space girl comic
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.
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.
hey, it’s that period that’s famous because of some franchise that overstayed its welcome by soon-to-be 5 movies. you know, the one with all the cretaceous dinosaurs… what’s it called again…?
to be fair though, the jurassic period is when dinosaurs came to dominate mammals and other reptiles, so maybe jurassic park isn’t such a bad name for a story where dinosaurs break out of cages and eat all the humans.
and yes, for those of you who didn’t know, birds are actually avian dinosaurs. and since crocodilians are the only other remaining archosaurs, that technically means that crocodiles are more closely related to ostriches than they are to lizards. isn’t science fun?
the triassic is probably the most underrated of the three periods in the mesozoic. i mean come on, its like an awesome 50 million year-long tug-of-war between archosaurs and therapsids (proto-mammals) for control of the planet, until the triassic-jurassic extinction happens and the dinosaurs go “nah mate, we’ll take it from here.”
also, my hometown sydney mostly sits on triassic rock. so if any of my fellow sydneysider friends ever go to the beach or someplace and see sandstone cliffs, remember that rock was made over 200 million years ago when dinosaurs just started kicking around.
(this fun fact is guaranteed to make you extra fun at parties.)
oh boy, i did a lot of wikipedia bingeing to learn about geological timescales for this comic (and the next few), but here are the cliff’s notes:
the history of the earth is divided into 4 ‘eons’, the current one is called the ‘phanerozoic’, and it’s been going for the last 300 million years. basically everything interesting to do with evolution happens here.
the phanerozoic is divided into 3 ‘eras’:
the ‘paleozoic’ (boring single-celled organisms -> cambrian explosion -> much more fun organisms, yay!)
the ‘mesozoic’ (dinosaurs, yay!)
the ‘cenozoic’ (no more dinosaurs, boo!)
each era can be divided into ‘periods’ (we’re currently in the quaternary), and each period can be divided into ‘epochs’ (we’re in the holocene) if you wanna get real fancy. so it goes eon->era->period->epoch. remember that kids, you’ll be tested on it later (maybe).
sedna makes dini an offer he can’t refuse.
if you haven’t noticed by now, i’m a big fan of silent comics. personally, after page after page of dialogue, i love to take a break and let the pictures tell the story. visual storytelling is always more important than verbal storytelling in my opinion. especially with comics.