Okay, so I might as well go ahead and apologize now for that second animation. As you all know, I do enjoy animating geeky space travel type stuff whenever I find an excuse, and I thought it would be fun to do some sort of a laser propelled lightsail thingee. So why, you ask, does the lightsail look like a giant umbrella? Well. when I originally set out to do this, I was thinking of doing something similar to the Planetary Society designs, with the big four-cornered sail unfurling. But then I looked at some stuff on Project Rho and started getting ideas for my own design. I wanted something more concave and disc-shaped and… the more I sketched it out, the more I realized… it was an umbrella. It was a giant freaking umbrella. So I just said “screw it” and used an umbrella. I guess I could have given it a more convincing texture, like made it look like it's covered by thousands of tiny little reflectors or whatnot, but I thought this looked so B-movie cheesetastic that I had to go with it. So yes, they're sailing to Jupiter on a giant umbrella.
And for anyone new to the comic, this is part of a very long (but very nearly completed) ongoing series of short(ish) animations, so the story may not make a lot of sense if you're just now jumping in. There's a synopsis of 'Insertion Burn' back on page 225. To sum up what's happening, our nameless male protagonist is the last surviving member of a band of ruthless adventurers who were on a quest to find this mysterious green triangle thing. After they discovered where it was, there was a bloody double-cross and everyone but him ended up dead. You can see the animations for that here if you're interested; it's some of my better animation work thus far, but also very gory. So as it turns out, our protagonist is now wanted by the authorities because he's suspected of killing his friends (not entirely untrue), and the Captain was planning to turn him in… until he struck a better deal with her. Okay, that's all. See you on the next one!
Hey wait a minute! Soooo… she was going to turn him in and get the reward… but instead now she's going to help him flee to Jupiter in exchange for half the value of that triangle thing? Why didn't she just turn him in anyway and keep the treasure all for herself?
Uhh… I dunno. Ethics? Professional courtesy to her client?
Professional courtesy?!! On the last animation she was just about to shoot his face off if the queen bug lady outbid him! This makes no sense! Consistency is not a thing that you do, is it?
Well, sometimes.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
Yay! No-dialogue page! Those are fun. Like I said before, I wrote the ending sequence so that there's room to read a number of different interpretations into what exactly happens. So I felt like the visuals pretty much tell the story for this page without any explanatory text. The best thing about doing something interpretive, is that when someone says they don't like it, I can tell them it's all their fault not mine!
On that fourth panel (heretofore to be referred to as the Butt Panel), you're probably wondering what those people are looking up at. Well, my original idea there was to have a bunch of birds catching fire mid-air and raining down on them like a meteor shower. But my initial attempts looked pathetic, so I gave up on that idea so instead they're just looking up at the glowing central hub of their colony as it threatens to burst apart.
The final two pages should go up next week. I'll see you then! Laterz.
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