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  Gray backlashJun 30, 2010 4:52 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Ah, gunfire's always a good excuse to get back to some nice stark black and white. I also made an alternate black and white version of page 13, which I stuck in the gallery--bigger version available under this smaller version:
 
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And yet another banner to feed my banner obsession:
 
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  How many fingers do you need for drawing?Jun 29, 2010 5:03 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Survived the beach party, only two burned fingers, and on my non-drawing hand. :)
 
And here's a teaser to get you to go visit the latest page of my Sunday fairy tale comic:
 
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  Maybe we could double-team youJun 26, 2010 2:49 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:A single solitary page for Friday! My output Monday will likely be similarly curtailed; it seems my fine friends have determined a beach party would be just the thing to take the edge off the opening of the week. :o Yes, they are wonderfully silly people.
 
Have a lovely weekend, and keep an eye out for Sunday's Princess and the Giant update, if you're into it.
 
 
 
 
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  Can you do that to silhouettes?Jun 25, 2010 4:59 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Hm I kind of like the cel-shaded silhouette thing going on in page 10 there, I'll hafta keep an eye open for other places where it might work.
 
 
 
 
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  Right down to businessJun 24, 2010 4:11 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:I always forget to draw that thruster thingy on her forearm. We'll see how many pages I have to stealth edit over the course of this episode to add it back in after forgetting it. So far: 1.
 
The table saga continues! Now where can I get some tin snips...
 
Meanwhile, another day, another banner:
 
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  Of desks and shipsJun 23, 2010 3:38 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Ooh, not another of these only-one-page days! Ech. On the plus side, I think I'm just about done modifying this new table thingy I've been trying to set up as a desk / drawing table; after days of altering or replacing large amounts of it, like replacing its wheel feet with tennis balls, cutting its top down to size with my dad's POWER SAW, hand-sanding the heck out of the remaining top part in my bathtub, and replacing the super-flimsy washers it came with after one buckled and caused one of the top's clamps to get screwed up (fortunately I have spares since I'm only using half the top to begin with), I've now got it into a workable state, hopefully. It even TRANSFORMS between DRAWING MODE and TYPING MODE; admittedly this is just a workaround for its total inability to stay up if you try adjusting the table height normally.
 
Yes it was cheap. ;) But its general frame and size looked closer to what I needed than the more expensive ones, so I figured it was worth trying to whip it into shape. If there was a manufacturer out there who actually made compact, sturdy, adjustable and affordable work surfaces for keyboards/drawing tablets, I wouldn't be having this problem. =P Not to mention the furniture-industry-wide problem of always making desks that are at least several inches too high for even a fairly tall dude like me to type on in a truly ergonomic fashion! Anyway hopefully this one will work out now; so far it's definitely better than...not having a table, which was my previous situation.
 
Okay I know, nobody cares about the table. So as you can see, slow page output aside, we're already springing into some action, huzzah! It sure is nice to have them out of those silly old ships. I tried making a banner out of this one:
 
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No, I'm not at all desperate for a sexy full-width image to use in a banner, why do you ask? :P Eh... Fortunately this episode should have plenty more material to draw from now that Selenis is on the loose. Burn the ships!
 
 
 
 
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  A* too cool, says internet userJun 22, 2010 6:46 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:I found someone talking about A* on another site today! Yes I am stalking the internet! It was on the xkcd forum, where member Dauric was kind enough to include A* in a short list of webcomics that would never qualify for syndication. :D The other comics named were xkcd, Schlock Mercenary, Something Positive, and Questionable Content; if you know even just a tiny bit about webcomics, you know those are all very long-running, super-successful comics, so I'm pretty flattered to find an insane...ly awesome internet user including my little A* in such august company. Of A*'s syndication-ruining qualities, they said "Adventure comics don't go over well, and the art style is too abstract, to [sic] inaccessible for newspaper readers." Yesss! Stickin' it to The Man. And really I'm just pleased that someone considers that the comic has art, style, abstraction, and adventure. :) So thanks for thinking of A*, Dauric; you are a rad person who made my day today.
 
Speaking of making peoples' days, my weekly Princess and the Giant comic updated this weekend; go take a peek! Clicking on this little preview picture will take you right to it:
 
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  Okay well check out SamneeJun 19, 2010 4:29 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Boo only one page today! Still not back up to speed yet, we'll see if we can't do better next week.
 
One non-me thing I've been meaning to mention for a while now is the art of Chris Samnee, a dandy artist currently working on a Thor title for Marvel comics. Samnee has a really nice black and white style that he executes with a brush pen or something similar, dropping down thick black lines and blobs in a way that is alternately thick and graceful, both retro and sleekly modern. Check out this Tarzan he did recently, for instance. Look at those shadows! The poses! The composition that puts foreground, middle, and background together so naturally, so dynamically! Yes this is good stuff.
 
 
 
 
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  Episode 10 is off the blocksJun 18, 2010 3:08 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:A slow start I know but I'm still suffering from storyboarding hangover. :P Speaking of which, I stuck that last storyboard mosaic in the spankin' new episode 10 gallery. Oh yeah, and I updated the very first A* comic--the episode 1 title page--with the name "Vero," since this has been his story, but episode 11 will begin with a different name; "Vero's" always been the lead-off name on the episode list page, which is a handy index for accessing the movies, discussion threads, comics, and art galleries of each episode, but not many people look at it so I thought maybe I should point that out. ;)
 
Also gonna try updating some other things tonight like my old ad banners you might still be seeing hither and yon about the Internet, and my deviantART.
 
 
 
 
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  Ep. 10 boards done, comics start tomorrowJun 17, 2010 7:14 AM PDT | url
 
Shew, I'm always pretty much brain dead by the end of these pre-episode storyboarding marathons. But episode 10's is done! So that means I can start drawing and posting actual episode 10 comics tomorrow, yay. And in the mean time, here are some randomly arranged selections from today's final storyboard session for the episode; there was a lot of really potentially spoilery stuff so I can only give you lots of general close-ups for the most part:
 
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  Episode 10 storyboards, partie deuxJun 16, 2010 4:37 AM PDT | url
 
Got 66 episode 10 storyboards done today, so here's a double helping of randomly arranged samples:
 
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Yeah! If I get an equal number done tomorrow then that'll finish 'em off, and it'll be on to the real comics on Thursday.
 
Speaking of real comics, I was so excited with construction activities yesterday that I neglected to give you a little clickable preview/link thing to this past Sunday's latest page of my weekly fairy tale comic, The Princess and the Giant:
 
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Just look at that super-deluxe cross-hatching. :o
 
 
 
 
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  Episode 10 storyboards, part 1Jun 15, 2010 5:48 AM PDT | url
 
O Monday! I realized today that having 50% more storyboards (150) for this episode (10) means that it'll take me more like three days than two to draw them, so it'll probably be more like Thursday before I can start in on the actual episode 10 comics.
 
And I quickly fell behind quota on them 'boards today because I decided to construct the little minidesk that's been sitting here in a box in exactly 60 pieces for a while now while I've been scribbling out drawings by balancing my drawing tablet on my knees, which is getting old! So I assembled the desk (only skinned one finger! :D), then took about a third of it apart again, and now I just need to make it some new feet, and cut the desk top down to a more convenient size with POWER TOOLS :D that I don't own. :| But I'm on non-shoot-on-sight terms with several people who do so, we'll see.
 
Enough excuses, gimmeh some episode 10 storyboards! Okay!
 
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The first two of those I'm not actually going to use as layouts; they're just a little too generic in their side view / front view-ness. Three reminds me of this page from episode 4, and four reminds me of this page from episode 1, so it looks like my brain's stock of layouts it deems acceptable is pretty finite. Fortunately I've never pretended to be original, yesssss!
 
 
 
 
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  Episode 10 script doneJun 12, 2010 8:25 AM PDT | url
 
Got the script for A* episode 10 written out, and at 150-some pages of just two characters (and you can probably guess who), mysteries solved, new mysteries revealed, and pretty much wall to wall life and death stuff from start to finish--oh, and lots of explosions--I can safely say that I think this episode is going to be killer.
 
I promised I'd leak some lines, so let's see what we can do in as much of a non-spoilery way as possible... Gee, that doesn't leave me with much. :D Okay, here are some non-consecutive samples in random order:
 
- "Don't be stupid. There's no escape--no alternative."
- "It's just going to be a bowl of radiation."
- "Damn. You're too slow; hang on, and don't get any ideas."
 
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Aaand I whipped up some more banners with art from the last episode:
 
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Finally, for a contrast to the US's WWII-era nuclear "Operation Crossroads" I was posting atomic pictures of a few days ago, today I'd like to direct you to Project Habakkuk, a British project from a just a few years earlier, designed to test the feasibility of aircraft carriers made out of ice and sawdust. It started off with a bang, as the story goes--a bullet deflected from the super-hard frozen substance, dubbed "Pykrete," whizzing past the ankles of a dubious admiral--but appears to have ended up not quite as impressively. And I'll bet that admiral would rather have had some mushroom cloud cake instead.
 
 
 
 
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  Episode 9 finale! Episode 10 starts next Wed!Jun 11, 2010 5:52 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:And that concludes episode 9! We had some space battle action in this one, but I'm looking forward to drawing episode 10, because we'll finally have people getting a chance to get out of their ships and stretch their legs a bit. They'll have to do more than just stretching, though, because 10 will be the final episode in Vero's story. Episode 11 will start in on someone else's story, but it will also be a direct continuation of this one in many ways, with some familiar faces playing big roles.
 
But back to episode 10! I'll be offline writing the script tomorrow, but stick around because I may have some fun dialogue to leak to you or something. If I get that done this week, then Monday and Tuesday of next week will be dedicated to rendering the episode in quick doodlish storyboard form--and I'll probably let slip a few of those to keep you entertained--and Wednesday, if things stay on schedule, episode 10 comics will start!
 
Will Vero learn the secret of the black system facility? Will Selenis find whatever she's after? Will they survive Mar's "scorched earth" nuclear attack? We'll be finding out in the climactic episode 10! (Can you tell I'm excited? 'Cause I'm kind of excited. :))
 
 
 
 
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  Boot thisJun 10, 2010 6:52 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Still slow--but only two more pages in this episode, so I really oughta finish tomorrow!
 
Spent some time these past two days diagnosing and eventually reviving my parents' PC; it seems that it had a memory stick die, which also corrupted Windows--probably the registry--so it couldn't boot for not just one but two reasons! Neat. And then after I reinstalled Windows (if it was just the registry that was bad, maybe I could have restored that somehow short of reinstalling, even though Windows' repair process failed to...but eh), it couldn't connect to the Internet, because its not-plug-and-play USB DSL modem needed a driver file, located on the Internet. I guess this is standard PC tech repair, but I don't have to think about it for most of my life, so this was all very exciting, let me tell you!
 
 
 
 
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  I'm sure 30 seconds is plennnnntyJun 09, 2010 8:13 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:This here's an interesting page to think about when the "safe distance" question comes up in relation to nuclear blasts. Such things *have* been tragically miscalculated in the past. Despite--or probably because of that--they are pretty darn interesting; for instance, if you zoom in on the center of the Baker detonation at Bikini Atoll, on the ships right around that central spray column at the base of the mushroom cloud's stem--which was 2000 feet wide--you can see exactly how the fireball reached based on how much black smoke is billowing out of the ships that were floated out into the test range.
 
Just to indulge my grim fascination with that particular series of nuclear bomb tests known as Operation Crossroads, here are some more photos from it:
- Test goats calmly eating aboard a test ship before it gets nuked
- Jolly unprotected US Navy sailors trying to scrub the radiation out of the deck of a German cruiser used in the test--with mops (they found this does not work; some of the least damaged/irradiated ships were sailed back to the US with their full crews aboard--this ended up increasing their eventual mortality rate by 5.7%)
- Live fish from the lagoon, so radioactive it can create its own x-ray exposures on film
- The huge water-laden shock wave at the start of the Baker explosion, which was underwater, dwarfing the warships next to it
- The light aircraft carrier USS Independence sustained massive damage but didn't sink (some ships did sink and are still there, at the bottom of the atoll; when they found they could not decontaminate the ships that survived, they sank some of them, including the Independence, near the Farallon Islands, 27 miles off of San Francisco)
- And then as the admiral you celebrate with your wife and a mushroom cloud cake
 
Also I hadn't realized that the bikini, invented by the French in that same year, 1946, was named after the atoll (well that part I knew), not because it or its inventor came from there, but because they thought it would have an atomic-bomb-like impact on the public consciousness; other reasons have been said to be that it was a bathing suit of atom-like size, or that atomic warfare would reduce everyone to primitive costume (ugh).
 
 
 
 
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  Shadings!Jun 08, 2010 6:22 AM PDT | url
 
Added 3 new A* pages:Big doings afoot in that dark system, that's for sure. Also, if you haven't checked it yet, this past weekend's new Princess and the Giant page awaits you:
 
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Notice I've been doing a lot of little shading lines lately! I guess they're just kind of fun. Hopefully I don't start overdoing 'em. :P
 
 
 
 
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  More slackin' and some storyboardsJun 05, 2010 6:57 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Next week we have a scene switch, and there are no girls involved, so I might be able to get back to my usual page drawing pace. ;) Drawing females definitely slows me down; today I found myself still fiddling with that drawing I posted on deviantART yesterday, for instance. :P But they're also more fun to draw, so I guess that's a balancing factor. In fact I think I've been slacking on drawings of Vero lately; it's like...oh he's a bald dude *scribble scribble*...do we have all the major limbs represented...yep okay done!
 
Speaking of scribbling, some of the storyboards for the recent story had come out pretty well, and somewhat differently than the eventual final art for the panels they represent, so I thought it might be useful to post them for you. These are the storyboards for what became pages 78, 81, 83, and 85 of episode 9; you can click on them to see the final page they would become:
 
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You'll also find those storyboards in the episode 9 gallery, should you want to track them down in the future.
 
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One more thing I've been slacking on is mentioning that last weekend I added three new little picture-font-poems to my strange poetry comic series, word. If you have any interest in silly poems, free fonts, stuff I do on the weekends, or any combination thereof, they might be worth your while to check out. I will understand, however, if your weekend is already packed full with super activities. Have a good one, and I'll have a new scene—the final scene of this penultimate Vero episode, in fact!—kicking off for you on Monday.
 
 
 
 
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  Semi-productive slackingJun 04, 2010 6:15 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Yep another 2-page day, the slackin' continues! It was super-productive slacking for me, though, because I got laundry done (hopefully nobody but me really cares about this...), and I got sucked into a pin-up art challenge over at Comic Fury, for which I ended up drawing a non-A*-related picture; I won't post it here because it wound up with a surprising lack of clothing, but you can check it out behind a content warning (NSFW!) on my deviantART.
 
Also I found some neat stuff on the web today! How about some live webcams at the CERN particle accelerator! If those go white (or black? :o) at any point, we're probably screwed.
 
And then an international astronaut team trooped into cramped living quarters in Moscow, in which they'll stew in their own juices for 520 days, simulating some of the stresses an isolated space ship crew would be under during the long flight to Mars. There's an interesting note about the previous such experiment, in which the simulation crew did *not* last the full duration:
 
"A similar experiment in 1999-2000 at the same Moscow institute went awry when a Canadian woman complained of being forcibly kissed by a Russian team captain. She also said two Russian crew members had a fist fight that left blood splattered on the walls. Russian officials downplayed the incidents, attributing them to cultural gaps and stress."
 
Oops! Not the team you'd want to send to Mars, I guess. Hopefully this latest team has the right stuff! We'll know in a year and a half.
 
 
 
 
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  Other comics get radJun 03, 2010 4:36 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Still light on comics 'cause I finally did some serious catching up on sleep today. :D So I think at least the drawings came out a bit better today than yesterday, eheh. The other thing is that I seem to be spending more time on them, because I'm trying to get the black and white to stand on its own better, so I can use the grays more intelligently, and maybe more sparingly; I think they were starting to be a bit of a crutch.
 
One thing that got me thinking about that was a webcomic I found out about over the weekend: "Space" by surlyben, currently running on the front page of his site, Space Pirate Apocalypse. Now get this: his "Space" is a hard science fiction webcomic, in stark black and white, single-panel, widescreen format. !!! Man, this makes me feel so validated, I just can't tell you. :D And I really like some of the things he's doing in his artwork, particularly the long, slender structures, and the very high contrast black and white that eschews backlighting (another thing I've been using as a crutch too much to help define forms); check out how he renders the asteroid on this page, for instance. I was comparing that against some of the asteroids I'd drawn in the past week or so, and realized I'd been slacking on the detail, just slopping grays over low detail black and white--I'd done a more painstaking job with the planet and moons of Lode in episode 8, for instance.
 
So yeah, its an inspiring comic that's just starting out (the author's been in webcomics for quite some time, though!), give it a look. Not sure where the story is going yet (he's dropped references to "immortal space vikings" or something 0_o) but its already got some really cool space art/atmosphere.
 
 
 
 
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  Slowly scribbling through spaceJun 02, 2010 12:33 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Still have comic hangover from the weekend, as you can see from my continued lagging A* production here. Ungrawah! Tomorrow I think will go a bit better. While I'm at least semi-conscious here though I'll at least link in one of the weekend's comics, which was another page of The Princess and the Giant, along with this little preview for it:
 
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  The burning threat posed by Greek statuesJun 01, 2010 8:45 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Boy howdy (that's the kind of clever thing we say here in the West) that last one took me forever. You'd think just drawing a character close-up would be pretty straightforward, but nooo... For some reason I just wasn't getting it working, and ended up redrawing it--except for some eye bits--about 4 times. Since I'd like to at least get something out of those otherwise wasted versions, I'll show you the third one; it was going to be the final, but then I flipped back to the first one, and there was just something about it that seemed more compelling, so finally I redrew most of the first one again, and that became page 78. Here's that previous, third attempt:
 
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(Notice it shares some of the eye on the left with the final version.) Now, that one's fairly polished, and I could have used it in a pinch, but it's also in a sort of smoothed, simplified cartoonish style that I'm continually trying to get away from, whereas something about the eyes in what became the version I went with struck me as much more realistic, almost like a high-contrast b&w photo; in fact I'm almost certain they remind me of a specific photo or movie character or something but I can't seem to figure it out!
 
Guess I'll have to sleep on it. I've got a lot of other stuff I really want to talk about, including some very cool art by other people to show you, more rambling about my struggles with cartoonishness vs realism, and the other comics I spent pretty much the whole weekend on, BUT... It looks like that'll have to wait for tomorrow. :P
 
Oh! I was going to say though that that alternate version of page 78 there (which lives from now on in the episode 9 gallery) struck me as kind of classical Greekish in its strong abstraction of forms--that big straight nose, for instance--and maybe that isn't such a coincidence, because part of what I wasted so much time on today was another long Wikipedia "research" ramble, which among things like Suleiman the Great's slave-made-wife, his great sea-captain Barbarossa (not to be confused with the earlier Holy Roman Emperor), the Spanish Empire, the Ottoman empire, female corsairs, and browser-history-knows what else (checking: oh yeah: T. E. Lawrence, Knights of Malta, Crusader castles, John of Austria aka Don Juan of Austria (charming illegitimate son of emperor Charles V), the Hapsburgs, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the replica Parthenon and its giant gilded statue of Athena Parthenos in Nashville, electrum, Artemis, Diane, Hecate, and, originally, Seléne, the ancient Greek moon goddess, whose name means "moon" and which is where A* bounty hunter Selenis' name comes from. So yeah maybe the down side of looking at too many Greek statues is that you end up drawing everyone like a Greek statue. :P
 
I'm not going to show you the other two failed versions of page 78, because they are horrible. >_<
 
 
 
 
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