Today’s strip demands a lot from you, readers, but I think it reads smoothly. Oh, and for those new or who have forgotten, here’s where Dimitri met Shuar, and then here, and some follow-up scenes (and one more) (I’d point you to the Shuar tag, but for some reason i can’t get it to show the strips). The remote Martina uses to wake Yuri didn’t get nearly enough screen time but did appear in panels 9 & 10 here.
Thanks to Gini Koch (of the “Touched by an Alien” series) for the blog mention. And a blog which missed my radar: Orren Merton mentioned me before in a blog about Spacetrawler, but now has a blog post about the book #1.
So, at the Phoenix Sci-Fi Con “LepreCon,” I met Seanan McGuire. She came up to me and told me that my webcomic “Bruno” helped her get through high school. I thought that was pretty neat, and nice of her to say. And since she mentioned that she was an author, I decided to read one of her books. I read “Feed” (written under her pseudonym, Mira Grant) and holy cats. I generally find the horror genre of books and movies to be too much for me, especially zombie stuff as it is focused around gore and shooting, but this wasn’t. This was about character and the geeky details of day-to-day life in a zombie-virus world, it was emotionally moving. Maybe all the more impact because I didn’t expect that (and have just ruined it for you, now going in expecting it). This novel was marvelous. Anyhow, link to Amazon (if you want to give me a kickback) for “Feed
Oh, and hey, Brian Madison: email me. I got your T-Shirt.
“It’s like this…” Interruption! Gah!
“Time to wake up Golem..”
That seriously made me LOL.
I wish I had your gift for scripting!
Chris, you’ve been picking up bad habits from American Idol.
Is Shuar’s resemblance to eebs a coincidence, or is there some distant relationship?
Sorry, but Rocket Scientist Leland just had an allergic reaction to “by chance we passing by Shuar’s drifting ship”.
Didn’t you read your copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide? It tells you quite plainly that in the Introduction that: “Space is big. Really big. You won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mid-boggingly huge it is. I mean, you may thing its a long way down the road the the chemist, but that’s just peanuts in space. Listen, you could never understand how HUGE space is, the concept is impossible.”
@TB, lol!
@Justme, Thank you.
@Coyoty, um, what habits? (I’ve never watched it). And it’s a coincidence.
@Leland, H! Too true, too true. It’s still a fun coincidence. 🙂
Admittedly, it’s not an infinite improbability, but still!
PS H! ? Short for Ha! ?
@Leland, the greatly improbable makes for great storytelling. Me, I use it too. (“ha!” ha! yes)
I haven’t read Feed, but I enjoyed the October Daye books.
The Rogues of Wool sequence in Little Dee is one of my all-time favorites.
Panel 8. I’m getting a “Calvin and Hobbes” vibe from it and I have no idea why. 😉
Love, love, love how Emily refuses to pass up the chance to man the big guns
@Leland: Space trawlers are powered by an infinite improbability drive! Of course they’re going to chance upon Shuar’s drifting ship!
And speaking of drifting, who’s going to pilot the I.A. Starbanger?
And Brian Madison, if you ever want to see your T-shirt again, bring $1,699 to 161 Avenue D on June 31 at 9AM precisely
Bless you for linking back to inbound plot threads. I wish more webcomic authors did this; the relatively slow pace of serialization (vs. reading from a finished book) is not kind to a reader’s memory. (That said, I got all the references in this strip.)
@Don Simpson, I have just begun reading the first October Daye book. “Maltese Falcon meets Little Big,” good stuff. 🙂
@Frank, “And speaking of drifting, who’s going to pilot the I.A. Starbanger?” Gurf and Dimitri are in one wing ship, Yuri in the other, and Martina and Emily in the IAStarbanger. Hrm. Where did I lose you there?
@Tim, I do my best! You’re welcome. 🙂
In my assumptions that only the wingships could fire, and hence there had to be three?
@Frank, ah! That makes sense. And in looking through the archive there aren’t all that many pictures of the ship. But yes, there are only two wingships:
I love this comic so much. The pacing! So great! One thing: for the first time ever in this strip, I was momentarily paused by clunky dialog. Shaur’s and her copilot’s dialog was not believable at all. But maybe you were going for camp silliness? At this point, though, it’s more of an “exception that proves the rule” kind of a deal.
I have another question: why would they have to know about the missing DNA to want to give chase? I mean, they’ve already done a bunch of destructive eeb-liberating type activities. Wouldn’t that be enough to make them fugitives? AREN’T they already fugitives?
My prediction is that this is going to be one of those things where the bad guys have them pinned down and Red 9 is all, “we’ll never tell you where we have the DNA!” and he’s like, woah. what? you have eeb DNA? and then Shit Gets Real.
@Kathleen. Thank you! And yes, Shuar and Flinneous will likely sound over-the-top because their main role (at least currently) is comic relief. The second question, the previous strip to this one outlines it pretty well. The G.O.B. has mostly found advantage in the I.A. attacks, in that it solidified loyalty to the G.O.B. (much like our current politicians talking about terrorists attacks), and so the G.O.B. haven’t REALLY come after them. In THIS case, our good crew accidentally overhear that this is a sneak attack aimed to actually destroy them, not just chase or board them, which kinda’ backs up Red9’s assertions. There is of course possibility that I could be doing some kind of double-blind author trickery with future plans, but I’ll be honest, I’m not. The G.O.B. knows they have the DNA. (although your idea is awesome!)
Nice handling of multiple plot threads. Silly, funny, good.
@Frank: It could be that Emily just thinks Martina is more dangerous (to them) with the guns than as the pilot.
You do an amazing job of developing story threads to cliffhanger points then shifting to another moment or thread. 😛
Speaking of…I still refuse to believe Pierrot and Krep are dead.
In response to the blog post, I’d like to say that Seanan isn’t the only one. I was already out of high school when I discovered Bruno (somewhere around 97-99 I think it was) but it definitely had an effect on me. You’re one of a small handful of artists whose work pulled me through a serious bout of clinical depression during my late teens and early 20’s. I am eternally grateful for that. And now I’m following Spacetrawler with bated breath! (Not bait-scented, despite what people who know me may say)
Thank you, @Isaac! That is so awesome to hear. Yeah, she helped me through a lot too. So glad I was able to share. 🙂
@Chris: I actually did think about what the ship looked like. But the fact is, the only protuberances we’ve eve seen doing anything are those of the spacetrawler (panel 8). We’ve never seen any guns. We have, however, seen that ships can stay docked at the bottom, quietly out of sight, so why not a third wingship? (save for the obvious misnomer it would be)
Yes, you could argue that the ship, as a whole, would be less aerodynamic if it had something like that stuck to it at such an odd angle, but since they always leave it in orbit when they land (never putting it in “air”), aerodynamicity doesn’t seem to be a requirement
@Kathleen: Could you possibly be complaining that the way an alien speaks “just isn’t human”? (Don’t get mad, it’s a joke)
Hahahaha, I really enjoyed this one (especially the reveal from the GOB squadron).
@Frank, excellent point! Sorry, did not mean to make assumptions on your thoughts. 🙂
@Frank: yes! What we don’t know is that Blue Space Tigers are known for their ridiculous dramatics throughout the galaxy. They have a strong propensity to blindly trust and have a keen sense of vengeance. Also, so many love triangles.
So really, what we see as terrible campy dialog is actually startlingly realistic.
I had the mistaken impression that Pierrot and Krep were in one of the wingships, where did they get their transport?
Sorry, @Plane, forgot to answer this. It’s revealed in this earlier strip that “Krep went to buy a small shuttle since the G.O.B. would be looking for the I.A. Star Banger and its wingships.”