Friday Comics, Edition #3

WELL WOULD YOU LOOK AT THIS! Strap yourselves in and prepare to be shocked the way you are when you run into a friend you really weren’t expecting to see because Edition #3 is here! 

First up, thank you so much for the recommendations and shout-outs, it’s such a joy seeing this thing growing a little bit bigger each day. So, Thank You for that and WELCOME to everyone new!

Ok, enough waffle, let’s GO.

So I’ve discovered the frustrating thing about doing a Friday newsletter is having a big news story come and go over the weekend, followed by five full days for everyone to forget about it, at which point I then do a comic on it - almost a full week after everyone else. 

With that in mind, here’s a comic on that Chinese Balloon from what now feels like a few months ago.

Of course, this news was quickly overshadowed by the Arabian Tectonic Plate really giving techtonic plates a bad name by doing a tiny little bit of this…

…a barely perceptible hiccup on a geological scale, yet more than enough at a human scale to completely destroy large regions of Türkiye and Syria that lay across that East Anatolian Fault, subsequently killing thousands of people, with the death toll rising every day. It’s horrible.

I obviously don’t have any comics for that, but also it felt weird writing a weekly news wrap up thing and not mentioning it at all.

There’s a good article on places to donate here, (not that you need help with finding that!)

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So with that covered, onto some other news, like good old Space News.

In Space News, astronomers have been at it again and discoverd another ‘Earth-like’ exoplanet that could conceivably contain life.

The planet is orbiting a red dwarf star just 31 light years away, so if the potential life on that planet has discovered radio, they’ll be enjoying the following number one song currently arriving to them from Earth, and correctly assuming we’ve reached our cultural high point.

There’s always excitement at finding a new ‘Earth-like’ exoplanet, as it might also contain life similar to our own, or more importantly, offer up a new habitable world should we ever work out how to travel faster than 299,792,458 meters per second, which as it turns out is frustratingly sluggish.

That said, considering the aforementioned unpredictability of tectonic plates, not to mention the multiple floods and fires ravaging the planet at any given moment, I’m starting to wonder if an Earth-like planet is even what we really want…

According to astronomers, the newly discovered planet is also tidally locked which means that one side is always facing its star, while the other side sits in permanent darkness. Meanwhile, running between these zones is a thin strip circling the planet that is in a permanent sunrise/sunset situation. All of which to say, if we do ultimately move there, we’re going to have to organise things differently.

For the record; YES, I am extremely happy with the above drawing. Had a lot of fun drawing this one. Hey look! this is also my first image caption. How cool.

Ok, what else is happening…

OH MY GOD!!!! The trailer for the Tenth Fast and the Furious film is about to come out and I knowwww some people think the Fast and the Furious films are nothing but vacuous VFX riddled blockbuster cash-grab trash, but you would be very, very wrong (That’s what Marvel does) - No, no, no - The Fast and the Furious franchise is a high camp artform and the 22 year long saga should be held aloft as one of the greatest (albeit nonsensically meandering) stories ever told.

The best bit is, if you’ve forgotten where you’re at in the saga, and who the Good Guys and the Bad Guys are there is a General Rule: The Good Guys are whoever the Bad Guys were two films earlier, and any new actors will play either the new Bad Guys, or a Good Guy’s previously never mentioned long lost sibling, who might also be a Bad Guy too - either way, there will be cars, they’re always in cars, you just can’t keep ‘em out of those cars.

Anyway, The Fast and the Furious Youtube channel is counting down all previous 9 trailers, and re-watching them is a lot of stupid fun. Enjoy.

And to finish up…

My favourite story this week was case of the 500 Million dollars worth of cocaine found floating in the ocean off the coast of New Zealand. What I love most about this particular article is the observation that “The quantity of the drug was enough to supply New Zealand for 30 years” vaguely insinuating that five million New Zealanders could have spent the next 30 years on a non-stop cocaine binge were it not for the dastardly efforts of the local authorities. Imagine how many terrible start-up ideas they could have come up with at 4am in the kitchens of house parties by now. While this is obviously a massive blow for the New Zealand start-up industry, it is a considerable victory for the reduction of overly talkative wankers at New Zealand house parties.

The other outcome of course, could have been that the drugs were consumed by someone else…

And that’s it for this week!

As always, comments are open to all, so fire away there should you feel so inclined.

And of course, feel free to forward, share or pass on this weekly nonsense to anyone else likely in need of some distraction on their Friday.

Oooh - also, toying with the idea of doing a monthly (possibly twice a month?!) trivia quiz, which would have a couple of visual elements in order to make it count as a comic related thing. How do we feel about that?

(and yes, I kinda just wanted to try out the poll thingy)

Also - LAST THING! Next week I’m heading up to Sydney for my last dose of brutal Australian sun before heading back to the currently freezing Berlin - all of which is to say, next week’s edition is going to be done on the fly, which will be… interesting. So you can look forward to seeing how that goes! Will it work? Or will the wheels completely fall off? Who knows! Certainly not me.

Till then…