So. There you go. The big bad secret about spacetrawlers. The shadow behind the title.
And by coincidence this is the 200th page (if you count the double lead-in strip as two separate pages, don’t include the awesome guest strip by Alan Ryan of Faraday The Blob, but do include the auto-bio intro strip and the book review strip I did over at Unshelved… it’s all such fuzzy math). So, yeah. Wow. I try not to think about it because it makes my head melt, but, um, yay.
Let’s see. Oh, Holiday cards are now available — and they’re awesome. Order them now so you have time to send them (along with some books, totes, and tees for gifts to go with the cards).
Let’s hope darkspeed drives are perfected soon, because space trawlers are about to become rare and valuable and highly defended by those who don’t want to give them up.
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Wow. I mean … wow. Real nightmare fuel, Chris. More than I ever dreamed.
You have a sick and twisted mind, dude. In a good way, I mean …
Wow. Now I feel bad about asking you to explain it all. (Okay, I don’t really feel bad, but I am a bit shocked …) Wow.
Okay, now for a big question … is the implication here that faster-than-light travel simply didn’t exist before spacetrawlers were invented? Otherwise, why are spacetrawlers so important?
Okay, assuming that spacetrawlers are essential for FTL travel, then that would mean that Qwahntoo didn’t have an FTL drive when he arrived at the Eeb homeworld and conquered them (because spacetrawlers are made from tortured Eebs). So either Qwahntoo is from the Eeb star system, or he has a really-long lifespan, or something really weird is going on that we don’t know about yet. (And do we actually know how long ago the Eebs were conquered?)
Just more stuff enquiring minds want to know! *smiles, then shivers at the current strip’s revelations*
p.s. CONGRATS on the 200th strip!!!
And your novel is excellent, by the way. I got it in the other day, and I can hardly stand to stop reading and put it down to do necessary trivialities, like going to work and taking a shower and stuff. (For those of you who haven’t noticed it in the merchandise section of this site, the novel’s called “Loved into Submission: A Dark Existential Farce” It would make a great Christmas present for yourself or a bibliophile on your list!)
Actually Eris I think you have an interesting point. Part of me wonders if maybe there WAS faster than light travel but it was either horribly expensive or dangerous, either that or they did a lot of cold sleep style travel where people were put into a kind of suspended animation for a long period before arriving at the destinations. Only other idea I can come up with is that they did this more because they were utterly horrified at the Eebs and decided this was the best way to use them and keep them controlled.
Races are supposed to contact the gob on their own, so FLT was probably developed independently a few times. Eebs in the spacetrawlers are used to collect and compact stuff. I assume it’s a needed step to build some sort of apparatus capable of that, but probably not very efficient (probably can’t simply pick debris on the fly like spacetrawlers do).
Congrats on the milestone! Enjoyed every page.
Congrats on 200!
They’d have a much easier time destroying the factory if Red-9 just created a brain de-clamping device and used it on all of the sympathetic staff. It might be anti-climactic, but it would be a lot more efficient and effective.
“I try not to think about it because it makes my head melt.” So…you’re saying you have a huge headache, but it only gets worse if you’re not working on the strip?
1) Today’s first panel tops yesterday’s last panel for teh funnay, which is quite a feat.
2) You are a master of mood whiplash.
3) Martina is made of win and awesome. Love it.
Thanks for all the congrats! 🙂
@Eris_lobo, @Joker, and @Filipe — oh yeah, I should figure that part of the backstory out, shouldn’t I. 😉
@Alan, passed along to Tom.
And @Herander, I offered to buy him a drink if he allowed comments. He agreed.
@PastorDan, that’s about the sum of it.
Christopher, you wrote a novel? I can’t see it in your extras page. You have my contact info, because I bought a page from Little Dee. (Where IS that, bow?)
“Loved Into Submission,” in my digital store. https://topatoco.com/collections/christopher-baldwin
I love that spacetrawlers still have headaches. Also Martina in that last panel.
The look on the three-eyed alien’s face in panel #11 reminds me of how my Uncle Howard’s face looked when he talked about liberating the Buchenwald death camp complex. He was a tank commander and was with the infantry in his brand-new, up-gunned M26 Pershing tank to support them when they first entered the camp. What he saw there haunted him for the rest of his life.
The GOB would have loved working at the Nazi death camps. Eebs = Jews, Romanian Gypsies, homosexuals, etc.
@TJ: or Lexx.
Okay, this entire sequence is pure gold! From my first laugh out loud with Mr. Zorilla in the first panel, to the “Holy Fuck!” in panel 8 all the way until Red 9 deadpanning, “Prepare to redefine ‘can’t.'”
Awesome!
As I recall, it’s not that Spacetrawlers are essential to FTL travel, I think that’s a separate technology entirel. It’s that the spacetrawler matter compression and reshaping is so essential to the GOB economy that if they ceased to exist it’s going to have hugely distruptive effects to everything based on it. Chaos.
@Corpore_Metal, thanks!
Oh, and to supplement the discussion, the main strip dealing with FTL travel is THIS ONE.
Oh, and today essentially confirms one of the conspiracy theories about making spacetrawlers.
This! Is what makes Spacetrawler awesome. http://t.co/ywciHxT5 Living ships have been one of my fav scifi tropes since Farscape.
Cpngrats on the 200th page of Spacetrawler! I’m hoping for at least 200 more.
Clamped EEB brains make the best on board computers in the galaxy is why space trawlers are so in demand. What a horrible thing to do to a species. Better to let them kill each other free than that kind of horrible slavery. Congrats on #200!
“Oh, and to supplement the discussion, the main strip dealing with FTL travel is THIS ONE.”
Ah, I completely forgot that bit of key exposition. Doh! If the spacetrawlers go, it’s going to wreck the entire GOB civilization. Unless the Mihrrgoots can be convinced to share their darkspeed drive.
But nope. Even then it doesn’t matter. The secret of the spacetrawlers is simply too horrible to allow to continue. The GOB is goin’ down!
And the scary thing is, we are actually working to things like this! Oh sure, we’re doing it with individual neurons taken from dead rats and what-not, but it really isn’t that much of a stretch to see that this is the next God-help-us level.
Also, naked eeb.
Wow, this is very well done.
I was trying hard to read the forshadowing and guess this part of the plot, ….nope I didn’t go far enough.
But it makes sense and has plausability.
I am enjoying this, thanks.
Yep. Knew I was going to be sorry I asked.
Welp, on to Plan B – BURN EVERYTHING.
Congrats on the 200th page | 11/11/16 The Spacetrawlers http://t.co/whspoNTK #comic
hahahah, if one part of her conspiracy theory proved to be cannon, I really really hope that the shapeshifter JFK makes an appearance somewhere. >_>
Wow, ok, so…
The Spacetrawler ist not the propulsion system, but rather the “shield”, compressing every fleck of matter out of the way of the ship travelling alt greased light speed.
And there has been light-speed travel before the Spacetrawlers (which eveidently havent been torn to shreds by space-debris.
And the GOB is the sole and single provider of the standard-spacetrawler-shielded fast ship….
Wow!
Until now I had the impression of the GOB being something like the UN, a quite powerful but buerocratic and inefficient umbrella-oranization. Now, with this revealet, they seem more like – I dont know – the sole provider of everything interstellar?
Tough nut this.
The influence of such an organiazation would be massive.
Good Page, Congarts on 200, and – oh good, you wrote a novel.
Bloody hell, why didnt I know this!
BD
“The K-3 indicator registers the level of pain. Watch as I turn it on.”
“Holy fuck!”
“He who controls the spice…er…Eebs, controls the universe!”
Yes, thats the kind of analogy I was looking for.
Thanks!
Or is it, “Save the Eebs … save the world!”
Naaa!
@ TJ you should Google about a series of books about “The Ship That Sang” you’d like them.
I would think that the Eebs would probably withdraw to their own system and quarantine it leaving the universe in peace to honor the (probable) sacrifice that costs Martina her life.
Ooooooo, ooooohhhh! That’s for both the 200th strip and the story revelation. Congratulations Chris!
Awesome! As Eris Lobo mentioned earlier, I also regret wondering what Spacetrawler is. Horrifying. Around here we have this saying: You are either a happy pig or a suffering philosopher. I don’t regret being the latter even though it might be disturbing to learn something. It makes appreciating other things easier 🙂
Smacks of that living castle spell the villains were attempting at the start of the Band of Four novels, but with obviousl more sci-fi.