Lightning Made of Owls
is a new project being developed by the Irregular Webcomic folks. It's
intended to be a collaborative webcomic, where anyone who follows the
simple guidelines for the comic format can add their own comic.
This page is gathering all my various attempts at comics for the site, as
the project developed.
-
Alpha: During the alpha stage, DMM took the input from
the various forum users, and put together a
cast page and
FAQ to establish a set
of guidelines to follow. Since the cast was in flux, the comics were
subject to becoming incorrect.
- test-000 - My first attempt at the
new format. Notice how, at this point, the Professor was orange,
and Oliver was blue.
- test-001 - an experiment on the
indentifying mark for Samantha, as well as a real plunge into a
Dada comic.
- test-002 and test-002b -
these attempts were to see how one style of identifying marks for
Samantha pitted against the other.
-
Beta: After the characters were defined, these were my
experiments into different character designs and new comics.
-
Live: Comics and other experiments once the site went live.
- Klein bottle comic, colored in
(published here)
- Plushy News Report - Using the
plush animals for a newscast comic.
- Racer Sammy - character portrait
- The Scarlet Advenger vs. Death-Masque-Man
- testing out a Supers idea.
- Meri as a kid, and Ambrose as the
Dad - with inspiration from Calvin and Hobbes.
- Shoes discussing the history
of communication - sort of.
- Materialism vs. Maya - This one is
taken from The
Kid, a Charlie Chapman film. It was released into
the public domain, and is available for download
here.
Here, Ambrose is played by Charlie Chapman, and Meri is played
by Edna Purviance.
- Team-up of Unlikely Superheroes #1.
The characters represent famous Transcendentalists. From left
to right:
- Henry David Thoreau, who is famous for his work Civil Disobedeance. This
image is under the Public Domain.
- Amos Bronson Alcott,
who founded the utopian community known as "Fruitlands".
This image is under the Public Domain.
- Elizabeth Peabody,
who owned the book store where the community gathered, and operated
the business side for their journal, The Dial. The
image is from here, which is in
the Public Domain.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He didn't really do anything.
- Why Lovecraft Never Made a Monster Movie
H. P. Lovecraft
will probably be best remembered for having created the Cthulhu Mythos.
Unfortunately, he also chose many descriptive words for his horrors
that have since become the target of ridicule. One of my favorites
was from "The Call of Cthulhu", where he writes, "The Thing which
cannot be described," then promptly goes about describing it.
He also used the term "non-Euclidean" to describe the alien
architectures from which such creatures live. This has already been
the target of many jokes
(such as with legos).
Even the Wikipedia
article on non-Euclidean geometry makes reference to Lovecraft's
use of the phrase.
For the creature itself, I opted to have it take the form of a
pseudsphere,
which was one of the first surfaces to be used in non-Euclidean
geometry.
- Mandatory Meetings At the risk of sounding
like a Comments from a
Postcard entry, I have to say that this discussion happened to
me today, nearly verbatim. Of course, it was all light-hearted,
but I discovered that I took the unfortunate role of Ambrose in this comic.
It was quickly followed by a philosophical discussion on the general
applicability of the last line.
As for the artwork in this one, I attempted to include character
detail by drawing each panel on its own 8 inch x 8 inch page.
Unfortunately, my inking tools were limited to my daughter's highly
abused markers.
- Parallel lines never meet
- Another Lucas Rehash See This for a reference.
- Squirrel Chores In the vein of The Far Side.
- Clouds The original SVG is
here.
- Time Machine The original
SVG is here.
- Concerns of Sidwalk Chalk.
- Danger People
