Underwater Volcanic Eruption

Click to make big.

When the National Science Foundation's Ridge 2000 program was launched in the late 1990s to study active undersea volcanic activities, researchers chose several areas of interest. One of those is located about 400 miles west of Mexico along a massive volcanic mountain range called the East Pacific Rise. When the U.S. researchers returned to check their seismometers in April 2006, they discovered that several of them were lost, buried under new lava from an underwater eruption. And when they used a deep-diving camera system to see what's had happened, they saw that almost ocean bottom life had disappeared. As says one of the scientists, this was like seeing the 'death and birth of a mid-ocean ridge from all perspectives — geological, biological, geophysical.' But read more…

The Sundays #1 page 7

And now it is inked.

New Sundays page

The Sundays #1, page seven has been penciled.

Venom

Courtesy of Rev. Danny.

My T-Shirt Came

Mr Gruff, the atheist goat who loves coffee instead of god.

New Sundays page in the Inks section

Page six is inked now. Check it out here. You can also see the line art for the Flight of the Living Dead poster in there.

Sigma Airlines.com Officially Launches

Check out the official page for FLIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD at www.sigmaairlines.com. This is where you'll be going every Monday for the next twelve months to get your zombie fix.

Flight of the Living Dead

This is the new webcomic I've been working on for the past few weeks.



Flight of the Living Dead was created as a 60-page graphic novel, which is being serialized from January 1, 2007 to December 31, 2007. The story takes place over seven hours, with each hour comprising eight pages (the final hour is 12 pages). One new page will go up every Monday in 2007, with the first eight pages all going up on January 1. Hence the schedule will be:

* Hour One: pages 1-8, January 1
* Hour Two: pages 9-16, January 8 - February 26
* Hour Three: pages 17-24, March 5 - April 23
* Hour Four: pages 25-32, April 30 - June 18
* Hour Five: pages 33-40, June 25 - August 13
* Hour Six: pages 41-48, August 20 - October 8
* Hour Seven: pages 49-60, October 15 - December 31

Comic Book Recommendation of the Week

SHENZHEN: A TRAVELOGUE FROM CHINA
by Guy Delisle


I was a big fan of Guy Delisle's previous book, PYONGYANG: A JOURNEY IN NORTH KOREA, and I was delighted to see this new one at Borders today.

PYONGYANG was an autobiographical comic about Delisle's stay in North Korea while working as the director of a Korean animation studio. Delisle, who is French-Canadian, writes the book in a diary-like way, going over his daily life while working in a country that intentionally isolates itself from the rest of the world. Delisle stays in a hotel with so few guests that they all stay on one or two floors, and those are the only ones with the electricity turned on. He orders french toast in the hotel restaurant and gets soggy bread warmed in the microwave. Radios are illegal and he can't even take a walk without having a Korean "guide" come with him. Everyone in Korea must wear a pin with a picture of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, and their portraits must be hung in every room in every building in the country. Even the bathrooms. He brings a copy of Orwell's 1984 with to read and can't help but notice the similarities.

The new book, SHENZHEN, takes place in a less totalitarian country and Delisle seems to enjoy his stay in China a little bit more than he did North Korea. The differences between Western and Eastern cultures are still there, though, and he is staying in a city with very few non-Chinese people and almost no one that speaks English.

Both books are really great for anyone who likes diary-style comics like AMERICAN SPLENDOR or BLANKETS. I've read PYONGYANG three times now and I cannot recommend it enough.

Yellow Submarine

My new favorite website

I'm pretty sure this is a joke, but this site is worth a lot of laughs even if it isn't.

http://objectiveministries.org/kidz

I bought this t-shirt.

My webcomic is online

Comic Genesis, who have agreed to host my new webcomic debuted January 1, have put up the first page two months early. And I cannot yet log in to delete it. If you know how to work Google, well... chances are good you can find out a week early what the comic is about and see the first page.

Update: I figured out how to log in and take it down. They sure do make it difficult. Once you have your page set up on ComicGenesis, before you can edit it you then need to register for a username on the forum, then attach your account to your username. Why it's set up this way I have no idea, but no longer is the comic online.

Couldn't have said it any better myself

Comic Book Recommendation of the Week

THE GOD DELUSION
By Richard Dawkins

"If atheism had a pope, it would be Richard Dawkins." - Penn Jillette

Richard Dawkins is an English biologist who has written several books on science and evolution. I've only previously read his book The Blind Watchmaker, which describes and explains natural selection in a way that a layperson can fully understand. His new book, The God Delusion, is sort of a follow-up and expansion of his BBC documentary on religion entitled The Root of All Evil?*. Keep in mind I can only comment on the first quarter of the book, having read that much so far.

The book goes into the common arguments for belief in god that tend to pop up from theists, and he shoots them down one by one. Points such as "something so complex as life on Earth must have had a designer," "everything can't have started from nothing, so god must have started it," even the transparent Pascal's Wager ("If you believe in god and are right, you go to Heaven. But if you're wrong you lose nothing") are shown to be completely empty arguments. He then shows the arguments for why there almost certainly is no god, and talks about the harm that religion does to the world, and why it's ridiculous that religion should be treated with a kind of respect and honor that makes it taboo to disagree with.

This book was not really meant for me, as an atheist, since its main goal is to show believers why the only really sane choice is nonbelief. But it is fascinating and I would recommend it to everyone, believer or nonbeliever. I started this review with a Penn Jillette quote (who interviewed Dawkins on his radio show recently, which is how I found out about the book), and I'll end it with one from the back cover:

"The God Delusion is smart, compassionate, and true like ice, like fire. If this book doesn't change the world, we're all screwed."

* The Root of All Evil? has not been shown on American television, and probably won't be anytime soon. A DVD release is apparently forthcoming, but if you'd like to watch it now, you can download part one here and part two here.

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On a completely unrelated note, make sure not to install iTunes 7.0.1. I had heard from friends that iTunes 7 has been known to delete mp3s from users' computers. Last night my housemate Kyle told me the new version, 7.0.1, had fixed the glitch. I installed it and the first thing it did was to delete every single mp3 from my hard drive and iPod.

An image from my new webcomic

Inking the first page right now. Here's the first time we see the main character, Kat. I don't want to show any more of the panel because it'll give away some of the story, but you can see the style I'll be working in for this one. A little bit messier than usual, but I'm getting it done faster. I'm also experimenting with stuff I normally would shy away from, like scraping a razor across black ink, black and white ink splatter, and drybrush (which you can see in Kat's shirt and hair).

[EDIT] P.S. I've decided on a day when I'm going to announce the title and full details of the comic: November 13.

Picard's Theme Song

Character Design

A sketch of the main character from my new webcomic. Visually she is based on an ex-girlfriend of mine.



You can also see it in the "sketches" section.

Pumpkinball

Frat House Pumpkin Carvings

Coolest Photo Ever

Shamelessly stolen from Warren Ellis's blog, a shot of a space shuttle launch as seen from the International Space Station.

Click to enlarge, or go to WarrenEllis.com to see more.