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Wow. 24 hour comic day was a pretty amazing experience. Usually I'll get sleepy and drift off, especially if I'm doing something passive. I'm not sure if it was somehow finding just the right balance of sugar and caffeine, or just being highly focused on a mental task, or what, but I never felt sleepy, just weary and goofy.

Despite my valiant attempts to be funny on Twitter, Miller by far had the most detailed liveblogging of our mini-event. (Including "sleep deprived Kirk thinks he's funny" quotes) I hope he posts some examples of what he produced, by far he was exercising the most talent in terms of, you know, art that really looks like stuff and people, and also had an interesting story. He didn't finish but got significantly further than on previous attempts. (Also, he was a great host, with his signature pseudo-menudo and a lot of a lot of snackie goodness.)

Kate's had an intriguing shamanistic creation myth thing going, and when she decided her story was pretty much told around page 13 (short of the recommended 24-comic-pages or 100-webcomic-panels) she switched to this amazing artificial language puzzle game event thing she plans to utilize the story for.

Me, I doodle. But I finished! 100 panels, each individually drawn and then colored on my two Tablet PCs. On the one hand, it was kind of a shortcut to keep the narration under the art, and my style is what other people might call thumbnails. But I tried to polish pieces up the roughest spots, and I didn't duplicate art. And I got done, done, finalish webpage and all, right under the wire.

I'm so glad to have done this story. Ever since the goofy single panel I came up with 6 frickin' years ago, and then some test panels I composed 2 years ago, there have been some things I wanted to say through these intrepid explorers. I don't explain why no one is out of their spacesuit; in some ways it's always been a rough (and kind of obvious) metaphor for the extreme difficulty of really connecting to other people.

There's an almost retartedly blatant bit of drawing from some of my own experiences here, but it's an amalgamation. And it's so rough in parts... I'm terrible at plots, unable to resist the trop of the Tower-of-Babel like pursuit of a culture of group, and the people swept along in that. And that's before you get to the art.

So, after having gone on for way too long like someone had actually asked me for an aritst's statement, here is part 1 of 4 of Young Astronauts in Love.

chapter 1	space... the... frontier
not the final frontier, probably. but it's a frontier and it's pretty big	i'm an astronaut. always had been.
the academy was... pretty great actually	i got my degree, and my first assignment
i'm a federation technician, first class	my first assignment was on GHIBAL 3
GHIBAL 3 is the famous home of the ghibal anomaly	and ghibal city, set up for the scientists to study the anomaly and the corporations hoping to cash in.
it was even more of a happening place back then!	it was a long journey there
you can only ionski a few hundred times before it gets old	finally we were there!
unfortunately my assignment wasn't the city	or the suburbs
or that area surrounding the suburbs
	it was an outpost. scanner outpost gamma-222.
a monitoring station, for technical reasons as far as possible from the city and the anomaly, the anomalyobverse.	little glitches were happening all the time.
that's why i was there! one of the most qualified technoplumbers in the history of humanity	i had a few small rooms, 'net connection, coffee maker, a GIANT PILE of spare parts...
it was lonely, but with minibreaks to the city and holocoms with old classmates, not too bad.