20140202, 14:50 – Page SIX HUNDRED if you count all of the cover art. Story page 577. Story page 600 should be up later this year, as part of the “back half” of this chapter. I’ll make louder noise about hitting that 600, as it’s the one that really counts!

ELG-2623 is more space-colored than GAC-5623. There’s no particular reason for this. When Water was easing into production I was still in the process of kicking my EVE Online addiction, so it’s entirely likely that GAC picked up some of that, whereas ELG is a year removed from the disease and is consequently a bit more grounded in something resembling reality.

I quit smoking in January of 2013, I haven’t had a drink since April of 2013, and I quit EVE Online somewhere in between. It’s a huge chunk of my life I’m never getting back and I’d prefer to move on rather than dwell on it. It’s no coincidence that ATC didn’t really get back into space until after I’d kicked my MMO habit – it took awhile, but it finally sunk in that if I’m going to spend four to sixteen hours a day “in space” I’m better off going there with my own creations.

This page is the first big instance of a new bearding technique. I’m handling it a bit like static in this scene – the stubble layer is a good-sized pattern fill masked above the line art and merged for page assembly. It’s the most efficient method of five o’clock shadowing that I’ve found to date, though I may tinker with it a bit between scenes, as it doesn’t quite downsample to the desired density.

Orbital mechanics spinning FTL physics into a punchline about male sexuality. If you’re new here, fair warning: this page is par for the course for both complexity and humor!

Next week: The rest of the funny!

Cast

  • Ornix doesn’t let trivial things like ethics and morality get in the way of his loyalties or sense of reality. A longtime friend of Thad and a fellow “victim” of the Templar Waking God...

  • The first extraterrestrial human to be born on Terra. Home-schooled by Templar, he left the organization in 1997 citing management issues and took the Daedalus with him. John is an incredibly talented Navigator, having...

  • A pink-haired mechanical genius with a full complement of prosthetic limbs (one “bolt-on,” three high-quality synthetics) and no memory of her first twenty years, Xand is the Daedalus flight engineer. A non-terrestrial human with...

Glossary Articles

  • Daedalus

    A Javelin class Am-capable high speed cargo transport, the Daedalus is the property of ex-Templar Captain John West. The workhorse of a shady courier service run out of the Australian outback in a nearby...

  • ELG-2623.4

    A moderately well-endowed gas giant with a reasonable number of moons, one or more of which may be worth colonizing.

  • ELG-2623.4.21

    A small mars-like moon that’s managed to hang on to an atmosphere, clouds, and polar ice. Any one of these items would have merited a note in the logs but indications of all three...

  • A jumpnet is an alloy mesh that surrounds a spacecraft like a Faraday cage. A Navigator in physical or very close proximity to a jumpnet can transition a spacecraft into or out of Am....

4 thoughts on “Air -9-

  1. AvatarSTrRedWolf, :

    Well played, sir! Well played!

  2. dmhdmh, :

    Thanks man! :)

  3. AvatarNomikos, :

    Xand’s glasses are for ..?

  4. dmhdmh, :

    … aesthetics? ;)