This is the last purely gratuitous page for the remainder of the chapter. In the pages to come, we'll see some new dimensions to what the bad guys are planning, and how Captain Savage's ship plays a role. There's also a bit of a twist at the end of the chapter. In the meantime, here's the next installment of our 'Insertion Burn' animated series:
PREVIOUS EPISODES
This animation definitely played out better in my head than what turned out in the end result. For whatever reason, it seems like whenever I put a lot of time and fuss into an animation, it always turns out awful, but the better ones are usually something I put very little work into. Ah well.
And I should probably explain that, no, the story behind the animation is not that there's some ancient Lovecraftian civilization of mermaids (or merpeople, whatever) living in submerged cities beneath the ice of Enceladus – cool though that would be. No, these are just a subtype of mooners, in the meager phylogeny I've established for this comic book universe. They're human colonizers who've adapted themselves to living underwater and they've made a home for themselves down there. Most likely, a human underwater colony on Enceladus would be built from the top down, anchored into the ice above, rather than being built from the ground up. The underground oceans on Enceladus are 26 to 31 kilometers deep. Earth's oceans, by comparison, have an average depth of 3.7 kilometers. So the fact that this creepy temple our protagonist is infiltrating has been built from the ocean floor up, is a good sign that it was built by mooners.
It's always interesting what kinds of things you learn working on these things. In this case, while doing this animation, I learned something surprising about mermaids. We tend to think of mermaids as being part human, part fish. But I've discovered that's not quite right. Mermaids aren't part fish – well, okay, they're not part-anything, obviously, they're mermaids… and they're not real. But if we're going to think of them as being part-anything, then it makes more sense to think of them as part-dolphin! That revelation came to me when I tried to visualize just how a mermaid would swim:
Notice anything about that undulating swimming motion? Does it remind you of something? Fish and ray fins move their tails side to side as they swim, but only mammals (dolphins, whales) swim with that signature undulating up-and-down motion. It makes sense why that is when you look at a dolphin skeleton, keeping in mind that they evolved from land mammals, and likewise when you imagine how a mermaid skeleton would work. Unless they grew a second spine at the hip which moves in a fishlike side-to-side manner, then it only makes mechanical sense for them to swim the way all mammals swim… by humping the water. So mermaids are part-dolphin, if they're part-anything, which they're not, because they're mermaids, and they're also not real.
Now, some of the more astute among you may want to ask me, if this “mermaid” of mine is supposed to be dolphinlike, then why does it have very fishlike spiny fins rather than flippers? And my response to that is, hey look at these award nominations I got for this year's Drunk Duck Awards! Yay!
TRANSNEPTUNIAN has been nominated for:
- Best Adventure Comic - Best Adult-Oriented Comic - Best Sci-Fi Comic - Best Action Within A Comic - Most Deliciously Offensive - Best Background Art - Best Character Design - Best Comic Layouts - Best Plot Development - Best Use of Non-Traditional Medium - Best Protagonist (Jetta) - Outstanding Achievement Within the Community (El Cid)
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