Page 29 – Get Back Before They
UPDATE: 6.15.2010!
Well I don’t know if anyone remembers the inch-thick stack of paperwork I had to wade through, but I waded, and as of tonight, I have successfully completed that part of my application for an architectural license. Four years of work, broken down into fifteen-minute intervals. That’s a lot. I feel like I just took an enormous… well, nevermind.
However, in celebration of this minor milestone, I’ve updated the vote incentive yet again, to include a sneak-preview from the concept sketches I’ve been working up for the impending 6-Commando Chapter 2: The Longest Shadow. So vote, and see a little bit of what’s to come, artistically and (possibly) storywise!
Thanks again for all the support, folks! See you Monday!
[Original Post: 6.14.2010] Well, another week goes by, and the other shoe finally drops. Or, rather, the bomb. Okay, that was awful. I am afraid that, as has happened in the past, I am drawing a total blank on witty rejoinders and sassy reparté at the moment, so I’ll distill my thoughts down to a few declarative statements.
First, this page. I like it a lot. It was one of the first I sketched out when I began planning the chapter, and though I dumped it on a number of occasions, it kept coming back up. It’s one of my more carefully-arranged pages, laden with visual metaphors and symbolism that have a great deal of importance later in the story. The panel with Major Bronniford, by the way, is an homage to the first piece of guest art Joost Haakman did way back in October – Sarah is a total badass when she’s glaring at you down the barrel of a gun. She’s my kind of gal.
Second, the chapter’s almost done and I’m considering a change of style. To that end (for fellow-artists reading this who my be interested) I tried something different on this page – I actually inked it on tracing paper laid over the original pencils, which I composed on bristol board. The trace was smooth enough to get a pretty satisfactory result out of the pens, and also cut down of the bleeding I’ve been struggling with, which has made different lineweights tough to differentiate. And for the next chapter, I’m leaning towards a major shift to a looser, raw-pencil style. But that’s still up in the air.
Third, let me add a note of preferred congratulations to comrade-in-arms Jason Brubaker, whose online graphic novel reMIND has just been awarded a Xeric Grant, to help defray his self-publishing costs. It doesn’t give him a free ride, but it goes a long way. If you haven’t, check his stuff out. Jason’s been a great supporter of 6-Commando pretty much from the start, and his own work is tremendous, so on both counts, it’s awesome to see him on the upswing!
And lastly, thanks for all the votes this week! We went from #250 on Monday to #197 at the time this was posted – we cracked the top 200! So thanks to everyone who’s been reading, voting, and spreading the word about 6-Commando!
And now I rest. Got a very long week ahead of me, so I gotta get to it!
Hm, did Mike got some air defense?
No, but at this point I think he wishes he did.
–M
Hm… Am I the only one who thinks it is wierd that Mike has some fancy laser point defenses able to evaporate unguided projectiles, but is unable to shoot down a bomb?
Probably it has something to do with an angle of fire for those lasers.
I don’t think it was a big problem – at this point his lasers, as well as one of his sensor masts, have been severely damaged. And a few other things: the lasers can track guided projectiles, but not ballistic or erratic-trajectory ones. The artillery shells were semiguided and relatively low-velocity, where the missiles were high-velocity deadfire, and hitting him faster than he could traverse the lasers. And in any case, in my mind they were powerful enough to shoot down shells but not airplanes, which is why they sent fighter-bombers after him. They got through his laser screen, but his inner hull was too thick to be penetrated, at least not before he reached his (presumed) target.
But that’s a rationalization. Really, I just tried to follow a sufficiently dramatic chain of events and didn’t worry about it. But of course, I knew someone would notice. Still I don’t think it throws things to wildly off base, a little license like that.
–M
Awesome page! It really has that milliseconds before impact feel about it. Also great perspective and colors on that last panel. It nearly made me duck behind my monitor!
Thanks for the homage and the link, I really appreciate it! A lot of visitors to my site come from Viciousprint.com.
Oh and Major Sarah is indeed a total badass!
There was a famous political advertisement during the Johnson/Goldwater campaign of 1964 that, though aired only once, had an enormous impact on American political consciousness on the subject of nuclear war. In the end it was probably violently unfair to Barry Goldwater, who, though a roaring right-winger and an ardent anti-communist, was not crazy, nor was he likely to have provoked a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. But the advert itself, as a piece of political art, was quite effective, and I was trying to evoke a similar sentiment here, of the characters caught at the last moment of an inevitable situation (one, in this case, largely of their own making). They say that those moments are most revelatory of a person’s inner character.
On a less abstract note, I’m glad that there’s been such good interchange between the various sites in our corner of the Indie community. Comic art, for some reason, is generally really closed and competitive; well, the aspiring comic artists are, anyway. Something about it makes people feel like there’s a zero-sum gain to the whole endeavor, that if someone is succeeding, that means someone else has to fail, and that makes them closed with their comments and encouragements and critiques, as though it’s some finite resource, and if you’re too free with your comments and opinions you’ll hurt your own chances of “making it.” Frankly, I don’t buy it, and the people who’ve been reading 6-Commando have all been uniformly upbeat and helpful, and I’m glad that there’s been such good exchange of ideas going on.
–M
Here it comes…
Boom Boom Boom…out go the lights.
Referring to EMP pulse of course, I suspect that if he does “survive” this he will have some damage from EMP and heat, despite any normally sufficient shielding he seems to have lost much from the last attack.
Though on an interesting note the M-1 Abrams model was designed to survive a nuclear strike, not dead on of course, but hull down “into the wind” as it were they were designed for it, the only tanks ever designed that way. Heat, blast and EMP the only problembeing it is awfully expensive to use the real thing to testone so simulations were used, the best they could devise at the time. EMP was on the same magnatude as a lighting strike, heat was at blast furnace temperatures on hull samples and blast was tested by use of 5K -10K conventional explosives at close range.
All test recieved at most an A at the least a B-, of course the occupants mostly recieved a F on survival rateing. Something about being a pea inside a coffe can shot from a cannon.
Tank survived though…
Very decent info about the Abrams – the T-90 and other experimental Russian models were the same. Particularly in the late 1980’s, the threat of tactical use of nuclear weapons, as well as the weaponizing of the EMP effect for knocking out electronics, led to a lot of research being done. There’s all sorts of ways to deaden an EMP – like magnetic-absorbent fuzz (really, that’s a term – “fuzz”), Faraday shields, and a lot of other stuff that sounds like science fiction. Raise the Faraday Shields, Mr. Spock!
But the real point is what you make – you can keep the electronics working pretty well, but if the radiation and shock kills the crew, you have a sixty-ton hunk of metal sitting on the battlefield. And interestingly, that’s ultimately the reason we have tanks – to keep the guys inside them alive. All the tank rounds and missiles and whatnot really ultimately are designed to get through that armor to kill the crew. In Mike’s case, the “crew” is a little cube of protein-wetware gel in a nonreactive carbon-fiber shock case, but the goal of shooting at him is the same.
–M
Heh heh heh… wait for it…!
–M
Beautiful work on the last panel (and all around, but the sky looks particularly great)!
Thanks! It’s really terriffic to see other artists coming through to have a look! I was checking out your work as well (I advise other readers to do the same) and it’s pretty wild! You have a very cool and kind of warped style that I really dig!
–M
Well,
Even with impared optics and lasers, (Assuming standard Milspec design and redundancy) as well as the fact that Mike is a Self Aware Tank, knocking the bomb out of the air with either a shell or a missile really shouldn’t prove that much of a challenge, assuming that Mike has been tracking the incoming plane on radar.
Put simply, even with impared optics and radar, he should be able to compile enough data to create a synthetic apature image for range, direction and speed of fall, sufficent to knock the tar out of that incoming nuke.
FYI, synthetic apature, (and I think I spelled it wrong) is typically the compiling of data from seperate data sources, typically radar, that are seperated by distance to achieve the equivelent resolution of data to that of a radar dish or sensor as large as the seperation between the data sources. In this case, Mike would be using his laser tracking system as a form of Lidar, his Radar and his optical sensors, , (Normal light, ID and UV) to gain a better picture off what’s coming at him.
Boy, aren’t the Russians in for a surprise?
Jason
All of the technical points are valid ones. Unfortunately, I can’t get into them any farther without revealing too much, so for now we just have to ponder – if Mike CAN do all these things, and he SHOULD do them, why ISN’T he doing them?
–M
Drop the bomb