having with it was that nobody actually runs that way--or could run that way. Not even in the relatively low gravity of Nena's moon! So I started re-drawing the sections of the body that seemed the most egregious violators of kinetics, and eventually I had redone all of them. In comparison to The Marvel Run, a more realistic running position looks almost like at most a fast walk--especially here, where the gradual straightening up of the body resulted in the legs eventually trailing off the bottom of the page, so I couldn't get in one of those typical "this is a run" tricks of like making both feet slightly off the ground--which is somewhat unrealistic in its own way. But all in all I think it's a better way to go for A*, and hopefully I'll get used to it and start to do it right from the initial sketch so things fit on the page and flow a little better. :P Anyway I find it kind of funny that now my main concern with an action scene is controlling it enough to make it actually believable--and that the one that's given me the most tricky time in that respect in recent memory has been something as seemingly commonplace as a running pose...but I suppose I really haven't had one of those come along in quite some time, now that I think about it.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 89

I've got a ridiculous backlog of blog topics! My bookmark list is over two screens high now and I have to wait for it to scroll up and down to find stuff, that's how ridiculous it is--and I'm not even trying to think about the whole other pile of topics I accumulated a year or two ago and just had to mothball because I was falling farther and farther behind in talking about stuff in the daily A* news. Oy!

Obviously I've got to face the fact that the increased time I've been putting into the artwork has been sucking up my old A* blogging time, and I won't be able to do the hugely verbose, bandwidth-heavy blog posts I did in the carefree ol' days--not if I want to get a decent page drawn, anyway. So you know what time I think it is? Blogdozin' time! Yeah, instead of writing a whole photo essay about them--alas, time, etc--I'm just gonna start throwing mad news topic blurbs and links at you, and it's up to you if you wanna go check 'em out! *I* think they're all pretty interesting, and I'm not able to do them real justice myself, which is awful, but I think it's better to get them to you some way than no way. And I NEED to be able to start paring down my bookmark list, ugh. :P So let's start!


• Did you know we're in an ice age? It's true! You can tell because there are still year-round ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica--the current ice age started about 2.6 million years ago, at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, with a series of glacial periods that killed off megafauna like mastadons, sabre-toothed tigers, and neanderthals; at their maximum extent, ice sheets up to four or so kilometers thick covered 30% of the Earth's surface, and global sea level dropped by as much as 100 meters. Fortunately for us there are warmer and cooler cycles in the midst of an ice age; the last glacial--or cool--period ended about 10,000 years ago, and we're currently in an inter-glacial period in this ice age, during which temperatures are relatively warm. According to some scientists who study the complex cycles of glacial and interglacial periods, we're just about due for this interglacial period to end, and some even posit that man-made global warming is helping prevent the onset of the next glacial period--which would probably be a good thing for us in the medium-long term, you know (probably not in the short term :P). Of course, that's just a theory.


• The Event Horizon Telescope is a project coordinating radio telescopes worldwide into a cooperative network targeted toward one very special subject of study: the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sgr A*--their ultimate goal being to capture an image of A*'s event horizon! They perhaps optimistically think that this can be achieved in this decade with refinement and increasing resolving power and coordination of radio telescopes. Well, that would certainly be cool to see!


• One of the telescopes involved in that project is the South Pole Telescope--a 10-meter radio telescope located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which is precisely at Earth's south pole. It's the best place on Earth for radio observations, because the atmosphere is very thin, and the air, thanks to the freezing temperatures and distance from the ocean, is very dry, which means there's less water moisture to interfere with incoming radio waves from space; also, you've got months and months where the Sun never rises, making the atmospheric conditions very stable. You can't view the northern sky from there, admittedly, but fortunately for our purposes, A* is in the southern sky, so the South Pole is perfect! In an interesting coincidence, the telescope, which began making observations in 2007, is run by my alma mater! (Not that I can take any credit whatsoever--I was an art major :P.)


• The Findings section of the Large Hadron Collider Wikipedia page is an interesting spot to watch, what with all the excitement about CERN's gigantic Swiss-based particle accelerator looking for the Higgs boson (supposed to explain gravity) and all that. You'll find the "quark-gluon plasma" I mentioned yesterday in there, but the one I thought was really funny was bottomonium, a new particle or particle state observed at the LHC in December. Bottomonium is an example of "quarkonium," which Wikipedia defines as "a flavorless meson whose constituents are a quark and its own antiquark." Yes I have no idea what that means really, my brain just can't take these names seriously. Tragically, "toponium" does not exist, "since the top quark decays through the electroweak interaction before a bound state can form." Well, dang.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 17, Page 90

A friend of mine pointed out that in the inked and colored version of that Galactus page from Kirby's Fantastic Four #49 that I posted on my Tumblr, the colorist had rendered the world-eater without any pants. He also doesn't have sleeves.

Now, I thought this was clearly a mistake rather than a radical costume decision, since elsewhere in that issue the Big G (is that cartoony "G" on his chest to die for, or what? Kirby would remove it within a few years (maybe sooner, I haven't searched that hard :P), leaving just a blank round plate on this chest) appears to have his customary armored blue long johns, as you can see for instance on this page (although his helmet's antennae have mysteriously gone missing in the last panel, but never mind).

But the pantsless Galactus keeps popping up--post-Kirby, he's dressed for summer throughout the appropriately named "Galactus Unleashed" story in Fantastic Four #122, for instance--except for on the cover.

I suppose though that we should just be glad he didn't stick with the coloring scheme he had in his very first panel appearance, at the end of Fantastic Four #48, in which he shocks the FF with a festive combination of dark green / red helmet and chest piece, and maroon leggings.

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But what's this? A careful reading of the text in that last linked page digs up a surprising statement: "In this reprint, the colorist has given Galactus pants." This puts a whole new twist on things! If what this suggests is true, Galactus readers since oh perhaps some time in the 70's have had the pants pulled over their Galactus legs in a mighty Marvel cover-up! Were the planet-devourer's legs deemed too powerful, too sexy, too dangerous for the hapless inhabitants of Earth? Did some editing schlub at Marvel really go to all the trouble of making sure they were changed from flesh to blue...stuff in every reprint? Will anyone ever get to the bottom of this time-shrouded mystery??