space girl comic
you probably learned in primary school that it’s a “meteoroid” when it’s in space, “meteor” when it’s falling down to earth, and “meteorite” when it’s splattered itself across your backyard.
personally i think we should change these three terms to “space rock”, “firey space rock”, and “ex-space rock” for clarity’s sake.
fun fact: if you catch a train of starlink satellites just after launch, you’ll be granted 60 wishes at the same time!
some of you clever lot might recognize this as one of the classic sedna comics. but before you accuse me of self-plagiarism or running out of ideas, i actually had a sequel comic to this planned that i never ended up drawing for classic sedna, so i had to bring this one back for context. plus, i just really wanted to see this one drawn properly. can you blame me?
be careful what you say to your kids, you might accidentally give them an eating disorder.
now you can add “extra-vehicular activity” (e.v.a.) to the list of technobabble acronyms you can use to sound like the very smart person you know you are.
i’ve been told that you don’t actually need to put dots after each letter if you write it in something called… “capital letters”? whatever that is.
rockets have pretty much always been single-use since their invention, which has been the primary reason for space travel being so ludicrously expensive. imagine how much a plane ticket would cost if an airliner could only fit 3 passengers and was destroyed after one flight. nasa dabbled with reusable spacecraft with the space shuttle, but the refurbishment of the shuttle was so expensive it would have been cheaper if they’d kept flying single-use rockets.
when spacex landed a falcon 9 first stage in december 2015, we may have finally entered an age of true reusable spacecraft, where rockets can simply be refuelled and flown again much like an airliner. of course, we’re not quite there yet, but in a few decades space travel may finally be accessible not just to astronauts and ultra-gazillionaires, but to regular folk like you and me.
…well, not really me. you’ll still probably need many thousands of bucks for a ticket, and i forfeited making that kind of money when i started drawing comics. :(
confusingly, the soyuz is both the name of the rocket and the spacecraft, the latter of which has had 148 crewed missions as of this post (more than the space shuttle’s 135), with the first one being in 1966! if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, the russians say, especially when you’re working on a soviet budget.
there’s something so kerbal about landing in the middle of the desert with a single enormous parachute and tiny landing rockets firing just before touchdown to soften the impact. spare a thought for boris volynov, who rode soyuz 5 in 1969 when its parachute tangled and landing rockets failed, resulting in the spacecraft hitting the ground so hard it broke volynov’s teeth.
(click here for a high resolution version of this illustration)
it’s illustration day lads! not 100% happy with the colours in this one but i’ve spent so much time fruitlessly tweaking it that i really just need to move on with my life. hope you guys like it.
being able to do chalk art like this is one nice perk about living in a cul-de-sac in a country that doesn’t rain every second day. for reference, a diplodocus is about 26 metres (85 feet) long , and a redstone rocket (which carried alan shepard, the first american into space in 1961) is 25 metres (82 feet) tall. so i think the rocket is a little scaled down in this illustration, but if i zoomed out any further, sedna and dini would have just been tiny little specs.
well, that ends this little dinosaur storyline. it’s not easy making an engaging comic out of a biology/geology lesson, but i hope you all enjoyed it. expect wholesome space comics to resume again shortly. :D
maybe the reason dini always looks a little down is that he’s having a perpetual existential crisis over the fact that him being alive is a direct result of the dinosaurs being dead. life can be a bit of a cruel irony sometimes.
sidenote, if the phanerozoic eon was a movie trilogy, i’m pretty sure the movies would be named:
paleozoic: rise of the animals
mesozoic: the dinosaurs strike back
cenozoic: return of the mammals
obligatory fun fact: the word ‘cretaceous’ comes from the latin word for ‘chalk’ (creta), because the big chalk deposits in western europe were made in the cretaceous period. so next time you’re falling asleep in class, just remember the writing on the blackboard you’re totally ignoring is actually made of dead algae that lived alongside t-rexes.
…that is, unless you’re teacher uses gypsum-based chalk… in which case never mind.