A storytime thread for the 2008-2011 webcomic IntraGalactic by Stephanie Cherrywell.

This will be a single thread storytime, albeit a lengthy one unlikely to be done in a single day. So feel free to quip and comment and question to keep the thread bumped and keep me sane.

>Most of the pages in this comic have descriptions under them, which I'll be including unless they don't fit. Also, HQ copies of MOST of the pages leaked a couple years ago, so I'll be using those when I can.


001 – Pan In On

Please excuse the temporarily unfinished look of this page, there’s still a lot of mucking about with templates going on. Comics will be going up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at least for now. Shouldn’t have any delays for a while as there are currently 39 pages finished and waiting to go. Hope you enjoy!
Posted on October 6, 2008 at 12:00 am in Comic as part of Chapter 01 - Outset « volume and tagged with Benjamin, Intragalactic. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed. Comments are closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

002 – The Captain
Introducing Captain Benjamin Glee – and someone else.

That semitransparent blue membrane in the background is a force barrier, protecting the nearby buildings from the noise of launches, and the spewed-out-flaming-debris of almost-launches.

003 – Duckspeaking

I actually drew these first pages quite a while ago, and the character designs have changed slightly, so that going back and looking at these gives me a weird feeling. But then, I’m the one who’s spent several hours looking at every page, so it’s probably going to be less noticeable to other people.

>If you know the authors other stuff, this was being drawn in early 2008, just as Muertitos was ending and when Creamy Beamy was about 40% through it's final arc

004 – Travel Advice

You can get away with this kind of thing when you’re the captain, especially when you’re known as a loose cannon who does things her own way and doesn’t take any bullguff from anyone. However, Benjamin has encountered some problems applying this philosophy to her bucolic between-missions suburban existance. An attempt to start a daily jogging routine was quashed when some busybody police officers kept tackling her and wrestling the blasters out of her hands, and her disastrous participation in a “10K Fun Strafe” still haunts the nurses in the energy discharge ward. Please don’t run at top speed, shooting indiscriminately at everything around you, unless you know what you’re doing.

In today’s news, a big thank you goes to giantspacelizard.com for a very flattering write-up and link!

005 – Pink-Skinned Space Bish

We’ve all been annoyed by the ontological paradox at times, but without it, we never would have made such important scientific discoveries as transparent aluminum, or that windmill-destroying song that turned the tide in the war with Holland. To learn more about the ontological paradox, consult your local library, then go back in time and turn out to be the author of the book your younger self just read.

>>149504770 (OP)
You have my attention.

006 – Fabulous Prizes

Benjamin makes love like a game show host. Lots of good fun for everybody, the occasional obstacle course, and contestants who know what they’re doing and hit the buzzer at the right time during the first few rounds might get their choice of Door No. 1 or Door No. 2 later on.

There are, however, certain game-show-related items that are absolutely forbidden in her bedroom, including green slime, falling ducks, and Ben Stein.

007 – Extensive Vetting

I wasn’t really happy with the way the hands came out here… in case it’s unclear, he’s mean to be fastening his pants, rather than punching himself in the crotch or posing like Stronglad Gorillaman.

008 – Cludd! Vwoosh!

Who is this mysterious shadowy silhoette? You’ll just have to wonder about their true appearance and nature, because they certainly aren’t clearly depicted in the title image.

>>149504924
Dude, never post an image during a Storytime space is tight. Delete that

009 – The Bridge

Due to increased user-friendliness and the development of simpler interfaces, the ships of the future no longer need vast banks of blinking control panels. However, as they were a spacefaring tradition by that point, most large ships simply have blank panels and assign a few ensigns to move their hands about as if they were doing something.

010 – The Bridge Crew

I’m kinda straining to come up with relevant commentary for each of these, so from now on, unless I’ve got something more to say about the day’s goings-on, I’ll just use this space for irrelevant side musings that you can feel free to skip.

So I saw Igor today at the cheap theater, and it was a hoot. It did drag a little here and there, but the gorgeously weird character and set design meant it was always a joy to look at. It was also nice to see a children’s CGI movie that wasn’t build on a foundation of poo-bricks cemented together with farts, belches and vomit. Thumbs up!

Also go see City of Ember.

011 – Parallel Timestrips

Check it out! A rudimentary cast page has been added to the upper navbar, and the sidebar has been garnished with some new links – two older comics, and some pages belonging to personal friends of the site!

And some ads. Not that they’ll make more than a nanopittance at current traffic levels, but it’s best to get them up early, so the selling out won’t be a big surprise to anyone later.

>if you guys don't like the descriptions I can stop adding them, but personally I think it humanizes the author a bit

012 – Pontification? Check!

For those of you who read Muertitos, there’s a new costume cosplay bit there today: Happy Halloween 2008!

>BTW, the lore on how Piper's parasite works was revealed off site. Here it is

The parasite survives by gripping onto the skull of its victim via four strong mandibles, gnawing into the brain cavity and devouring the contents. The worm then "plugs into" the sensory organs, takes control of the muscle system and receives sustenance through the victims' usual methods. It can live this way indefinitely, preserving the corpse it's riding in an (almost) perfect state. However, the worm can't progress in its growth cycle this way, and usually uses the host to reach a fresh meal of brains.

However, when a brainworm mistakenly latches on to a fully sentient lifeform, something odd occurs. While the victim still dies, the memories and emotions absorbed by the brainworm form a dominant personality. The worm both recalls being a brainworm, and being the victim. In this state, the parasite effectively becomes a new incarnation of the dead host and will simply try and live the life it technically ended. Often with a massive guilt-complex.

013 – User-Friendly Interface
I considered doing a little PSA here for the benefit of the large majority of my readers who live in the US, about the importance of voting. But frankly if you’ve made it to November 3rd and something else hasn’t convinced you to vote already, I doubt you’re going to change your mind because a webcomic told you to. So instead, for those of you out there who are voting, a reminder to try and do a little research and find out what all the propositions and measures and things actually mean, because you don’t want to be trying to figure it out in the voting booth. Speaking from experience here.

And please don’t rely on what commercials SAY they mean, because they’re generally a complete load, except of course for all the ones I agree with. Those are pretty on the ball.

Addendum: the mention of voting seems to have attracted some pretty unpleasant ads, so I’ll just take those down for the next couple days so I don’t have to micromanage. Maybe I should talk more about science fiction, comedy, and webcomic-related topics in these text bits, so the box will learn to be relevant.

>Anyone remember Jibjab?

014 – Launchtime
Whee.

I didn’t realize when I was drawing it just what day this would end up coming out. But it sure feels appropriate now!

015 – School Days

Axl’s species is fully amphibious, so they can live either under water or out of water indefinitely. They evolved to live in deep, narrow gullies that were flooded part of the year, and thus have both gills and lungs. The tadpole stage occurs just as the floodwaters are receding, and needs to spend a few months in brackish leftover pools before growing legs. The species as a whole tends to have a rather hippie-ish culture from an Earth perspective, with an “easy come, easy go” view of possessions – torrential flooding is likely to wash away anything you own, and new things from upriver replace them. Of course, few members of the species actually live in the ancestral gullies now, but there are plenty of psychological remnants of their predecessors still in their mental landscapes.

016 – Into the Cactus Patch

We’re on a collision course for WACKY HIJINX!

A gallery page has been created – nothing fancy just yet, only links to some artwork, but go have a look if you’d like! I’d eventually like to make a fanart gallery too, so feel free to send it in.

017 – Keyboard …or KILLboard?

Check out the brand-new fanart gallery for this comic’s first reader-submitted art, from the talented C.J. Burgundy. Thanks, C.J.!

018 – Well, That’s Over With

Finally we can put all this bird nonsense behind us and move on to some people getting killed in a horrible space conflict nonsense.

019 – Melissa’s Sting

So I picked up Bender’s Game last week. (You’d never have guessed I liked Futurama, would you?) Verdict: fun, beautiful, excellent. Ranking the three movies so far, I’d probably give the other two the edge, but much more because of their strengths than any weakness in this one.

020 – Space Turkey in the Nano-Straw

Not that a good number of you haven’t figured it out already, but yay, finally we know what they’re actually doing out here in space, beyond general space stuff like flying around and violating directives.

021 – Magic 2D Space Map

It wouldn’t seem like you could chart space on a two-dimensional screen like this. Until you remember that at large distances space functions as a flat surface due to the exponentially increasing effects of gravity as we near the Planck time. Subspace anomaly nanoprobes wormhole.

022 – You BITCH!

Just got another wonderful piece of guest art, but you’ll have to wait a few weeks until there’s a break in the action to see it, along with some other supplementary material.

023 – Engine Trouble

Since doing this one, I’ve become pretty sure that this joke with the wacky disappearing engine has been done before – darn if I can remember where though. Oh well.

Since I don’t like turkey or… any of the traditional foods really, tomorrow is officially Parade Day! When three hours of television boils down to about twenty minutes of quality viewing. This year I’m thankful for TiVo. Sure, the occasional visit with Masi Oka or an Avenue Q puppet is nice, but the real stars of the parade are the balloons. And seeing the hosts try to react to cartoon characters they’ve never heard of. A couple years ago it was “those two glam rockers, Hi Puffy and Ami Yumi!” This year it’ll be… I don’t know, what’s cool right now? Angular CGI Yoda? Sonic the Werewolf?

024 – The Bad Fairy

Try to guess what the “T.” stands for.

025 – Bagpipe Onomatopoeia

Check out the fan art page for another great guest drawing of Piper, this
one by Edgeling.

026 – StrawBURIED!

Where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire fleet single ship was eaten by a small dog big dog who liked ice cream (possibly Marmaduke).

027 – Impulse Power

Impulse power is slow. So slow it will take them two weeks to get anywhere! Time for some bonus art.

>End of Chapter 01: Offset.
>Albeit Chapter 01 and 03 are basically two halves of a single story with 02 being a bonus detour, so still going

The Capty Awards!

Each year, the starship captains of the Intragalactic Iced Treats Distribution Concern gather at the San Tarantino Civic Glitzatorium for the Capty Awards, honoring the greatest feats of captaining in the past year. Categories include -

Best Captain (overall)
Best Feat of Daring
Best Violation of the Primary Ordinance
Best Seduction of Non-Earthling Babe/Hunk (changed from “Alien Babe/Hunk” last year for clarity purposes so captains of non-earthling descent couldn’t claim eligibility for seductions of humans since “from our perspective, they’re the aliens”.)
Best Ensign Death
Most Ensign Deaths
Funniest Ensign Death
Most Exceptional Crew Member (non-televised, awarded across town in cafeteria of Alan Keyes Middle School.)

And the technical awards:

Most Anomalies On Viewscreen (cumulative)
Most Anomalies On Viewscreen (at one time)
Best Support Garment (merging last year’s Best Girdle and Best Truss categories).
Best Animation in a Holo-Simulation
Nuclearest Wessels
Most Ice Cream Given Out Which Is Actually Supposed To Be The Whole Point Of This Thing We’re Doing Anyway

Among currently active captains, Benjamin has the second-largest haul of Capties.

Science! – The Proof: Part 1

It’s time for a look at the AMAZING FUTURE SCIENCE that made the world of Intragalactic what it is today. Stay tuned for further developments in Part 2!

>Is it really a Steph story if the Gokiburi family isn't around doing casual crimes against humanity?

Science! – The Proof: Part 2

It’s old news now, but back when this was drawn there was a big to-do about the Large Hadron Collider, which a lot of people were worried would create a black hole that would destroy the Earth. If you’re interested in finding out how that turned out, check hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com for the up-to-the-minute scoop. Meanwhile, a consortium of Swedish scientists has already started work on the next generation in research equipment, the Absolutely Huge Kerflooey Vortex.

>And yes, this segment fully confirms that this is in the same canon as all the other Steph stories. So the dead presumably go to New Memphis Venus, and presumably the Usaginari and the Mylarians are out in space somewhere

Xenoparasitodex

A special guest comic courtesy of Agouti-Rex of Witchprickers.
Piper is really popular. Pipular.


>She is. She's easily the second most popular character in any Steph comic on here besides Cheesecake and I've actually seen new fanart get made for her a couple times. Anons love the wormy girl

CVS 002 Bridge Crew

A fresh-faced eighteen-year-old right out of Intragalactic Co. Academy, young Benjamin got her start taking care of the flow of ensigns under the calm leadership of Captain Trevelle. It seems like only yesterday she was entering that hallowed institution with a head and bra stuffed full of dreams and tissues respectively – and now, four years later, here she stands, a titan of ensign-herding, with her sights set firmly on even greater things.

Previously, On Intragalactic…

She’s not always sitting on her ass in that recliner. This was the thrilling climax of Benjamin’s last adventure. Truly an amazing tour de force full of action and intrigue!
Our story resumes on Monday, when we’ll begin about two months of diddling around in a crappy mall. In space!

Chapter 03: Darth Mall

028 – Darth Mall

A wonderful new piece of guest art to share today: Intragalactic by Guardian-Draca. I was looking through her gallery and the need to commission her to draw my characters struck like a bolt of demanding lightning. The result was a very lively picture of Benjamin and Axl in a dynamic pose and oozing space adventurer sex appeal!

029 – MANN*E

Fresh of the heels of the last guest art, we’ve got another one: Benjamin, by a live-action friend of mine. Very nice! This one might be pretty big if you don’t have an auto-resize.

030 – Et Tu, Aqualiculus?

Whee, I finally have a Wii!
Wii will enjoy the Wii.
Also, Wii had to take the cat to the vet today because he snorfed down pork twine and Wii had to have the pukes induced so he wouldn’t clog.

031 – Vermicious Kids

I like to listen to podcasts while I draw, and some of my favorites are the ones that replay ancient radio shows from the 1930s-1950s. When they first aired, going out over the airwaves to crackle out of old-timey wooden radios, I wonder if the makers had any idea that people would be able to listen to their shows at will over half a century later?

Look for Old Time Radio on iTunes and you’ll find a treasure trove. Did you know that Blondie used to have a terrible radio show to go with its terrible comic? There were good shows too – check out Our Miss Brooks or You Bet Your Life. I also enjoy Fibber McGee and Molly, which emulated the variety shows in that it was charmingly frank about its product placement, boasting a character whose only role was to show up and gas on about the linoleum company that sponsored the show. The practice of inserting the commercials into the plot so honestly seems almost refreshing in our modern era of Sylar carving subliminal Nissan and Sprint ads into people’s faces.

Wednesday in this space, I’ll tell you about a modern production that keeps the spirit of old-timey radio alive, with all the thrills and action of the sepia age and none of the racism and shameless huckstering for soap and Jell-O.

032 – Translator Macrobe

In its heyday, radio played host to mystery, comedy, and variety shows. Now the major stations are mostly music and blather pumped out of the Clear Channel Central Omni-Core, and there’s nary an audio drama to be found. Fortunately podcasting came along and reawakened the napping giant, and today original productions are easier to find than ever before.

One of my favorites is Decoder Ring Theatre, an authentic recreation of old-time pulp superheroes in the form of The Red Panda and the Flying Squirrel, a pair of Toronto-based gadget-masters with a twist of hypnosis. They’re a lot of fun and really capture the feeling of the original old-time shows, right down to the sometimes excessive violence that took place before Batman and his ilk developed their code against beating the ever-loving crap out of people. It’s a little jarring if you’re used to the more talk-things-through heroes of the modern age – but I once heard an old Flash Gordon where Flash killed a guy for his house, so you can’t say it’s not authentic.

They also produce a noir detective series which is less my thing, but very true to the genre, so if you’re a fan I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. If you’re looking for something to listen to, I suggest you check the place out.

>According to Steph, Scratchi sounds like that russian girl from Rocky and Bulwinkle except with a chipmunk filter. So sort of like this https://vocaroo.com/1iikO9jJOweZ

033 – Griftink

For her voice, take this base and add this template. Oh, and her name will be revealed (not like it’s a big mystery or anything though) next week. Happy 2009, everybody. Only six years left to invent hoverboards! DAMMIT, SCIENCE, GET CRACKING

>see what I mean?

034 – Cosmic Rays

The other days at Toys (Untypeable Symbol) Us, I noticed there was a whole wall of Bakugan stuff, amazingly not on clearance the way most of the rest of the store was. Usually I try to stay hip with what the young folks are doing these days, but I’m kind of flabbergasted at its popularity. It’s just so … generic. Little plastic bits, cards, and a cartoon with some spiky kid. How long did it take them to come up with that?

Now Pokemon, that was a collectible-monster-related wad-of-consumables-and-media for the ages! One that’s still going a decade after being largely dismissed by the so-called “experts” in the field of hotology-or-not as a transient fad, I might point out. Will Bakugan last as long as its venerable precursor, lodging itself tenaciously in the public consciousness like a plastic dinosaur-marble-thing in a child’s throat? Or will it quickly expire, like said child? Only time will tell.

But at least Bratz will march ahead of it, wielding a glittering machete, and clearing its path to hell.

>Steph's been doing webcomics long enough she penned Flying Suit Reiko when Pikablu was still a common rumor meanwhile this is being written when Platinum was out and HGSS was coming

035 – That’s Not A Moon

Games I got for my new Wii, part 1: One Piece Unlimited Adventure. Like all games based on a license from some other media, there are glaring flaws which would probably turn off anyone who wasn’t a fan of One Piece. Fortunately, I am a super hardcore One Piece fanatic who squees just being able to run around as the Straw-Hats, so I don’t care.

Licensed games always have problems, but they’re much less of a rip than they used to be. In the early days of gaming, a license just meant that the blob of squares of the screen were described in the manual as E.T. or Spiderman. Later on, when videogames discovered the concept of “looking like stuff”, you actually got to control a vague approximation of (to pull an example from an actually good licensed game) Scrooge McDuck, using his cane as a pogostick to kill gorillas just like he did on the show, but it was still just a few characters you know inserted into a platformer.

The modern age has now dawned and licensed games, while still largely middle-of-the-road in quality, offer must more for the dedicated fan. The recent Simpsons games give the player the chance to explore a world made almost entirely out of landmarks from the show’s history and provide massive amounts of new material from the writers. Ever animated movie has its related game, to the point where it’s expected that if you’re doing voicework for one, there will be that one day on the set where everyone reads lines like “Very good, Po/Bolt/Wall*E/Marjane! Now, lock on with Z and push the A button to punch!”

Next time: “Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed”. Can Earth survive an attack by a massive interstellar army of lame penis puns?

036 – Dry Wit

On the same day I bought One Piece: Unlimited Adventure I also got Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleased – there was a buy-one, get-one-half-off sale which meant they were only fifteen dollars each. The most recent entry in the DAH series (or rather, co-current with another one for another system) seems to have been pretty roundly panned as a big step back for the series, but I’m enjoying it. It’s not Mario-quality or anything, but it was a good deal for three fins. The controls, using the Wii-mote and nunchuk, take some getting used to but are easy to use once you get them down, and the ability to aim directly is wonderful.

I’ve only passed the first zone so far and already the ‘Big Willy’ jokes are getting painfully stale. “As stale as the crusty buns wrapped around my Big Willy”, as not-even-thinly-disguised Invader Zim expy Pox might say. Other than that, it’s pretty funny and has that GTA thing where the characters will sometimes chatter during missions. If you’re looking for sandboxy games for the Wii where you get to explore around and be a jerk to people… well, get Bully first, because it’s better than this on every level, but if you already have it and want another one, you can get this from the cheapo bin, because it flopped big time. LIKE POX’S BIG WILLY.

037 – Beast Peels

Beast Peels – the hippest, freshest, newest new way to buy fur, with all the classy elegance you’d expect from the mall. If you’re unable to grow soft, lustrous, thick hair on your body in very specific patterns that looks like clothes, then you really only have one option for all your fur-wearing needs! And every fur from Beast Peels is coated with high-tech Spiterol, the miracle seal that not only repels red paint, it converts it into turtle-choking six-pack holders!

Style, sophistication, and suavity for the 70th century, that’s Beast Peels! Level 281, just west of the food court, next to the Infrared Julius stand.

>I guess that means this is set in the 7000s? Probably 7008-7011? I wonder if that's before or after Dicetopia

038 – K-I-O-S-K Spells Quality

On Monday night Krepta and I were having a little constitutional and we came across a couple of wandering monsters, er, drunks, looking for a club that was in the area. They were off by about five blocks, but I knew where it was because I’d been to a poetry reading there. You see how I slip that in so you know what a hip and cultured person I am. So we had to guide them there and it was the BEST ESCORT QUEST EVER.

One of them kept yelling “let’s go get drunk!” even though she was already more booze than human, and kept wandering off in various directions heedless of whether there was traffic there. She reminded me a lot of this little fellow. The other one kept yelling at us like we were minions every time her friend wandered off, and whacked me with her purse because I didn’t give her a good enough hug on request.

Eventually we managed to steer them into a bar that was open and tip off the bartender that they needed a ride home, so hopefully they got into a taxi or something. They didn’t seem to have a car, so that wasn’t a problem. Though I do wonder in retrospect how they came to be weaving around stinking drunk in a neighborhood with no bars and no visible means of transport.

I wonder what their Tuesday morning was like, or if they remember us at all? Oh well, ships that stagger past you in the night.

039 – Salesoids

Actual product may differ.

>you can actually read the small print in this HQ release

040 – Sales Pressure: 1000 Atmospheres!

In kind-of-important news, I’m in the middle of a rather large (128 pages) project which you will see sometime or other (quite possibly in actual print, but with the precarious state of everything in general and the comics industry specifically nowadays, nothing is certain). Unfortunately that means Intragalactic production has slowed dramatically, and I’m going to run out of prepared strips before I finish. So five weeks from now, Intragalactic will be stopping for a while – there are actually more strips than that, but rather that get down to the wire I’ll break at a natural point in the story and work on building a buffer on the other side. This is also the reason there have been hardly any Creamy Beamy strips, for those of you who read that – I’d like to start putting more of those out too, post-project.

>This doesn't end up working out great for ole Stephanie, but that particular project became Widgey Q Butterfluff. I'll do that next week

041 – A Metal Slime Draws Near

Another new fanart today, and the first one so far to feature Scatchi! This one comes courtesy of Daniel Willingham of Head Doctor Productions!

042 – Charm Offensive

Some sort of clever Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy joke goes here.

043 – S.Y.P.D.

She’s a two-fisted 19-year-old police force veteran who goes by the book.

He’s a hotshot 17-year-old rookie who goes by a slightly updated edition of the book with some revisions and an expanded afterword.

The two of them teamed up to kick ass and lose their virginity… and they’re all out of virginity.

They’re Spears and Samu, officers of the S.Y.P.D.!

Much as the barbers of old used to also be surgeons, the passing of time has combined the occupations of policework and modeling. Though it’s difficult to remain in S.Y.P.D. much past age 21, there are more general police agencies like G.L.P.D. (Good-Looking Police Force) and others.

044 – You’re Fired

Last night’s movie was Dragon Wars, aka D-War aka Sauron Does L.A., a fun little Korean movie that combined a confusing plot and cardboard characters with some geniunely, non-ironically quality action scenes. After suffering through Michael Bay spending millions of dollars to accomplish elusive qualities such as “wait, what’s going on?” and “the jerky camera is making me sick”, it was nice to see well-shot and clear footage of an army of Dodongos marching through Los Angeles, crushing cars and firing their back-cannons.

045 – Meet The Pest

It doesn’t really come across, but snaffets are fairly well known at this time, so this is more or less the equivalent of a customs inspector lecturing people on what an orange is.

046 – Miranda

*click*

–then put your little hand in mine
There ain’t no hill or mountain we can’t climb.

Babe
(dwa da, dwa da, dwa da)
I got you babe
(dwa da, dwa da, dwa da)
I got you babe
*crash*

047 – Piso Mojado

Random thoughts while watching Sleepy Hollow:

Ha ha, that guy looks like Mr. Dursley!

Wait a minute, I think that IS Mr. Dursley.

Pow, there goes Mr. Dursley’s head, no presents for Dudderkins this year.

048 – Bravobo

It’s like “Brava!” or “Bravo!”, but for robots.

049 – Everybody Meets Everybody

I’m pretty sure this is the first page to include all six members of the primary crew.

Fantastic new fanart today of Rusty and Scatchi! Thanks Edgeling!

050 – The Aviary

Movie recommendation – rush right out and see Coraline at once. If you can swing it, get tickets to the 3-D showing, then show up and find out that it’s been cancelled in favor of My Bloody Valentine 3-D, so they change your ticket to the regular showing but you get two extra movie passes for free to make up for it. That’s what I did!

051 – Adorabitchy

Yesterday, we celebrated the man who discovered how those individuals who excelled at both survival and reproduction would give rise to the next generation, eventually leading to the formation of completely new species.

Today, we give rememberance to the man who taught us that you can either survive or reproduce, but not both. At least if you’re a sexy teen at a summer camp. Or, eventually, in outer space. Or the ‘hood.

052 – The Winning Team

With the new official additions, it’s getting to be time to update the cast page. That’s definitely on the list of additions to make during the break period. And it’s almost upon us! This is the last week of Intragalactic pages for a little while, due to work on a graphic novel. (Do check back next Monday however, for a peek at some of what you’ll see when it returns.)

Another new fanart today, from Mild Concussion. Thanks a bunch!

053 – Dream and Friends

Of course, the frontier they refer to is the Old Timey Space West, where people swear in Chinese and/or are secretly 200-year-old tree monsters.

>That's the end of Chapter 3 and I'm taking a break for a good half hour to 45. Despite being one of the shorter ones this story always seems to take way too long to do and drain me, I think it's a combination of the text for every page and the high file size dragging things out. And try to liven up the thread a bit, threads practically dead

>>149504952
What a kinky captain

Chapter 04: Miscellany 2

Monster Peninsula

Monster Peninsula is actually an island.

Non-Sneak Preview

Two new fanarts today – a reflective Piper by Olle of Ironborn, and Benjamin Glee, another great picture by Edgeling!

I actually have the project mostly done (assuming the art gets accepted), having used up my giant backlog of Intragalactic strips while I worked on that – but I’ll probably still take a while off, so I can build up a buffer again. There may be some standalone pieces or extra short strips at some time in the meantime, so check back once in a while!

>(for the first time today, something that wasn't in the HQ copy. This is straight off the website)

Inside Scatchi

Today’s guest strip courtesy of Agouti-Rex. There are also two new pictures by the prolific Edgeling in the guest art gallery. Here’s a big thank you to my readers for helping the site stay fresh while I am so busy watching every episode of Kim Possible working ever so hard on the book project.
>half that text should be crossed out

The Chameleon Suit

Sometimes, discretion is necessary even for a pathologically overconfident space adventurer. For those occasions, Benjamin shops at Incognito A La Mode, the premier supplier for fashionable stealth gear aimed at those who want to go unseen and look good doing it. Pictured is the classically elegant Chameleon Suit by Ninja Brothers of New York – a simple but effective body-concealing fabric system which uses cutting edge hyper-Hypercolor technology to render the wearer as transparent as this excuse to show Benjamin is a skin-tight bodysuit. Forget the Anole Poncho, the Octopus Sari and the Ermine Muumuu – when you want inconspicuousness, one brand stands out from all the rest. The Chameleon suit (sizes XS-XXL, MSRP 3999H99h).

The characters page has been upgraded with new entries for Scatchi and Poid – more to follow as soon as anyone else become important enough to get one.

>second time I've had to pull out my old copy

Sexy Pinups 1 – Piper

Part 1 of 6.

Piper had to get pretty hammered before she had to courage to have this taken.
The regular comic should resume at the end of April. Thank you for your patience, everyone.

Sexy Pinups 2 – Poid

Rowr, so hot.

Sexy Pinups 3 – Scatchi

This would be Scatchi’s style if snaffets weren’t so ill-treated by the rest of the universe – she’d probably be a high-powered attorney or businesswoman due to her talent for cunning and manipulation.

Sexy Pinups 4 – Axl

Spicy spicy salmon roll at the tasty seafood buffet.

Sexy Pinups 5 – Rusty

Why, good evenin’ there, little lady. Y’all sure do look like you could use the services of a burly, willin’ ranchhand.

Like most old people, Rusty wasn’t always old. And there was a time during the late 2500s when he was known as “The Midnight Alloy” because of his habit of dressing up Texas-style and selling his sexual services to furries (the legend of cowboys having gotten a bit garbled in the intervening centuries). Let’s enjoy this steamy pic that I’m sure will be on everybody’s wall.
>I guess this confirms this is set in the early 2700s like I thought. Again, no clue when Dystopia is set

Sexy Pinups 6 – Benjamin

Wrapping up the parade of sometimes-questionable sexiness is Benjamin as Ice Scream, the superheroine with the power to really fill out a leotard. Also to kill you with absolute-zero deadly frost bolts.

New REAL strips coming in one week! It’s not a dream, not an imaginary story, not a May Fool’s Day prank! Set your calendars for May 1st, and while you’re at it, set them for ADVENTURE!

Chapter 05 - Scratchi's Checkup

054 – Welcome Back, Frotteur

Ever wonder why the doors on the holodeck lock, even though it results in people getting stuck in there and almost killed approximately always percent of the time? Because they’re at hanky-panky factor 8.4 in there.

And on the subject, what was with the one episode where Wesley has ski practice on the holodeck and whacks Picard with a snowball in the hall? How did he bring the snowball out of the holodeck? Was it using real water and just decorating fake mountains with it? That was really weird.

(Update: Wil Wheaton actually read this, and he doesn’t know how it got out there either.)

055 – Ringyacht

That ship is so big – how big is it? It’s got more bows than an introduction factory. It’s got more sterns than a phone book for the shock-jock clone farm in the Baba Boort Cloud. It’s got more poop decks than a destitute team of poker-playing archaeologists forced by hard luck and a crippling card shortage to use carved dinosaur coprolites as a substitute. And it goes without saying that it’s somewhat difficult to actually sail the thing in a body of water.

056 – Little Bittle Pink Potato

Happy Seis de Mayo, or “Mexican Boxing Day”, everyone! Today we’ve got a SUPER fanart from Richard Karandosh – Bathtime. It’s all sexy and naked.
>the best fanart ended up basically part of the comic, but there's a ton of stuff Steph mentions that you'll have to find yourself. Maybe I'll drop some links later

057 – Cassandroid

I’m not especially wild about this week’s strips, or next week’s – just didn’t seem to click, for whatever reason. We’ve got some killer stuff coming up though, including prurient interest, beach parties and more messing around with the Fauxolodeck.

058 – The Jolly, Candy-Like Button

Press the green button, ship goes forward, time’s up, let’s play again.

>HOW LONG CAN SHE HOLD OUT

059 – Dumbitude

Heard back about the book – it’s slated for early 2010, with the editing process happening sometime this fall. Apparently it’s quite a long pipeline when you’re a first-timer and there’s an economic crisis going on (although given all that, I’m delighted that it’s happening at all). Hopefully I will be able to give sneak peaks of some of the characters during the lead-up to publication! And of course, as soon as it’s actually out the relentless hawking will begin.

060 – Space Fraud

The weird thing about moving to a new city is getting used to the different slate of newspaper comics. The usual coelocanths are in evidence, of course, but there are a whole bunch of odd ones which DON’T have the names of the creator’s fifty-year-old heirs written in as co-authors. My impressions, based on sort-of-reading a couple week’s worth of strips from each:

Frazz: Seems to have a pretty huge ensemble since it’s almost always different characters every day, although they all look an awful lot like Calvin with different heights and hairstyles. Looks like it’s mostly about a school? I don’t know who or what the titular Frazz is yet, but the jokes have been decent.

Retail: It’s Between Failures for the daily paper. The main character (Marla, upon looking it up) is kind of cute. That’s all I can think of to write about it which is not a terribly good sign, but it’s early yet! Impress me, Retail! I’ll give you a chance and keep reading! Not like I wouldn’t anyway. It’s impossible to lose me, I read them all. I read the fucking Wizard of Id. So actually, feel free to doze off behind the counter.

Cul de Sac: Some kids (who live in a cul de sac, I guess?). For the last few days it’s been about cutting weeds in order to dance on a manhole cover. Do weeds grow from manholes? Do you dance on the covers? Is this an actual thing or is “dancing on the manhole cover” an attempt at whimsy, a modern equivalent to Bloom County’s dandelion-snorting? Maybe it’s tap-dancing.

061 – Ensign Chekup

Although reasonably well-informed, Piper’s not actually a medical doctor. She was just the only one concerned enough to keep the sickbay in operation. It’s rarely used, as Ben almost never gets sick (Piper never does) and most of the rest of the crew has either been robotic or prone to instant death rather than disease or wounds.

062 – Hypno-Lolly

Freeze-dried snaffets are popular for aspiring medics to practice on, so it’s not so strange Scatchi’s insides would look familiar. (A brace of snaffets also makes handy raw material for the fun and creepy art of whimsical taxidermy! Why not put one in waistcoat, or seat four around a table, playing cards glued to their dessicated paws?)

063 – Scatchback

Since I ragged on Mallard Fillmore the other day, I feel it’s only fair that I give credit where credit’s due and say that I actually found yesterday’s installment kind of funny. And not funny in the sense that the author bragging about how he biked more than those lousy hippy Greens did was only funny when you knew he’d racked up two D.U.I.s, but genuinely amusing. Let’s all clap our right wings together for the smug little pantless reporter that finally did it. That’ll do, duck.

064 – The Naked Time

It’s the real cast of Intragalactic!
The real Piper Kaufman, a New York graphic designer whose interests include muppets and gay marriage, so available evidence indicates she’s awesome and I hope I don’t screw Google up too much for her.
The real Benjamin Glee (almost) at benjaminglee.com.
The real Scatchi, Japanese auto enthusiast.
The real Axl. Believed to have evolved in response to comic’s existence.

(That Scratchi channel is still up https://www.youtube.com/@scatchi/videos)

065 – Reverse Malpractice

Links to some great webcomics have been added to the right sidebar. When you’re finished with Intragalactic, why not give these a try?

066 – Look, Alien Rat Boobs!

Remember all the elaborate backgrounds in the early strips? Yeah, I got lazy. On the plus side, the close-up here provides a better view of Piper’s raw facial sores.

067 – Eye-Lights for Children

I didn’t realize when I was drawing this that a Terminator movie would be in theaters when it came out, which goes to show you how much I care about Terminator, I guess. But there you go! It’s topical! And I’m given to understand that the new movie includes Christian Bale flipping his shit at a lighting technician, assuming they kept that in the final cut, so it might be worth seeing.

068 – Scatchi’s Very Own Room

Super awesome! Reader Mike Hungerford provides these instructions for making your own CVS-0008 ice cream freighter paper model.

Instructional PDF
>https://web.archive.org/web/20110406082906/http://users.sdccu.net/chthulhu2/models/glee/CVS-0008.pdf

After you’ve built it, the final step is to fill the hold with teensy weensy microscopic ice cream bars

>I've got something to attend to, will continue tonight and finish tomorrow. I've asked every year and yet not one person has ever constructed a model of Glee's ship. Perhaps you'll be the first anon....

>>149509018
Thanks

>>149504918
>tempus fuggiddaboutit
Clever.

>>149504952
>captain tools

>>149506327
I can tell by the midriff, she's going to end up stuffed by story's end

069 – Quadptych

When speaking to herself, Scatchi uses the Snaffet language, so she doesn’t have a translator-generated accent.

>well done, keep up the chat a bit, don't be too dead

070 – The Simichanga

That’s a pretty good amount of meat from one monkey. I think he’s been cutting it with frijoles to stretch it out.

071 – Inevitably…

I’ve linked to posts of his before but this is as good a time as any to point you to Agouti-Rex’s livejournal. A very talented writer, and the creator of the Witchprickers comic, available through the rectangle to your right. You might enjoy this entertaining post about Menage a 3, which is apparently very bad. It’s sort of harem comic about breasts, mostly. I’d never heard of it before, but I guess it’s popular? And I think we can all agree that slathering one’s weird sexual obsessions all over one’s webcomic is totally lame, which is why, of course, you will never see even a hint of such a thing on a classy webcomic like this one.

Anyway, I got curious and went and read Menage a 3 myself. Surprisingly, I did not hate it, although you won’t be seeing it over there on the right anytime soon. Cute art goes a long way with me, I guess. Also a few of the strips made me laugh, and if you make me laugh sometimes, you can basically get away with shallowly sexist douchebaggery and uncomfortable, icky jokes about sexual assault the rest of the time. Why yes, I AM also a fan of the Seth MacFarlane shows.

Back on the subject of Agouti-Rex, here is a selection of some his best posts! Let’s see how much traffic I can send his way! Will I defeat the comments section of Pharyngula?

072 – Chim-Chim’s Revenge

Oh, Scatchi, yours is an ironic comeuppance.

073 – ESOPHO, So Good

Look, I stole Wonderella‘s title format! Plus, puns are really easy when you’re just making up words. This ends the epic story of Scatchi’s doctor’s appointment – coming up, more SCIENCE, followed by the Intragalactic special summer fun story!

Science! – Fishy the Fish Sprite

Other uses for fish:

- Carve them into small, festive hats, as the Dutch do.
- Organize a game of basketfish.
- Cook and eat them.
- Breed them for the ability to “walk” through the weeds and detritus of the shallow waters. Over millions of years, select for characteristics amenable to survival out of the water for longer and longer periods. Gradually coax them to develop into a fully amphibious form, and encourage them to colonize the land, diversifying into a wide variety of saurians, avians, and therapods.
- Lew Zealand cosplay.

Reverse Bizarro Mirror Alternates

Your evil parallel-universe opposite can’t be your opposite in every way, of course, otherwise they would all be upside-down and inside-out, and food would eat them. So everyone’s evil opposite has one element reversed. Why not amuse yourself trying to figure them out? Some are more obvious than others. There might be more than one plausible choice, but the “official” answers will come on Monday as the Intragalactic SUMMER SPECTACULAR kicks off!

Chapter 06 - Summer In Space

074 – It’s Summertime In Space!

As I expected might happen, I got some guesses on the nature of the mirror universe characters which were much more interesting than the “official” answers. But here are the real ones anyway.
Mirror Poid is self-serving and competent, rather than helpful and incompetent.
Mirror Axl has his intelligence reversed, and Mirror Rusty is female instead of male. (Those were pretty obvious.)
Mirror Scatchi is low-intelligence animal creature in the position of a full crew member, the reverse of Scatchi’s situation. (Assuming “child” and “animal” to be interchangeable, which is fair, I think. This one was still pretty unclear, though, wasn’t it?)
Mirror Benjamin has a cursed life instead of a charmed one, and has become a humorless battle-scarred mercenary.
And Mirror Piper has a sociopathic lack of guilt rather than a neurotic overabundance of it. Although I like the guess I received better — that she kills parasitic worms and eats their brains.

(Extra: Since doing this story, I discovered that the show Lexx has a whole season with the same “twin desert and ocean planets” setting. Whoopsie! And I only intended to rip off Super Mario Galaxy.)

075 – Under The Sea

Today I got to see the video “Work Smart”, as part of some dingus way up the chain of command’s initiative to improve worker performance. This takes the form of mandatory weekly classes on how the store is like your family. Your family that can fire you!

“Work Smart” is about a woman carrying a bag of bagels through a mall and lecturing us on how we can be “Work Smart” and get ahead by using little tricks they may not teach you in the manual – secret techniques like being on time and having a can-do attitude.

I think there’s only one thing that could motivate me more than that video, and that’s the upcoming module on “The S.M.I.L.E. System”. Nothing fans the flames of excellence like deciding what you want the acronym to be and then making up words to fit it after the fact, like a comic-book terrorist group. Presumably it’s the Super-Malevolent Impish League of Evil, and its purpose is to kill Wolverine.

076 – Directive Rita

“Rita”, of course, was one of the new letters added to Ancient Greek in the 4000s when humanity started running out of cool-sounding Greek letters to give to directives, codes, devices, types of radiation, and paradoxes. Rita, along with Ota, Tu, Phu, Klonoa, and Thi, were proposed for common usage by Dr. Cornelius O’Donald O’Dell in his landmark paper, “On Beyond The Omega Contingency”

077 – Der Verwandlung Mit Ein Schwing

Go-go boots are always in style.
Posted on June 29, 2009 at 12:00 am in Comic as part of Chapter 06 - Summer In Space « volume and tagged with Intragalactic, Piper, Poid. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed. Comments are closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

078 – Vitamin “D”, for “Doin’ It”

When I was a kid I really liked the soundtrack to Grease from my parents’ CD collection, without actually understanding many of the songs. Greased Lightnin’, okay, some guys are building a car and there’s some other stuff in there I couldn’t quite figure out. Years later, at a karaoke place, I was delighted to discover that the lyrics are absolutely fucking filthy.

079 – Intraplanetary Wormhole

This is … not the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, but easily in the top hundred most amazing things I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen The Chipmunk Adventure and any number of Japanese variety shows. Anyone can come up with a random statement, but it takes something special to wrap it in six layers of passion and fire it out of your lungs like you’ve got an electric toothbrush lodged in the pleasure center of your brain:

Rita Pavone serenades unidentified cartoon potato (1977).

Let’s all thank the Internet for containing all the video ever shot of anything ever, enabling us to develop instant and powerful crushes on people who are now either elderly or dead. (See also: Eartha Kitt)

080 – Killer Instinct

Of course, the organism on Benjamin’s head is an itinerant Chaponite, a sac-shaped green creature that drifts about, perching on top of greedy or lustful creatures and waving its antenna to gather the Q-rays generated by these emotions. The first Chaponite specimen was captured by the US military as far back as the 1950′s — though of course, its nature was not understood until much later, after it had completed its long reproductive cycle and its pupated young burst unexpectedly from its host’s eye sockets. Right in the middle of a date, no less!

081 – Benjamin’s Brain

By 7985, modern brainologists have moved far beyond today’s antiquated models of how the mind works. They understand that the brain can be divided into several large, distinct regions, each governing a particular thing you think about a lot.
>Ok THAT'S the year it's set

082 – There’s Gold In That Thar Sky

New fanart in the gallery today, a pair from Edgeling and one from Jarrah James of TransStellar. Go look!

083 – Sarah, Plain and Dead

For she IS the Kwisatz Haderach!

084 – The Magic of Children

Space kids can be so space cruel! But wow, Piper has kind of an idealized image of childhood, doesn’t she?

>I like Piper

085 – Quite a Pickle Is In Scatchi

And suddenly things went sour.

086 – Airhole

This is possible due to the composition of the shovel. It’s made of an Averium alloy, a miracle material which facilitates doing stuff like you see in cartoons, but, like, for reals.

087 – Deep Below The Surface Of The Sky

The embalming process for monarch on Axl’s homeworld involves having one’s hair styled like Elvis.

Because he was “The King”. GET IT? IT’S SO CLEVER.

088 – Lobster Wrap

Here’s something I found amusing:

My First Dictionary.

But then, I am a sucker for anything that upends the dank, squatting basalt monolith of children’s basic-words dictionaries to poke around in the squirming carpet of grubs beneath.

New plot starts on Monday. There’s a big galaxy out there full of unexplored planets and wrongs to be righted, which can only mean one thing – it’s time to spend days on end playing Film Noir Detectives on the Fauxlodeck!

089 – The Legend of Zelda

Despite the 1948 setting, some details of the slang and setting may be more reminiscent of the 30′s, or 50′s. But remember, this is 7985 — I bet you couldn’t run around in 4040 BCE and avoid any accidental mention of the styles and trends of 4030 BCE. Why, your cover would be blown in a moment! Go ahead and try it if you’re so smart!

Chapter 07 - Zelda Questione

089 – The Legend of Zelda

Despite the 1948 setting, some details of the slang and setting may be more reminiscent of the 30′s, or 50′s. But remember, this is 7985 — I bet you couldn’t run around in 4040 BCE and avoid any accidental mention of the styles and trends of 4030 BCE. Why, your cover would be blown in a moment! Go ahead and try it if you’re so smart!

090 – Homme Fatale

Things I learned about cigarettes while working at the store:

-A lot of the more famous brands (Lucky Strikes, Chesterfields, Phillip Morris) are a lot less popular than I would have guessed, and aren’t even carried. Of course I was very familiar with Camel because of all those news stories growing up about how they were trying to corrupt me with cartoons, but apparently hardly anyone buys them. Mostly people buy whatever’s cheapest. Maybe my data is skewed because the store is in the poorest part of town?

-You can get FLAVORED cigarettes. This blew my mind. Cigarettes come in grape, cherry and peach flavors! Seriously! Technically, these are cigarillos, not cigarettes, but both suffixes mean “small”. Unless cigarettes are supposed to be girls?

-They’re expensive as hell. Don’t smoke, kids! It will seriously cut into your beer fund.

091 – Routine #9

“Routine #9″ is pretty obscure, but trust me, this is a good example of it.

092 – Clue Clue Land

But the victim is the most important part, honey, they couldn’t have the murder mystery without you!

093 – Wino Comatosinki

Hey, look at that up there, you can write an email now. I’m not sure why I didn’t have that up before, actually, I think I just forgot. Anyway, go ahead and do it, if you’ve got anything to say!

094 – Homme Metale

It’s Rusty, but of course the character he’s playing is a human being. Eddie just looks like some kind of robot because he’s from South America.

095 – Dizzy Tomato
Caught in mid-accusation! Oh no!

096 – Eddie And Veronica

Aww, this comic is the cutest: Sister Claire. I will use my powers of influence to send it literally fives of new readers!

097 – Racismariffic

If I had a million dollars, I would get a really cool car, and trick it out with those hopping lifts and one of those sound systems where the inside of the car becomes a deafening chamber of death. Then I would put on ear protection, turn the volume and bass up as high as they could go, and drive around playing a selection of the least hardcore rap songs ever created.

My playlist:

The PokeRap
Amish Paradise (or White And Nerdy? Maybe both.)
Don’t Copy That Floppy
The Legend of Zelda Rap
The theme to the dubbed version of One Piece
That version of “Drop It Like It’s Hot” that has the Kirby music dubbed in

098 – Zelda Slowly Walks A Few Steps

This is some shadowy and dramatic nothing going on.
Although I prefer to think of it as a combining of Japanese “moment-to-moment”-style panel transitions with the proud American tradition of filling your “action” comics with gigantic walls of text*, bringing bother together in a deliciously cosmopolitan melange. And isn’t that what we want from our sci-fi/detective/weird kink/comedy comics?

*The difference between Japanese fighting comics and American fighting comics is that in the Japanese comics the characters deliver a page of dialogue between every punch, and in the American ones they throw a punch and deliver a page of dialogue simultaneously.

099 – The Asipoleon

Hey look, she found another part for Axl after all!

100 – Dragon’s Lair

What a clever bit of misdirection. It seems like it will be a little while longer before Piper appears. How will our heroine handle this villainess?

Next Monday: GOLDFISH!

101 – Predations

Remember to always come prepared for a role-playing session – know who you are, who the other person is, and what is and is not okay. A safeword wouldn’t have been a bad idea in this case, either.

102 – An Improvident Observation

My perception of improv comedy was forever tainted by a very, very bad group that opened for “Weird Al” Yankovic some years ago. And this is not even fair because what they did wasn’t even improv, but some weird routine where they lined up and went through this obviously rehearsed bit about the current California gubernatorial election, one word each. And it was just about the most pathetic and doomed-to-fail form of humor ever – political humor that goes out of its way not to offend.

So-then-Arnold-Schwartzeneggar-and-Cruz-Bustamante-both-decided-to-call-it-quits-and-go-to-Mexico-and-have
some-beer-HA-HA-HA OH GOD PLEASE LET AL BE READY SOON SAVE ME “FUN ZONE” SAVE MEEEEE

At least they formed a nice solid floor so that I knew I’d never see another opening act as bad. Even the guy who started off with a bit about Tourette’s Syndrome and then peppered his act with a sort of groaning, yowling dolphin yelp as a running gag was funnier.

103 – Pin-up’ed

The book Widgey Q. Butterfluff (coming out sometime next year) now has its very own huggable squishable info page. Go check out a small preview of some stuff that didn’t end up in the final version!
>I'll do that next week....anyone here?

104 – Myra the Waitress, Her Arms Wide

It’s easy to create holo-objects, but somewhat harder to get rid of real objects, so the computer has some trouble with Piper’s head. In the past they’ve had her play roles ranging from “Alien Queen” to “Marge Simpson looking straight up at something” in order to make space for it, but in this case the subtraction buffer just had to do its best with what it got.

105 – Somewhere That’s Green

Another new fanart today, from Edgeling: Invisible Benjamin. It’s Benjamin dressed in her stealth-ops chameleon suit, the one I totally forgot she had when I started drawing the upcoming story arc about stealth ops. Oh well. Maybe it’s at the cleaners.

106 – Join The Fauxlodeck Fun Club Today!

Hello to everyone who picked up one of those little flyers at DragonCon! Information on the upcoming book Widgey Q. Butterfluff can be found here. Also, why not stick around and read through a completely unrelated webcomic?

107 – Miss Busted

They locked her in there with the rats! How awful!

(Get this address from a flyer at Dragoncon? The book page is right here.)
>whats dragoncon?

108 – The Real Killer

What a shocking twist!

Once again, here’s the book page for anyone just now tuning in!

>frick it, here's the Widgey Promo Steph keeps mentioning. I'll do that one next week I swear

>Isn't Snugglepump valley that place those magic toys send you from that one advertisement in "The Death/Hulamutt Power Hour"?

109 – Sagen Sie “Kase”!

Hitler’s pretty easy to draw. I guess if you want to be an easy caricature, the way to go is to affect an odd mustache and then be so evil nobody else will ever want to imitate it.

110 – Program Complete

Little King’s Story for the Wii … it’s what Overlord: Dark Legend should have been, gameplay wise. You’re the cute little king of a charming little forest kingdom, and you take your adorable little cuddletroops across the border into dreamy lands of cake and parties. Then you make unprovoked assaults on their monachs, take their lands for their own, build a cute widdle princess harem, and loot every last gold bar and turnip in their treasuries. Most importantly, it takes more than eight hours to get through the game. This was a big problem with “Don’t Tell Me It’s Already” Overlord.

111 – Cruise Control

That’s it for this storyline. From here on Intragalactic will be on break again for a bit, but stay tuned! There’s some great guest art coming up, followed by a special presentation.

Tasty Hamburger

This deep-fried, special-sauce-laden guest page comes thanks to (the very very NSFW) Mamabliss!

>not part of the HQ release, there's a lot of that coming up. I've seen archives of that guys old site and uh...it's definitely NSFW

Thumbday My Prints

Today’s special guest strip comes from Krepta of The Hungry Reader. While it hasn’t been updated in some time, the archives are a worthwhile read – go check it out!

>this one and the two labeled pic are from the HD HQ release, rest are website quality

The History of Ice Cream

A guest page collaboration by Krepta and Myld Concussion!

>If you're wondering why it took so long for people to discover ice cream, well it's very simple, SOMEONE messed with the space time continium and replaced it's original invention with Egg-Canola shakes. Not naming names of course, but he/she/he knows what they did.

Yellow Peril

The final guest strip. Next week will be something a little bit different!

Pepper Penwell, Girl Detective 1

Here’s a little five page comic I did a while ago, featuring a character I’d like to do more with sometime! This one will be running over the next couple of weeks. After that the comic will be on break for a couple of months while I focus on some commission work and other projects, but I’ll try to have the odd illustration now and again to keep things lively.

>Steph you're flying too close to the sun stop

Pepper Penwell, Girl Detective 2

Pepper Penwell, Girl Detective 3

She doesn’t really do a lot of “detecting” in this one, to be honest.

Pepper Penwell, Girl Detective 4

Pepper Penwell, Girl Detective 5

That’s it from Pepper for now! And now begins a bit of a pause in our publishing schedule. I’ll try to have some little extra pictures and stuff up just so the front page isn’t the last page of an unrelated comic for the next one and two thirds months.

The Pep Squad

Space Football! It’s like regular spaceball, except you play it with your feet. And back at the Academy, Piper was on the cheer squad for the school team, the Fightin’ Atheists. And Benjamin, who was too young to cheerlead, got to play the mascot, a pine marten. (This mascot was chosen because the pine marten is nature’s atheist, and also because the giant foam Christopher Hitchens was scaring small children.)

There will have been much innovation in sport over the next 4000 years, and actual balls are no longer used. Instead, the “ball” is a cube made out of a randomly chosen material. It’s also legal to redraw boundary lines to your advantage, so long as you aren’t caught doing it, which is why a veteran groundskeeper like Rusty is a must, and forms an unofficial 12th position. The other positions consists of three Kickers, four Runners, an Oaf, two Wallflowers, and a Goalie. In 7881, after a long string of 0-0 ties caused by granite or lead play cubes being too slow and easy to intercept, the Gronman Amendment was added to the rule book. This rule requires all Goalies to be at least seven months pregnant at time of play, so there is a lot of turnover in this position throughout the year. Several other amendments were added in the 7930s, specifically barring dogs, chimps, pigs, and pairs of small children on each others’ shoulders from the field.

Halloween

Enjoy the Halloweeny goodness, all November long! And since not too many people might think to look for it otherwise, there is in fact a Muertitos Halloween 2009 picture, too!

Boxing Ben

There’s always time to set one’s galaxy-saving duties aside for a while and win a few boxing championships. And when you’re done, you’ll have a mean hook ready and waiting for those space villains!

Hey, guess what? Widgey Q. Butterfluff is now available for preorder! This book was a blast to draw and everyone I’ve showed it to has agreed it’s just as fun to read. It also makes an excellent gift for any post February-10th occasion, be it a belated Groundhog’s Day or Canadian Christmas.

(Edit: just noticed the February 10th given on the page is 2009, not 2010, so it might actually be out in January after all.)

>We do the rest of the comic tomorrow. Keep the thread alive.

>>149504770 (OP)
bump to read

>>149514618
Bump.

>>149515540
Bump?

>>149504770 (OP)
Thanks OP.

Good thread

I see a Steph thread, I bump.

Chapter 08 - Twelve Days of Joelmas

113 – Two Pals a’Talkin

Replicator technology is a tricky thing. It’s very convenient, but the system is so delicate and prone to breaking down that you just can’t rely on it. So in the future, if they ever need something specific and can’t get it, it’s probably because that darn replicator is broken again!

114 – Three Pestries Bakink

Okay. What the fuck is up with this “circus clown” bullshit? The snowman is PARSON BROWN, people. PARSON MOTHERFUCKING BROWN. You’re turning a beautiful song about pretending to get married by a snowman into some kind of messed-up clown snuff fantasy. Can’t Bill O’Reilly or one of the other members of the U.S. Strategic Bloviater Reserve call a boycott until this travesty is put right?

(Update: It has been pointed out to me that the “circus clown” verse is merely the second verse of the original song. Okay, I can get behind that – who doesn’t want to spend their honeymoon at the circus “having fun” with a clown, after all? – but this merely shifts the responsibility to whoever lopped off the first verse in whatever cover version it is that plays at the grocery store. Shame on you! You’ll be sharing a circle in Christmas Hell with the people who put out the “Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaanta Claus is comin’ to town” version of THAT song.)

115 – Fornication’s a Nick-Creatin’

Naked Mole Rat Weird Fun Facts:

- Naked mole rats are eusocial colony animals, like bees. They’re one of only a couple kinds of mammals with this social structure.
- Naked mole rats are the only cold-blooded mammal.
- Naked mole rats are the longest-lived rodent.
- Naked mole rats are immune to certain kinds of pain (from acid, for instance).
- Naked mole rats live on gigantic underground tubers. They eat the insides and hollow them out, slowly, giving them time to grow back so they can feed on them indefinitely. Naked mole rat:potato::eagle:Prometheus, for you SAT takers out there.
- Naked mole rats don’t actually talk with a Bart Simpson voice. That’s just a bit of Disney razzle-dazzle!

>I was gonna make an X joke, but that was a STAR nosed mole, totally different

116 – Five Bars of Gold-Pressed Wealthium

BA DUM DUM DUM

Guess what, you can now visit Benjamin Glee’s Twitter account and read all the exciting things she says between now and whenever the novelty wears off!

>it's still up https://x.com/BenjaminGlee/

117 – Six Muppeteers Manipulating

Hey, now you can go right to Ben’s tweets via a little Twitter icon just to the right. Unless you’re reading this several years in the future, in which case, younglings, “Twitter” is that thing that ‘The Born Loser’ and ‘The Wizard of Id’ in your local newspaper just now started making jokes about. That thing your grandparents talk about sometimes, from the beforetimes. Before the great sun fell from the sky and the metal-skin raiders came, and a handful of water became more valuable than all this accursed gold… the gold which carries the blistering death. Can you believe humankind of old used to prize this worthless metal! You can’t even make a spearhead to fight the raiders with this. Soft! Useless! Man grew decadent, hypnotized by the Twitter while the politicians and the warmongers rattled their sabres and brought the Great Sun which burned the world. Look, look here, my child, at this twisted and pustule-ridden turnip I have wrung from the soil with a simple iron hoe. This! This is life! This is reality! Not the Twitter-dream of the ancient fools.

Of course the preceding was just a little flight of fancy. There won’t really be newspapers in the future!

>aged...well?

118 – Seven Eyes a-Crawling

I’m sure someone has noticed that the Deadly Bees really don’t belong here, being a Mike episode. Apparently some small details of history have become slightly garbled. Perceptive readers also may notice that I probably shouldn’t have tried to draw Trumpy from memory, but I’m sure they’ll give me the “a-ok” sign anyway!

119 – Eight Cakes a-Existing

Just got word today that my second graphic novel, Pepper Penwell and the Land Creature of Monster Lake, has been accepted for publication! I’m super-duper stoked! Unfortunately this will mean more hiatuses in Intragalactic‘s future – but it won’t be for a little while, as the art for the next story, “Infiltration”, is nearly finished.

And if you don’t want to wait until that comes out, please don’t forget that you can still preorder Widgey Q. Butterfluff!
Posted on December 16, 2009 at 12:00 am in Comic as part of Chapter 08 - The Twelve Days of Joelmas « volume and tagged with Benjamin, Intragalactic, Piper. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed. Comments are closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

>Stephanie no, you fool, pull back! Pull back!

120 – Nine-Month Subscription

Busy busy busy busy busy busy, I am a busy little space-beaver.

121 – Ten Years Ago (Plus One Year)

So, eleven years ago. Kind of too bad I didn’t make this one the eleventh page instead of the tenth, huh?

122 – Eleven; Piper’s Not In This One

Probably gonna be a couple weeks off after this story ends… since the next one isn’t done yet and I want to make sure it doesn’t get stuck in the middle. Pepper is going to be keeping me pretty busy for a while, but I’ll try to make some time to finish Intragalactic‘s next arc up one of these days.

>Steph's constant notes make it easy with hindsight to see where it all went wrong

123 – Twelve Bits of Blitzen

And with that, Joelmas draws to an end the way all good holidays should, with a mixture of perverted self-indulgence and violent wildlife-eradicating explosions. Let us close with that immortal final line from Tiny Tim – “Why does God need a starship?”

New strips in a couple weeks (probably)!

Chapter 09 - Operation Stealthy Eagle

124 – The First Layer of the Onion

This page probably holds the record for the biggest lead time, having been completed back in August. So enjoy that retro-Naughties flavor! You know, for the nostalgia value. Will there be Naughties nostalgia? That would be kinda hard to pull off. Dude, we’re having a Naughties party! BYOB in tiny little containers separated into a Ziploc bag, and then we’re gonna watch crappy Simpsons episodes until the party ends due to bank foreclosure! Whee!
Posted on January 11, 2010 at 12:00 am in Comic as part of Chapter 09 - Operation Stealthy Eagle « volume and tagged with Axl, Benjamin, Intragalactic. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed. Comments are closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

>Like Steph said, she completely forgot about the Chameleon suit until it was too late to add

125 – Tiny and Less Tiny

I thought that a lot of my comics were a bit too talky and text-heavy, and so part of the impetus for this storyline was to do a few dialogue-free strips. (It goes back to being talky later on, though.)

126 – They’re Holding The B Button

In my day, the B button was round and red. Now it’s a trigger! How the world has changed.

If you’re looking for something to read, why not check out Worlds, a serial novel about the unseen places in our world, written by a talented friend of mine?

127 – I’m Gonna Go Be Awesome Around This Corner Now

Links added to the sidebar for Between Failures, Murry Purry Fresh and Furry, and Guttersnipe.
They’re about, respectively, people working crappy jobs, animals working crappy jobs, and jobless starving orphan children, and each is a bucket of delight, so go read them!

The side thing is starting to poke down really low, so I don’t know how many people actually see it. I need to figure out how to put some stuff under the comic, too, to give people a reason to go down there.

>sorry for the trickle, I've got other things to tend to and mostly just wanted to keep the thread bumped.

>>149504770 (OP)
Isn't Stephanie Cherrywell that tranny who loved fat chicks?

128 – I Spy Some Butts

Hey looks, it’s Officers Spears and Samu of the Sexy Young Police Force! It’s also the very loosely managed police force (they don’t advertise that part), leaving them free to work as mercenaries much of the time. Hey, as long as the people they’re shooting are criminals, or potential criminals, they’re doing their job, right?

For anyone who follows Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy, while I’ve been paying even less attention to it than usual because of Project Pepper, there will probably be a new one in the next few days, so check in soon.

>I'm committed now, non-stop til we're done

129 – Axl’s Contribution

Today we’ve got a new picture in the fan gallery, courtesy of Agouti-Rex!

130 – The Craytrix

I got Megaman 9 the other day (way late to that party, I know). Hey, I remember when you actually had to work to get through a level instead of it being like a little tour you just walk though, and now those days are here again! Or rather, they were like a year and a half ago when it came out. I was going to say ‘now we need Capcom to make a Ducktales 2′, but I looked it up first and holy whonkers! There was one! Was it any good?

>the site has just completely buggered up on my end, it's moving at a snails pace

131 – The Laser Hall

I don’t know why they always leave enough space in these for someone to either jump through it or ooze through sensuously. I’d put all my laser-maker-thingies in one spot in the middle of the hall forming a grid of one-inch squares.

132 – Nine Chickweed Lame

I think this one takes place inside a Virtual Boy.

133 – Acro Circus

Yeah, her back is a little fragiler than it used to be, but Benjamin can still jump and flip and avoid things and all the usual space-hero business when she needs to.

134 – Body Stockings vs Skins

I wonder if I’m the only person who likes Startropics II? Yeah, it’s frustrating when Mikey jumps diagonally into space or falls off a platform or loses two-thirds of his health to multiple hits from a low-level rat, but there’s something charming about the way it blends sort-of-like-Zeldaness with kind-of-like-an-RPGness-but-not-really with humor-except-not-that-funny. I think I just talked myself out of liking it. You know what was a good game? River City Ransom.

I do enjoy Startropics II for all the little touches, all the little things that say ‘this could have been a really enduring franchise if the gameplay didn’t suck’. Traveling to different times, fighting cactus golems, baby mummies, and Yum Yum, drinking the Red Eye sarsparilla…

Plus there’s Cleopatra. She can horf down an entire large pizza in twenty seconds. And she is a knockout!

135 – Closet Fight

I got the first actual printed, physical volume of Widgey in the mail today! It was super exciting! It’s still not officially out yet for a bit, but getting closer!

>got the internet back. I've read Widgey, it's scanned online by a guy who goes by HelgaPhugley so it's archived. It's so high quality I can't tell if it's a scan or if somewhere there was a digital copy release I missed. Peppermint Penwell isn't archived online as far as I can tell, and while I own a personal copy I've never read it as I'd rather experience it with you guys. Plus I want to find the missing 2004 Reiko issue first.

136 – Aren’t You A Little Nude For A Stormtrooper?

The Enstant models would probably survive better if they were more observant. Sure, the Enstant Corporation may boast “The Light That Burns Half As Bright AND Half As Long!”, but even they may be rethinking that slogan after last year’s dismal performance record. Thirteen product recalls by companies relying heavily on Enstant Enspectors. Three major studio productions shut down due to the complete inability of Enstant Engenues to learn lines longs than half a sentence. A rare species of ant wipes out by Enstant Ensectivores. The ridiculousness of trying to market Enstant Ensectivores in the first place, a decision the Enstant Corporation blamed on its in-house Enstant Ennovators. And then there was a whole “selling unprogrammed clone matter as ‘Enstant Mashed Potatos’” scandal. It’s no wonder consumers are flocking in droves to Sunny Select Soldiers and other superior and less expensive store brands.

>If someone has a professional grade scanner or knows of a digital copy, by all means back up Pepper Penwell though. I'd rather it not be lost to the world, it and the 2004 Reiko are worth finding.
As for Widgey, I'll storytime it next week

137 – Awww

I found a typo in Widgey the other day… it’s not like it’s that serious, but it annoyed me that I never noticed it during all the other times I’d looked at the page, back when it would have done some good. It bothered me enough that I had a dream where I got to go to the publisher and make some last-minute corrections. Then I woke up and it was too late again! Disappointing! Also I bet the SLG offices aren’t really inside a multicolored planetoid filled with stalactite chambers and ridable platforms drifting down lava rivers. Also disappointing! But I’ve never been there so I choose to believe that really is what it looks like.
>guess we can play 'find the typo' next week

138 – The Really Big Door

Yay, the other day I actually figured out who the killer was in a Kindaichi Case Files before it was revealed. Usually I have no idea beyond ‘one of the people who hasn’t been murdered yet’. In this case part of the solution was actually hidden in the obligatory wacky high-school sexual tension shenanigans that appear in every volume. Slick!

139 – Rezdezvous With Destiny

Why, I ask you, can I not play Legend of Kyrandia and Day of the Tentacle on my Windows 7-style computer? I may know absolutely nothing about how computer programming works but the least those lazy game makers could have included how to play it on a system from fifteen years in the future in the instructions, you know?

(Update: A thank you to the people who wrote me about ScummVM! It works like magic! Once again, I’ve managed to solve a problem by bitching about it into the howling Intervoid. Hooray!)

140 – Nooooooooo

And that dinner looked so good, too!

141 – Lincoln Likes To Watch

And that’s that! I wish I could say there would be a new story starting next week, but unfortunately with Pepper Penwell only about halfway completed, there probably won’t be any more Intragalactic for a little while, at least not steady-like. I’ll have some standalone drawings now and again, though, and maybe some single-page bits to keep things going.

Driveway Bath

This really ought to have music with it. Just imagine either “Pour Some Sugar On Me” or “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go”, to taste.

UPDATE: Hey everyone! Widgey Q. Butterfluff is here at last! You can order direct from SLG, or from SLG’s Amazon store, via the link to the right. Apparently Amazon cancelled some long-standing preorders just as the book was finally arriving from the printer (thanks a heap Amazon) – if you got an e-mail from them about this you’ll have to re-order (you won’t have been charged for the first one). Sorry for the inconvenience! The book should be out in stores in a couple of weeks.

142 – One More Two Borg, Please

The first of a number of sporadic standalones while I work on Pepper. (And by the way did I mention you can totally buy Widgey Q. Butterfluff now? So please, you know, do, and everything.

A wowtastic new piece of fanart today, from JT of Between Failures! Super thanks!

I’ve been reading Afterschool Charisma recently. It’s quite interesting – take the premise of Clone High (almost exactly, down to some of the same historical figures featuring prominently), but make it a way more serious mystery thriller sort of thing. Looking at the two series together is a good study in how the same idea can go in totally different directions. The character design choices are radically different too. Clone Hight made most of the minor characters look like what they looked like when they were famous, even though they were supposed to be teenagers. Afterschool Charisma is nothing but bishoujou and -nen. All of them, up and including Cute Teenage Bishy Hitler, are pretty much interchangeable except for the hair. It’s about the only complaint I have about the series so far, really.

143 – Eucalactus

I got Bioshock 2 recently. I’m actually really hopeless with FPSs so I’m playing it on easy… I just wanted it because the setting and story is so cool, and because you get to take care of cute and creepy little corpse-eating zombie girls. It’s fun!

Widgey is supposed to be released into stores today, so if you have a local comic book shop, go and see if they have it! It would also be really super neat if anybody could get a picture of one on the shelf and send it to me, since I live in a comic-shop-less hole right now and probably won’t get to see that here.


Here is a great fanart by Holden Crick of lots of characters I’ve done, from the very early Flying-Suit Reiko all the way up to the oh-so-current and oh-so-purchasable Widgey Q. Butterfluff. It’s so cool! Super big thanks!

144 – An Ark of Wax

The Big Bang went on vacation and Billy (age 5) filled in with a few planets.

Here is a great fanart by Holden Crick of lots of characters I’ve done, from the very early Flying-Suit Reiko all the way up to the oh-so-current and oh-so-purchasable Widgey Q. Butterfluff. It’s so cool! Super big thanks!

45th Annual Ceasefire Accord

Every year, the leaders of Earth’s two major powers gather on the central Eurasian warp veldt to negotiate a permanent end to territorial disputes. In accordance with the Ricardo Conventions, the new border is painted on the ground in cheery red paint, and both leaders agree to stay on their own sides. This is followed by tea and tiny cakes, and then the traditional dash back to their respective bunkers before the drying of the paint signals the annual Resumefire.

Pictured:
Empress-General Oku of the Afro-Irish Empire
President Barry Scroffles of the People’s Democratic Equal Republic of the Free Non-Censoring Pleasant United Countries Where Everyone is Happy
Fana, head of Martinian Bummer Minimization Council, acting as arbiter

New strips will be starting before too long, stay tuned for more info! And remember you can still get Widgey!

>next arc is Ivy, easily the longest of the entire story

Chapter 10 - Ivy

145 – Scatchi Birthday To You

I don’t know what day Scatchi’s real birthday is, and she probably doesn’t either, so why not just tell them it’s some day convenient for her? It’s not like they’re going to have the right number of candles on the cake anyway.

This story doesn’t have as much of a buffer as previous ones have had, so I can’t guarantee that there won’t end up being delays if I run out of strips, but I don’t think it’s too likely.

146 – Unwantisphere

I found a comic at the library – I won’t say the title, because this isn’t all complimentary and I assume other comic creators google their books too – which caught my interest. It was Christian manga, which I picked up because I assumed it was going to be something hilarious like Hairy Polarity (and I don’t much care if I offend the Hairy Polarity folks). What I got was, well, it wasn’t GOOD exactly, but surprisingly non-horrible, with a lot more subtlety than I usually see in these things (bearing in mind that I’m a snotty atheist whose exposure to Christian fiction is mostly in the form of Jack Chick and B.C.) The Christian characters aren’t perfect, the non-religious main character actually grows as a person without instantly converting (although it’s a series, and guess what happens in the last couple of books?), and the obligatory visit from the witch-like Secular Humanist Boogeyteacher only takes up one page.
The artwork was pure How To Draw Manga: Characters And Nothing Else, so the people are generic but competent and everything else is voids and filters and flat, geometric houses, but I’m the last person who needs to be complaining about anyone else’s shittily-drawn architecture so let’s move on. I get onto this weird obsessive squirrel hunts over things that aren’t objectively very good (example: Total Drama Island), and I think it’s because there’s something about a promising but deeply flawed work that’s more compelling even than pure out and out quality. Maybe it’s that it demands criticism and improvement, and thus more involvement that something that can only be experienced through passive enjoyment, or maybe it’s that through a work’s flaws, we get more of a feel for the artist as an individual?

>>149505081
Piper my beloved

147 – Nice Day To Start Agaaaain

Recently someone at work lent me the first novel in The Bartimaeus Trilogy and I enjoyed it so much that I had to get the other two as quickly as possible. It’s very cinematic – it’s the sort of thing that (along with Artemis Fowl) I would love to see movies for. But with The Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials franchises both crashing and burning before they even had a chance to get to preachy parts, maybe Hollywood is done beating the young-adult-fantasy-novel thestral that Harry Potter kicked off?

148 – My Little Bishony

Some really amazing fanarts today – Piper and Benjamin (naked boobies alert), both by Toby. These are really beautiful and stylish! Thanks a huge bunch!

149 – It’s a Major Award

Three new pictures by Edgeling have been added to the fanart gallery. They’ve actually been around for a while, but he was so prolific I kind of lost track of what was up and what wasn’t, so it’s been fixed now!
Defiance is Fruitless
Pine Marten Mascot Benjamin
Benjamin and Piper’s Fauxlodeck Family
They’re kind of specific but if you go through the archives, you’ll see what they refer to!

150 – Femail

You can always rely on a Silver Age comic to serve up a heaping plate of totally nuts. Case in point, Wonder Woman issue #111, “The Robot Wonder Woman”. Wonder Wonder is tricked into agreeing to a showdown with a potential robotic replacement invented by “Dr. Menace” , on the condition that she’ll go back to Paradise Island if she loses. Then Dr. Menace reveals the terms of the contest – a test to see who can stay awake the longest. Twenty-three days later, in the center of a stadium filled with enthusiastic onlookers, Wonder Woman finally nods off and Dr. Menace has the robot steal all the ticket money. The story raises some interesting questions, such as, 1) they were able to fill a stadium with people willing to pay money to watch Wonder Woman fighting sleep? For three weeks? And 2), sure was lucky that there was no actual crime of the sort that would require a superhero for the better part of a month, wasn’t it?

The very next issue, “Wonder Girl In: The Chest of Monsters”, contains this neat little quote about science:

“Science SEEMS to work like magic sometimes, Bonnie! But the difference is that science has an explanation for its ‘magic’!”

That’s actually kind of pithy and spot-on, even if it is coming up in the context of ‘since cold causes metal to contract, absolute zero causes metal objects to become microscopic’. At least they were trying, Hera bless ‘em.

151 – The Great Benjini and Screwy

Still better than Jeff Dunham though.

Speaking of weird Silver Age stuff, here is a comic recommendation for you! When SLG was having a sale, I got Doris Danger Giant Monster Adventures, it’s really good! It perfectly captures the feel of crazy old comics where giant monsters are stomping on everything. The titular character is a journalist who’s trying to prove the existence of giant monsters, of which there are several dozen apparently attacking major cities and destroying the army at all times. My favorites were Spoosh, the Giant Who Likes to Grab Airplanes, and Aahblaah, the Creature Who Defied All Science … By Punching! If that’s your thing you should definitely get it (if you’re already gotten your copy of Widgey, of course)!

I found something really fun at the library too, I will tell you all about that next time!

152 – TNG

Wow, here is a good comic I found: Rapunzel’s Revenge. It’s an expanded retelling of the Rapunzel story which takes place in a kind of fairy tale Old West setting. In this version of the story, in order to keep from going crazy from boredom in the tower, Rapunzel teaches herself to do rope tricks with her braids, so that by the time she gets out she’s become an elite hair-based cowgirl superhero. She meets up with Jack and his Chekhov’s Bean and Chekhov’s Goose, and they have adventures trying to defeat the witch and rescue Rapunzel’s biological mother. It’s really exciting and beautifully drawn and it even has the best thing any fantasy book can ever have, a map! Be sure to read it if you get the chance!

153 – The Seahorse Boys of Aquus 4

Hola! It’s time to take another look at the wonderful world of Silver Age Wonder Woman. But today we’re not looking at the comic itself, but at one of the many educational supplements used as filler. So you’ll just have to wait until another day for the rundown on that one story where Wonder Woman ate the world’s largest pizza for charity.

Like most comics of the day, Wonder Woman had its share of extra comics teaching us that music’s not just for sissies and that Superman doesn’t like it when you don’t place your bike properly in the bike rack, but it also had something unique – text-only pages with information about women’s history! Very progressive, eh? Well, let’s take a look at some of this important information. Today’s excerpts are all about

PRE-HISTORIC WOMEN

“From crude drawings found in caves and from the tools that have been found by archaeologists, it is possible to piece together some idea of how pre-historic women lived.”

Also they filled in some of blanks by consulting famed archaeologist Johnny Hart. So what do we know about prehistoric women?

“But often, when animals threatened, the men remained home, armed with their clubs and crude axes to drive off the early wolves and other beasts, while their wives huddled in a corner of the cave.”

They were wimps! Thanks for the heads up, science! We know this, of course, from examining the femurs of cro-magnon females, which tended to display striations associated with lifelong terrified huddling.

“It was about this that the women began complaining about the caves they had to live in. It was too cramped, and almost impossible to keep clean.”

And their husbands were always sneaking off behind the cave for a Winston break.

154 – The Famous Half-Pendant of Ancient Canada

This famous half-pendant was forged by the Zeox Civilization, mightiest empire central Canada has ever known, in the fiery belly of Hoodoo Mountain. Of course, the one Ivy is crushing is merely a replica, which can be easily purchased in any major city’s Little Zeox district.

>sounds like someone went to Drumheller

155 – Rash Actions

Via The Comics Curmudgeon, here’s a column about a Scandinavian collection of NSFW Beetle Bailey cartoons drawn by Mort Walker himself. WOW. (Incidentally, I have seen him in person and yes, he is quite a horndog). Varning for snusk!

156 – 32-Inch High-Definition Uvula

Wow, this is just about perfectly done. No one can say that Pixar’s marketing department is lying down on the job when it comes to screwing with the archaeologists of the future. (Warning – some pretty major Toy Story 3 spoilers in the comments.)

157 – The Roboticist

A new Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy today, for those who follow that. (I will get it wrapped up eventually, I promise! – and yes, this storyline will be the last one in its current form, but there might be a new GPCB series at some point.)

>sigh....i hate reading some of these old notes with hindsight. Oh Steph...page in question was Caloric Supernova which was 3rd or 4th to last despite the final page taking another two months

158 – I Was A Teenage Me

Currently reading: big pile of dirt-cheap Archie Comics Double Digests. As they’re mostly reprints from the company’s entire 60-something-year history, you get a pretty schizophrenic reading experience, as a story featuring Archie learning extreme sports from his friend “Rad Chad” leads directly into one where he’s in a bow tie and Betty and Veronica are in dresses. (Also in the extreme retro division – stories labeled “Josie and the Pussycats” which are clearly from the pre-Pussycat “She’s Josie” era. You’re not fooling anyone but your intended audience, Archie Comics!)

And what do we find in a copy of Jughead’s Double Digest? An ad for Sabrina comics “for you Magna fans out there!” This is from 2005. Archie Comics keeps the spirit of lightly-researched mid-nineties print newspaper Lifestyle sections alive into the 21st century!
>I think Steph was on a comic podcast and talked about Archie at one point...and yes the conservation pivoted to the 2000 Weird Mystery Cartoon and 'that one episode' eventually

159 – Muff Meatmaze

Random quotes from DC Showcase Presents: Justice League of America

“That glowing meteor… turning us all into TREES!”

“One of my PARACHUTE ARROWS can save him — but I’ve got to get closer for a good shot, even if it means going UNDER THIS LADDER and defying BAD LUCK!”

“While we don’t have a permanent chairman– when it comes to cleaning time, we all agree WONDER WOMAN is boss!”

“Seconds later, the FASTEST MAN ALIVE begins whirling his arms around and around like the blades of a super-fan… faster and faster… ‘I’m setting up a COLD WAVE in this room… to freeze the water solid..’”

“I-I can’t stop doing this JIG!”

160 – Feel Like Making War

I’m not sure which Bennie’s hoping for. She just likes to be prepared.

They may dream big, but neither has a particularly glamorous career. Muff gets punched into walls a lot and Bennie spends a lot of time on her hands and knees cleaning up ensign splatter. But you and I know that everything’s going to work out fine in the end!

>I'll go into more detail later, but TLDR Creamy Beamy withered away into nothing because Steph picked up Widgey and then right afterwards Pepper Penwell and between those and Intragalactic it lost priority and then she lost the passion

161 – Gentle Peals

So hey check it out, this is pretty funky fresh! Widgey got a mention on BoingBoing. Super neato! Big thanks to Chris of AetherCo for telling them about it!

162 – Plip

Nothing could possibly be above me. Oh, hm, what’s that? A good rule of thumb is… if it’s drool, you’re the first victim, if it’s blood, you’re the second victim. If it’s something else, all bets are off. (Can we have a horror movie where this happens with mashed potatoes?)


>short break, just to ask what's the current thread population how many anons here? sound off

163 – Hyaaaaa

Special thanks to Chris Lowrance who created Dungeons and Dragons rules for Piper’s parasite. Neato! Although this isn’t completely canonical, it is actually pretty close to my idea of how they work.

164 – The Showroom

Some of these robots look a little dangerous for household use, but fortunately most of them ended up being safely sold to the military, where they’ll be blowing up other robots on wasteland moons throughout the Outer Rim.

165 – Squidgem Huggafish Wacerates Woo

The original release of Squidgem Huggafish was later named one of the year’s least safe dolls, along with My Gestating Baby (the baby doll that arrives in ingestible pill form and work on dinosaur-sponge principals), Pacific Northwest Vampire Wrestlin’ Buddies (solid chunks of hyper-breakable glass), and Slashy: The Reincarnated Serial Killer Doll who Really Comes To Life (the buttons on his overalls presented a choking hazard).

166 – They Didn’t

Whoopsie, this one’s up a bit late. Sorry about that, just forgot to line it up yesterday!

167 – Benjiclone

Wow, Archie Comics really spiffed up its website. (For the tiny fringe population who has never been to the Archie Comics website, it used to look like some circa-1998 Geocities page) Also, it looks like a recent issue of Veronica has her saluting the President on the cover and pledging to help with his job creation efforts. Between that and the introduction of the Archieverse’s first gay character in that title, it makes me curious if the Veronica audience skews especially liberal for some reason. That’s kind of counterintuitive (although, I like Veronica best, so there’s one anecdotal data point!). The Lodges are billionaires, but given the occasional stories where Mr. Lodge does things like decide to turn the wetlands he was going to build a mall on into a wildlife refuge instead, maybe he’s more of the socially conscious Warren Buffett type? This interpretation would make Veronica the urban, coastal yin to Betty’s midwest, red-state, occasional-Al Hartley-mouthpiece yang. And whoever the Archie universe’s equivalent of Rush Limbaugh is, he’d be perpetually railing against “the Hiram Lodge-funded media”.

I’m pretty sure the Cabots vote straight Republican, though.

168 – Gross, Cute, Gross, Cute

My publisher is looking for donations to help with some legal expenses – they have always been super nice to me, and put my book out, so I want to help them! I would like to ask those of you who can spare a couple of dollars to please consider going here and using the donate button at the bottom. These are the people who made my dream come true, so it would make me really happy if I could be of assistance to them! They’re also having a sale to raise money, so if you don’t want to donate, you can buy books and use the coupon code ‘legald’ at checkout to get 10% off. I recommend Doris Danger Giant Monster Adventures and (duh) Widgey Q. Butterfluff and there’s some really neat books you can get for only the cost of shipping if you look through the catalog, so I hope you’ll go check it out if you can!

>Steph, god, get out while you still can, SLG goes bankrupt in 2012

Come back Monday when this space returns to being about reviews of the four-part Archie Marries Jughead miniseries, or whatever.

169 – Unique

If I ever get an internet law named after me, I would like it to be this one: The Wikipedia article for any particular movie/TV episode that includes content that brushes on someone’s fetish WILL be written by people with that fetish, since they’re the ones with the most interest. (And trust me, all you normal people out there: EVERYTHING touches on some fetish or other.) Obviously this holds true less for really popular things, i.e., the page for Inception is probably relatively free of the writing of hardcore top fetishes (a.k.a. spinners, spinnees, and begomaniacs), but the less well known something is, the more likely it is that it’s only known today by a handful of people to whom it is the absolute holy grail of everything. I’m talking to YOU, person who was obviously typing that Gumby episode summary with one hand.

>>149524440
I'm glad I got Widgey and Pepper Pinwell. I think when I bought Pepper it immediately went out of stock on Amazon so I might have gotten the last one.

Should be a new Creamy Beamy today for those who read that. I’m gonna try to wrap it up fairly quickly – the original version of the story had about a zillion extra threads to tie together at the end, but (as you can tell by the posting frequency) I pretty much ran out of steam on it, and I’d rather just end the story with some closure and a definite ending. That doesn’t preclude GPCB coming back someday in a more polished form, though.

And now it’s

TIME FOR MORE ARCHIE SHIT

So, Archie’s Weird Mysteries. This was an animated show that aired about ten years ago which can be summed up as ‘Archie’s X-Files‘, but the weird thing about these Weird Mysteries is that this show was actually made to fill the FCC requirement for stations to air a certain number of hours per week of educational programming. So the show was usually buried between infomercials at odd hours to guarantee no kid would ever see it, because TV stations are spiteful bastards like that. Also, it wasn’t even educational, except for tacking on a strained moral that kinda-sorta followed from the events of the show, which puts it in the same scholarly class as the dub of Sailor Moon. For instance, if you break your word and are late for a date, your girlfriend might be turned into a vampire. It’s the “Snow Goons are bad news” school of moralizing.

I do think that episode had an important moral for vampires, though: BITE JUGHEAD, NOT VERONICA. Vampire Jughead would be almost unstoppable. He’d have a gigantic army in a couple of hours, and in few days, he’d be emperor of the Earth while the few remaining humans cower in the basement of Riverdale High waiting for the end to come. He even already has the crown for it!

>Aside from the Creamy Beamy R or Creamy Beamy Z we never got, yeah here's the confirmation the back half of what we did get was rushed to hell. Cheesecake got left in that tunnel, Reiko never showed up again, no epilogues, those aliens never, no true ending

171 – Virtu-Closet

So they finally got around to this. Yeah, it’s ridiculously expensive and you still need a runway and can only legally take off from the airport. But hey, future!

>what the hell is a Terrafugia?

172 – Swiss Army Girl

Although svelte overall, Ivy has trouble getting long pants that fit her because of those big ol’ Megaman shins she’s sporting. They can’t be easily modified because they contain secondary information storage, and her programming won’t allow her to give up on knowing 15,000 languages just to be able to fit into latest trends in socks and legwarmers.

173 – Giblicious

And now for more about Archie. If you don’t care about Archie, well, there’s a new Creamy Beamy today too. We’re into the home stretch now.

Misterkitty.org, in their Stupid Comics section (highly amusing – go check it out!) notes a shocking instance of textual alteration in a Betty and Veronica double digest. Well, if you have a pile of those digests, you’ll start to notice that they do that all the time, and the weird thing is it’s always in those same strange, blocky letters that look nothing like the original font, so it’s really obvious. Sometimes you can guess what the original must have been (Archie talks about DVDs while carrying a pile of what are probably records – Betty’s babysitting for a girl whose parents are doing some “last minute Chanukkah shopping”) but other times it’s just baffling. Why? And why is it always so clumsily done?
In at least one instance, not only is “I’ll call Cheryl Blossom” changed into “I’ll call Ginger Lopez”, but the panel itself is redrawn, in a style jarringly different from the original, to feature Ginger. Was our mystery censor called upon to perform this task as well?
I like Cheryl Blossom (she’s like the Super Saiyan form of Veronica) so I don’t cotton to this Ginger-washing of her legacy. Fortunately, she’s back now and apparently participating in a “Battle of the BFFs”, along with Ginger and the others. So that’s all right then.

174 – Roblush

Aww, it’s that special time in every girl’s life when she first develops a crush on one of her mother’s cabana boys while said mother sleeps off a 15,000-calorie lunch in the hot tub. Insert joking reference to current reality show featuring hilariously trashy family of the moment here! (I’m sure there must be at least one like this.)

>>149524650
steph being an archie fangirl is really funny. I had no clue about this aspect of her

175 – Upending The Cookie Sheet

It’s Harvey Awards time! And since I’m now an industry professional by the slimmest of margins, I got to vote on them! Unfortunately I hadn’t heard of most of the nominees, probably because very few Archie comics from the mid-nineties were nominated this year. I did get to vote for Foxtrot for best syndicated strip, though. And for best webcomic? It’s gotta be Hark! A Vagrant!, come on! If PVP wins, I’m totally moving to Canada for reals this time, or at least putting a big “DON’T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR BEATON” bumper sticker up somewhere.

>>149524780
I actually had to cut several of her Archie rants short, too big to fit.

>>149524511
Pepper still had a copy in stock when I started doing this in 2020 so might have been

>>149524853
its so interesting because so much of her early stuff was early anime inspired but her art has always had a western comic flair, so the Archie connection makes a lot of sense

176 – Sinister Sinatra

So, I actually finished that Christian manga series that I talked about waaaay back on June 2nd, at the beginning of this storyline. Wow, this one has been going on for a while, huh?

Anyway, I was curious to see how it would play out. Will the main character leave behind her wild, hedonistic life of implied sexual debauchery and drug use that we never actually see, and become a Christian? The answer is a big ‘a-DUH’, but at least her personality doesn’t reverse completely. In fact, the moral of the last book is “just because you’re a Christian doesn’t mean you have to wear drab, floor-length dresses and rinse your blue hair* back to being Mouse-Brown #5.”

The artwork take a HUGE leap forward in the later books and actually becomes somewhat stylish, with real backgrounds, unlike the lazy gradients I try to get away with these days. Yeah, there’s still some questionable stuff, like the reappearance of the Strawfeminist Boogeyteacher to rant about ‘oppressed womyn!’ (has any actual feminist ever used that spelling, or is it one of those things like ‘vertically challenged’ that were satire from the get-go?) and the ninth book’s “Hey teenagers! Throw away your condoms!” moral, but somehow I just can’t help but find it charming. Possibly because it’s up against competition like Psalty The Singing Songbook. I guess basically all you have to do to win my approval is show up after I’ve seen something horrible and be kind of cute and not that bad, which leads me to believe I should be on the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Ba-zing!

So, the conclusion. The last four books go really fast, because half of each is actually a “movie” made by the main characters, in a variety of genres. They’re a sort of half-assed Star Trek spoof (sounds familiar…), a disaster movie about a collapsing mall, a Biblical epic (the only one of the four with any overt religious content at all, oddly), and …

177 – Fetch Me My Princess Bathrobe

I’m not sure where this room is in the ship – they have a lot of rooms that don’t serve any apparent purpose (having a crew of seven people on a ship that’s a couple of kilometers long will do that for you.) There’s a small living area and a whole lot of ice cream storage, and the bridge… I think the rest is taken up with theaters and topiary gardens and what-not.

178 – To Exploitation!

Rusty looks way too tall sitting up in that last panel. Just imagine he has roborrhoids and has to sit on a rubber donut, I guess.

179 – The Goddess Euphoria

She’s not crazy, she just happens to have one of those personalities that’s a teeny-tiny bit susceptible to declaring herself a god and going full Nero.

180 – Wilting Ivy

Great new fanart today (the first featuring Ivy!) from a longtime reader. Thanks a bunch!

181 – Mission Inadvisable

I was actually mildly interested in this when I first heard about it. Then I saw the trailer and guess what? It’s another one of those “movies that came out this year — the movie!” dealies, craftily not calling itself Vampire Movie in an effort to lure me in to a bounty of pointless skits based on the trailers of Toy Story 3 and Inception and whatever else is currently or recently in theaters. Because god knows there’s not enough silly stuff in Twilight to just do a parody of that.

One of the other trailers for it contained blurbs from “Ivana Tinkle” and “Hugh Jass”. You know everybody hated it when they have to get their rave reviews from crank calls to Moe’s. But as terrible as they are right now, though, the ongoing crop of spoof movies is going to be very interesting in forty or fifty years, when they’ll function as a kind of pop-cultural time capsule. We’ll be able to watch them and see a cross-section of everything that was part of the pop culture in the year that it was born, from the things that went on to be treasured classics to the detritus that was forgotten after its opening weekend. I guess in the long run, they’re a good thing (and it’s not as if anyone is making me go see them, anyway).

But here’s something better to watch: The Big Girl, a beautifully animated student film. As you can probably guess from the title, I have ulterior motives for liking this one, but seriously, it’s awesome for everyone. Gorgeous blending of stop-motion and drawn animation, starring a kick-ass heroine.

>That's the Chinese one with the pink devil thing right? I think I know the one

182 – Medusoid XIII

China, being enormous both in area and in population, is a lot more diverse than the Western world sometimes gives it credit for. For instance, while a hardworking animator is busy making a rocking cartoon about an adorable little butterball who can kick your ass, someone in another part of the country is making this, which poses to the asses of the world not the danger of being kicked, but only the danger of being laughed off. Seriously. It’s pretty funny.

>bootleg Batman origin or something, honestly If I had to manually add in links to EVERYTHING Steph is talking about I'd never get finished, so sorry if some of these lack context since the hyperlinks aren't there, but I'm one guy)

183 – Like A Rock

NANCY DREW… REPORTER (1939)

I watched this one for research purposes since I’ve been on quite a Nancy Drew kick while working on Pepper Penwell. You know what? It’s actually suprisingly good. Bonita Granville’s Nancy may be a little clumsier and ditzier than the modern (and somewhat cardboardy) incarnation, but she’s also brave, assertive and quick-witted. She gets herself in plenty of trouble, but she’s tough and proactive about getting out of it, too.

This version of Nancy’s not a perfect feminist icon — there’s more than a whiff of ‘lookit what this dizzy dame is putting her poor long-suffering boyfriend through’ about the film — but considering it’s from friggin’ 1939 and it still manages to have an active heroine and even pass the Bechdel test, it’s not bad.

Plus, it’d be worth it for Killer Parkins – the 12-year-old Jughatted hoodlum with a penchant for slipping into a Donald Duck impression – and the out-of-nowhere all-public-domain musical number, even without the main plot.

Like everything else ever, it is now on Youtube. Let’s watch, shall we?

(Edit: The movie can be watched all in one piece here, which might be more convenient – thank you very much to the reader who sent this link!)

184 – Needle in a Spacestack

It’s been asked a few times whether Ivy is a permanent addition and the answer is, yes she is! She hasn’t been added to the cast page due to a variety of factors of which the most prominent is laziness. She’ll be on there eventually though.

185 – Postponed Postpartum Period

If anyone’s heading to Dragoncon this weekend, check out the freebie table, there will be fliers there to advertise Widgey and Pepper, so pick one up if you’d like! A big thanks to Jennifer for putting them out for me!

(P.S. since I’ve been so into Nancy Drew lately, today’s H!aV was fucking delightful).

>hang on a second, let me grab my old copies

>>149525092
Here's the actual final website release version of this page. As you'll notice, Piper's dialogue was tweaked(I think THIS is the canon final version, the other stuff was from Steph's full size masters and some lines might have gotten changed right before uploading).

There are probably other minor things like that that might be different between the Masters and the final release addition, this one just caught my eye.

186 – Turkey Club

Luckily for Benjamin, her golden armor is an elastic rubber-gold alloy built to accommodate the full-figured pleasure goddess on the go. Also lucky she had that turkey leg – which was kept in a case labeled with “Break Glass in Case of Simultaneous War and Delusions of Godhood”, and had a smaller turkey leg hanging next to it. I didn’t draw that stuff because it’s already getting kind of long.

187 – Why Doesn’t God Need A Starship?

Reader Beware – you’re in for a scare!

So my latest weird little crush on a vast bloc of extruded youth ephermera is, you guessed it, Goosebumps, the horror series for kids. I never got that into them when I was young – I was actually a bit scared to read them because of the spooky covers and the fact that I was a very very wimpy child. So you can imagine the anticlimax when I ran across a few of them recently (as well as summaries and commentary for many, many more, thanks to the wonderful Blogger Beware) and discovered that they really weren’t scary at all. For the most part they were simply youth adventure or fantasy novels up until the last page, at which point the happy ending would be undermined by a crazy twist where someone randomly turns out to have been a werewolf the whole time and eats the protagonist — or something equally bizarre.

They’re enjoyable little nuggets of crazy, though, due to being short and falling squarely in the “MST3K Habitable Zone” – that area on the quality graph where enough interesting things are happening that it’s not boring, but it’s goofy enough that it’s impossible to take it seriously. (Sort of a hard concept to get across, made harder by the fact that due to the level of movies they got stuck with many classic MST3K episodes, such as Manos: The Hands of Fate, actually far fall outside the zone on the “crappy” side. Maybe the “Rifftrax Habitable Zone” would work better?)

188 – Stone Tools

It’s really hard to remember to keep putting that little cartoon-Roman leaf crown thing on Ben. Also, the Turkey Leg of War… although I’m pretty sure she’s taken that off by now and eaten it. It takes energy to be on the march, after all.

>At some point in the decade between drawing these and releasing the full quality masters(which only happened in 2022ish I think) Steph accidentally deleted the full size masters for the last section of the comic. Sorry, but we're winging it going forward.

>She does apparently have the Reiko masters, but like, the actual paper sheets, and the glue turned yellow so, she's not releasing that. Especially not since she quite the erotica sphere a year ago

189 – Pklim

Surprisingly, one of the ten most common paragraphs in Qvan. It’s an unusual planet. Still, kudos to our worm-of-all-trades for her cosmopolitan vocabulary.

Since I haven’t linked to it in a while, I wanted to share my friend’s Etsy shop – she makes some fun and funky bead jewelry, it’d be great for a gift for someone, or for yourself! If jewelry is your thing, check it out, I would be very happy if I could direct a little business her way.

>I'll be damned it's still up https://www.etsy.com/shop/sparklingsundries

190 – In the Cage of the Jellyfish

I like the monster here but what I wasn’t too happy about was the way the panel order flows – I tried getting a little funky with it and I don’t know if it reads in a natural way. That’s hard to judge when you’re the one making it.

191 – Curvy Doom

I guess this wasn’t a problem for the Medusa of old because there was only one of her. Medusa wasn’t immune to the sight of herself, hence the ol’ mirror trick. But the snakes in her hair must have been able to look at each other all right, otherwise they would have been caught for sure at some point. Maybe isn’t because snakes aren’t very visual animals. It’s possible they would have turned to stone if they sniffed each other with their tongues or something, so they probably had to keep them in their mouths. It would make it hard to eat, but probably Medusa didn’t feed them much anyway, since they don’t have back halves and she’d just end up with her head filled with dead mice.

UPDATE: A couple of people have written in to let me know that Medusa had sisters, Stheno and Euryale. There’s really no excuse for me not knowing that, since that’s how it is in One Piece too. However, Medusa was the only one who could be killed. Also, she didn’t turn to stone from seeing her own reflection, although I’m sure I saw that somewhere (basilisks, maybe?) — she just got beheaded. Parts of my mythological knowledge come from sort of dubious sources, so the heads-up is appreciated!

192 – Just Like Kicking A Bicycle

She really likes her jump kicks, does our Benjamin.

193 – Deep Benpact

Once this story wraps up (which won’t be very much longer) there will be another break for a bit. Too many projects going on all at once – but I’ll try to at least put up some more standalone stuff in the meanwhile

>sobs in hindsight

194 – Scatchi 9-1-1

Aww, it’s the end of Girly. Along with Penny Arcade, Girly is one of the major inspirational example of artwork going from “adequate” to “godlike” over the course of about a decade. I just hope this means there’s going to be more Dr. Voluptua comics, now…

…so in that last comic, uh, who’s pregnant, anyway?

195 – The Worm Has Turned

What a cute fanart was received from the person who sent the previous one of Ivy. It’s a quick one, but full of personality!

>>149525263
I dont think I have the 2022 full quality masters? I have a (currently somewhat outdated) Mega folder I've upkept but I think there's been some discoveries since I started keeping it, so if you've got anything I don't I'd like to update it to have a more full archive of her stuff.

I do have all her Patreon stuff but I don't want to upload it yet. Even though the Patreon's dead I feel like it'd be a little unfair to post a bunch of paid content until it's been a comfortable amount of time.

Here's the archive in its current state:
https://mega.nz/folder/z4diiDrL#ukx2ToEab_jbPXJbmM13yw

196 – Carving Control

New GPCB today for those following it. Nothing too amazing – just wrapping things up.

>that was it it btw, never heard from again
>also title pun get it

197 – Classic Benjamin Lite

Hey, looks like SLG is having an one-day sale through tomorrow (Sept. 30). If anybody out there was planning on buying Widgey but hadn’t gotten around to it, here’s a great chance to get it at a reduced price! Check around the rest of the store too, because there is some really nice stuff (including some comics you only have to pay shipping on, super good deal!)

198 – My First Blaster

It’s the end of a very long storyline (a little over a quarter of the entire comic! Yeesh!) and time for Intragalactic to take a little break. The strip buffer is totally gone and there’s a lot of other projects demanding attention — some art-for-pay, some tattoo-design-for-not-pay (but I want to do a good job because, y’know, that’s permanent, yo) and some other stuff. I’ll try to have a few standalone strips now and again, and I may have some fan strips coming along one of these days. Thanks for reading, everyone, and seeya at the next update!

Homework Help

Piper (age 15) helps Ben (age 10) with some kind of futuristic geometry homework. This is right after Benjamin came to the Academy as an unusually young junior cadet. Her education before this was pretty lax, so it was a big shock and she had a hard time keeping grades up — not that it was very high on her list of priorities anyway.

HEY LOOK! You can now preorder Pepper Penwell and the Land Creature of Monster Lake. It’s a comedy detective adventure and I bet you will just love it. There were some problems with preorders for Widgey being automatically cancelled when the the printing was delayed – so if that happens (I don’t think it will) don’t panic! Thank you in advance to everyone who orders!

Civ-Os

Today we have a special guest comic from Chris Lowrance of Let’s Make Believe. If you’re interested in D&D or RPGs in general be sure to visit – there’s a lot of unique monster ideas, some of which I got to illustrate, and eventually there will be some journals about our D&D campaign. (Currently, I am playing a Level 2 gnome druid named Spucky Conkerbucket.) Thanks very much for this cool comic!

In other news, WOW SO COOL! There is a trailer on Youtube for Pepper Penwell! Go check it out right away! And it seems as though the price has been reduced on Amazon for preorders, so if you’re planning on getting it, now would be a good time!

Happy Mid-November!

Costumes from the following comics (some of which are NSFW):

Scatchi as Lil’ Ragamuffin
Benjamin as Wonderella
Poid as God
Axl as Ivan
Ivy as Skadi
Rusty as Filby
Piper as Doctor Voluptua

The next story will begin sometime in January and will tell the untold – UNTIL NOW – story of Benjamin’s hardscrabble childhood growing up in a nebula of discarded DVDs, her short career as a pod race hustler, and her first days at the venerable Starfreeze Academy of Ice Cream! Watch for it!

As always, please remember you can pre-order your copy of Pepper Penwell using the handy link to your right, and a little bit up.

Young Rusty Chronicles

A little bit (a very little bit) of Rusty’s history.

Hey guess what, I got an interview up on SLG’s web site. Wow! Go check it out please, everybody.

Edit: new pages will start on January 1st and will be released each Saturday from then on. This should allow me to release them steadily, while still developing other projects.

>Here's the interview archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130515145723/http://www.slgcomic.com/Salt-of-the-Earth--An-Interview-with-Steph-Cherrywell_b_24.html

>One quote that stuck out was "It's an instinct for me, like birds migrating or praying mantises biting their boyfriends' heads off. Even if I was the last person on earth and there was nobody to show them to, I would still be drawing comics. Probably painted on city blocks in that case, one panel per building. In a few hundred million years the cockroaches would evolve into paleontologists and it would be like their Easter Island."

Chapter 11 - Beginjamin

199 – Beginjamin

And we’re back! New comics will appear each Saturday. Let’s all enjoy the story of Benjamin’s early years.

And just in time, another Edgeling picture. This one is of Ivy and wow, it is a really great capture! I especially love her nose. It’s almost annoying when other people are so much better at drawing my own characters than I am.

It’s a bit late, but recently a friend introduced me to Heavy Rain for the PS3 and I was just fascinated by it. It’s really less a game and more like an interactive choose-your-own-adventure movie, but unlike other examples of the genre it’s quite engaging. She’s done some amazing fanfiction for it, check it out if you’re a fan of the game.

>friend's ffnet account was lankypanky, still up, but inactive, wonder if it's the same person as the etsy or not

200 – The Slime Farmer

More of chibi-Ben. Those pink streaks in her hair are natural – she dyes it nowadays.

201 – The Smog My Destination

(Update: Amazon is listing Pepper Penwell as being out now. Let’s hope the preorders go smoothly this time. If anyone hears anything from Amazon about it, please let me know!)

So they changed the zodiac all around today, apparently. I love when they arbitrarily screw with stuff like that, because it makes the future even more futurey when there are lots of little changes, the sort of things that you could imagine making up for your science-fiction novel set in the world just around the corner. And the new sign is a dude fighting a snake! It’s so metal! Congratulations, everyone who gets the snake-fighter-god-guy!

(Yeah, I know it’s been around for a long time and there’s actually two zodiacs and blah blah whatever. I’ll just be either an Aries or a Pisces depending on which stats I need at the time. Go Ophiuchus!)

202 – The Legend of Great-Goppy Nam-Nam
Posted on January 22, 2011 at 1:54 pm in Comic, Uncategorized as part of Chapter 11 - Beginjamin « volume. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed.

>no description on this one....

203 – Wellingtonfordham

>all this time with fancy descriptions and anecdotes and now nothing? Methinks Steph was nearing her breaking point....fuck SLG man

204 – They’re All Human

They just look like that because of the pollution caused by melting DVDs has increased mutation rates in Ben’s hometown to Oblongs-like levels. Ben herself has been protected her entire life by a thick layer of urchin filth.

Pepper is supposed to be coming out soon, but I’m rather out of the loop on the production end of things. If anyone out there spots it in the wild, let me know!

205 – Shinobi Bloodslice

Not quite sure what’s going on with Pepper – Amazon still says it’s shipping soon, but at least one person got an email from them saying it wasn’t being released until July (!!) – so those of you who have preorders, please hold tight! And please let me know if anyone hears anything further from them.

206 – Dirty

207 – The Scum Trade

So why is Pepper late? Apparently it arrived on time from the printers in Indonesia and then got horked by customs agents who went over it checking to see if someone was hiding drugs in it. Which is probably the sort of thing Pepper herself would approve of, so it’s kind of weirdly appropriate? And the good news it apparently they released it after not finding any hidden panels in the cardboard boxes so it should in fact be on the way fairly soon, for you patient souls with Amazon preorders.

208 – The Missing Piece

In case you missed it last week: Pepper update! The books, which actually have a much more interesting life than I do, have been released from their customs holding cell cleared of all suspicion with involvement in Indonesian drug smuggling. (Or whatever they were looking for – it was weird.) They ought to be working their way through Amazon and the comic shop system any time now. Thanks for your patience, everyone!

208 – The Missing Piece

In case you missed it last week: Pepper update! The books, which actually have a much more interesting life than I do, have been released from their customs holding cell cleared of all suspicion with involvement in Indonesian drug smuggling. (Or whatever they were looking for – it was weird.) They ought to be working their way through Amazon and the comic shop system any time now. Thanks for your patience, everyone!

209 – I, Pod

Hey everyone! Pepper Penwell is totally available right now at last! Are you a bad enough dude to buy one for your very own?
Posted on March 11, 2011 at 6:27 pm in Comic, Comic Blog as part of Chapter 11 - Beginjamin « volume. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed.

>including the date stamp now for context

210 – Moses

Pepper hit the comic shops this Wednesday, so if you have a local comic shop and they are cool and buy good things, they might have it! If you didn’t just get it on Amazon for some reason.

211 – Princivention

This May I will be at Balticon where (if we make the deadline) there will be a new book collaboration coming out that I did the illustrations for. More information when it’s closer. If you are going, come say hi!
Posted on April 1, 2011 at 9:34 pm in Comic as part of Chapter 11 - Beginjamin « volume. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed.

212 – The Academy
Posted on April 9, 2011 at 6:25 am in Comic, Uncategorized as part of Chapter 11 - Beginjamin « volume. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed.

213 – Cadet Benjamin

That’s it for a little while – I’ve got some other projects which prevent me from giving as much attention to Intragalactic as I’d like. I’ll keep you posted when they’re closer to finished!

Thanks to Apolaustika for doing a nice write-up of Pepper and Widgey!

Here is a blog about waiting tables in Las Vegas that uses a picture of Piper in the header (with permission). It seems that a lot of restaurant patrons in Las Vegas are total buttheads. Las Vegas is just like my job!
Posted on April 15, 2011 at 6:49 pm in Comic as part of Chapter 11 - Beginjamin « volume. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed.


>...Stephanie was here

>Stephanie never came back

>ok she did, but this is the end for Intragalactic proper.

Opening Research

Hey, it’s topical. Wheatly kind of reminded me of Poid. Oh hi, super bad perspective on the blocks in back.

A couple of new fanarts added today – Scatchi and Ivy by Brian of Shifter, and another one by Edgeling that I didn’t get around to putting up until now even though it is AMAZING. Thank you both for the art!
Posted on April 22, 2011 at 6:14 pm in Comic. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed.

Studmuffins

A beautiful guest comic by the amazing Mamabliss! Super thanks!

The Space Casey script and activity book is just about ready to go! We will be at Balticon with copies, and once it’s available I’ll put up a link for orders. I got my preliminary copy in the mail and it is looking very slick!

Pepper Penwell and the Lost Treasure of Captain Squeaks

Here’s a piece I’m working on for the SLG gallery show in August. (The theme was tikis and/or tropical drinks.)

>Just remember SLG fucking imploded at the end of 2011 and was bankrupt and defunct in 2012

Doris Danger for ComicCon Souvenir Book

This was a piece I submitted for the ComicCon Souvenir Book under the category of SLG’s 25th Anniversary, and apparently it made it in! That was good news, although I wish they would have told me beforehand so that I could have told anyone who was going to be on the lookout for it. If you still have your book, check it out, won’t you? Doris Danger is a delightful spoof of crazy Kirby-esque Silver Age comics about giant monsters, I recommend it a bunch!

You’ll also watch to be sure to order your copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, a relatively faithful (but condensed into the interesting stuff) version of the classic withhunter’s manual from days of yore. Anyone who enjoyed Widgey and Pepper will definitely enjoy this! And it even has an illustration by me in it!
Posted on July 28, 2011 at 5:47 pm in Comic, Uncategorized. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed.

Yeah, I’m not updating this too much anymore, huh? But here’s something that deserves to be seen: a really awesome picture of Widgey, by Moody Ferret. SUPER CUTE
Posted on March 24, 2012 at 12:26 pm in Comic, Uncategorized. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed.

>And we're post crash now...I can almost hear the bummedness in her text

A Sensible Girl 1

I’m gonna put this (and maybe some others of these) up here, but it’s just a test for now.
Posted on October 23, 2014 at 9:13 am in Comic as part of Part 1 « volume. Follow responses to this post with the comments feed.

>A Sensible Girl was her main 'ongoing project' when she launched her patreon Supercake Studios, got to about 67 pages if I remember correctly, never finished. Supercake was active until 13 months ago when Steph quit the erotica game. Funnily, she did it during the overnight break of last years Creamy Beamy storytime.

So basically, what happened is this.

Steph started off drawing shit in high school, Swamp Oppossum(lost albeit the character cameos in FSR), some early Flying Suit Reiko(which...might be lost or it might have been redrawn and touched up into the first couple issues of what we got in 2000, statements are contradictory) and some early late 90s Muertitos(lost outside of one page I can no longer find). Her internet trail goes cold pre-2000 so who knows the specifics, but yeah.

Then we got Flying Suit Reiko in 2000-2002 and the old Muertitos from 2001-2002, and in 2003 she started up Dystopia(Dice-Topia). Plus Steph's sidehustles like the Porkydex and her work with Axel-RR(who still does art) when the two of them split up the Reiko website into two halves, with the dedicated Steph stuff staying with her and the public art and IRL chat section going with Axel.

Dystopia got 3 issues deep, but Issue 4 was put on hold when Steph moved and some personal stuff happened. Then(I don't know the specifics) in the Summer of 2003 she made a reboot issue of Flying Suit Reiko and pitched it to SLG to become a published series. They never bit and in February 2004 she gave up and released it online(still lost outside of Page 1). She decided not to continue Dystopia and instead ended up rebooting Muertitos which came out later that year.

Then we got a couple years of Golden Age, late 2004 - early 2008 were Steph at her Stephest and the output on some years was utterly insane, peaking in 2006 with something like 200+ pages across her two main comics plus her side stuff on Deviantart.

In 2008 with Muertitos wrapping up nicely she started work on Intragalactic to replace it...but then something happened, I think maybe a friend put her in contact, not sure, but SLG was interested in an idea and so she got to work on Widgey through 2008 and 2009, which drained resources from both comics, but especially GPCB.

>>149526494
Then after finishing Widgey, but before it was even published, they wanted more, and she worked on Pepper. Pepper as a character already existed and Steph was toying with the idea(as you can see earlier in this thread), but SLG talked her into doing a full thing. The workload for that plus the massive delays all this caused ultimately killed Creamy Beamy by a slow death of ever less frequent updates in 2009 and 2010, left the conclusion of the finale rushed, and meant the planned sequel where she went to Sucra never happened.

IntraGalactic marched on, Ivy was mostly drawn after Pepper was finished, but Steph had to wrangle the publishing issues and also SLG wanted her to work on collabs and help them raise money to deal with legal issues and attend their panels and also Steph still had a DA at this point and some commissions there and also Steph had to help her friend out with her Etsy and also move at one point and also Steph was 30 at this point, and so after Ivy and Beginjimin with zero buffer space she took a break, spent several months toiling for SLG, and when the company broke apart around her she basically vanished for a bit.

Steph did some DA stuff once in a while on SSakurai(especially ATLA and Korra), and toyed with continuing IntraGalactic or starting a new Creamy Beamy project, but I think by that point she lost the spark, and in 2014 started up her Patreon Supercake Studios and pivoted to full time commisioned work. (Albeit she did toss out that one page GPCB epilogue).

There was an attempt to maybe do another long webcomic with Sensible Girl, but that fizzeled out and honestly by the late 2010s her art quality was declining as she got up in years(she's past 40 now) and the thirst went away. She ultimately retired last year in Summer, but she gave 6 months notice so pretty much everything public was archived before she purged it.

She's currently writing teen novels and working at a library. Unboxing Libby was published in April 2025

Break for now, will maybe dump some fanart or sideart later.

>>149526583
>Unboxing Libby was published in April 2025
Cool, might have a look at a copy when i'm next near a bookshop.

Bump

Fanart time!

MAKE IT

wow I've not seen a lot of these before

That's all the fanart, but there's some art by Steph herself still lying around. Keep the thread alive til tomorrow and I'll dump what's left.

And here, have a Ben Glee.

>>149529190
I would really like to get in touch with you sometime in the future (I'm >>149525471) and maybe consolidate our collections. My goal has been to make a public archive of Steph's stuff available (eventually on IA) so it would be super nice if we could chat about that sometime. If you ever stop by /ceg/ on /trash/ maybe we could talk there?

Thanks for storytiming again!

>>149505117
This character concept was the one thing I remember the clearest about the webcomic. That and the fat female kirk.I wonder where the author got the idea.

>>149529212
What specifically are you looking for? Last public find I was aware of was the two main missing Reiko pages from the main comic being found.

>>149529260
Piper was always my favorite too. The whole thing where she's a puppeted around corpse is so interesting.

>>149529316
I'm saving the pics from this thread so I'll have the high res versions since I didn't even know those existed. If I didn't know about them I'm not sure what other stuff I might be missing. Where were the high res versions of this posted? I know there's a couple single commission pics we found from other people's DAs a while back too.

Just looking to see what else is out there.
It's been a long time since I've updated stuff after I got in contact with that person on Reddit for those missing pages.

Still holding out hope that we find those missing Muertitos pages.

Oh and in case you're new, maybe check out the authors prior 2 comics, Muertitos and Creamy Beamy.

http://muertitos.comicgenesis.com/d/20040921.html

http://creamybeamy.comicgenesis.com/d/20050727.html

>>149529341
Did you check the internet archive?

>>149511941
>>149514490
>>149521959
>>149523591
>>149529152

God I love Scatchi the little fat bitch. I read this when I was younger probably around 2010. I didn't notice how big the main character was nor all the softcore stuff.

I wish western media was more like this. Leaning on angular anime designs but the style being flexible enough to squash and stretch and change styles. It was the style of every webcomic at the time no? god, I miss it

>>149529400
yep, ironically just before you posted this. I've got them in the archive now. Thanks!

>>149529461
Steph's stuff was always a weird stylistic hybrid.

Oh, and this is what her art looked like in 1999. Holy shit the quality improvement. Compare this from the first issue of Reiko to any page in Ivy.

May as well post a few highlights while I'm here. Here's the art quality in 2003. (This is from Dystopia)

2005-2006 era from Muertitos right here

By 2007-2008 like this, and you've seen the 2010 era stuff today.

Honestly it's a weird fusion of homemade Manga style with western comics. Steph was a big 80s/90s anime fan(Ranma, Sailor Moon, Project A-Ko), but also a massive Archie and newspaper comic junkie. The style is pretty distinct

>>149529476
I've got a decent chunk of fanart too.

What's lost that I feel is worth looking for(I'm ignoring stuff like the prototype Muertitos and Reiko shit from the late 90s or Swamp Oppossum, anything pre-2000 is probably lost to time forever and I can't even find a slight trace of it) is...
1. The missing Classic Muertitos pages(and there's two sets since there's two versions of Chapter 3, pre-redraw and post re-draw)
2. The colored character art for Reiko.
3. The 2004 Reiko Issue 'A New Hope'
4. A high quality scan of Pepper Penwell similar to the H.Phugley Backup of Widgey

>>149529617
If I ever find another copy of Pepper I'll see if I can find someone to scan it. I don't want to damage mine. I'm pretty sure you and I talked in /ceg/ at some point but I spoke to Steph on Patreon and she said the paper Muertitos comics definitely exist in a binder of hers, and she might release them someday. Our best bet is some digital hoarder out there, but I don't know a way to get the word out to the fat community at large. Not sure what artists have oldheads in their community that we might be able to prod to get the word out, and a lot of newer artists are annoying about the idea of archival projects.

https://kemono.su/patreon/user/166673

found her old patreon on kemono if that helps

>>149529804
Oh nice! I saved it when I subbed but it's cool that it's already publicly available. I was waiting a bit to post it since I didn't want to upset her by posting paid content so soon

>>149530100
Hold onto yours, a lot of the old Kemmono backups are in horrible quality. Some of them are crunchy as shit.

>>149530100
>>149530262
Yeah this