page 1314 – Taking The Quick Way Up
Uh oh, looks like somebody got inspired by the April Fools page to play around with animation again. I don’t normally give away easter eggs like this, but I’m actually not sure if you can just pause an animated PNG in-browser, and this wound up a lot harder to read while in motion than I’d intended, but one of those crawlspaces in between the floors has “Trigger Was Here” graffiti. I’m pretty sure the eagle-eyed among you should be able to catch the OTHER bits without my help.
Anyway, despite what both the complexity of this gimmick and the fact that I was up until after 4 getting it finished, this is actually something of a stop-gap page. I mentioned this elsewhere, but I got weirdly suddenly sick right the frig outta nowhere for a couple days last week, and it badly threw off my work flow on everything. The page I really wanted to do next would have required me to get started drawing it at least a full day earlier than I was physically able to, preferably more. And while the EDITING of this was way more tediously time consuming than usual, the actual drawing was lightning quick, and that’s the part that I most need to be on my a-game to actually do. So here we are.
Hopefully, the aforementioned workflow hiccup won’t get in the way of a fresh TWC Voting Incentive this Friday. I’ve got plenty more to do, there’s literally a half-finished Conventional Wisdom page open in another tab in Clip Studio right behind the one for this page. I ping-ping back and forth between projects a lot, as in “do a page of one thing, then go do a page of another,” but it is RARE for me to literally have two separate comic pages open simultaneously. I must really be playing catch up right now.
EDIT: NEW VOTING INCENTIVE IS UP! It’s late, but it’s up!
I wanted to make a joke about the ship not having enough layers for even one cycle of this, but the graphs on pages 37 & 38 imply that there are probably at least 20 floors, assuming all floors are of consistent height. And we can reasonably assume that the images there were either over-sized to make them visible, undersized due to the full layout not being determined, or both oversized and undersized because the ship’s size fluctuates as needed for the comic’s gags.
Shame.
At the time, I’m pretty sure they were intended to be properly to scale, especially since Layla had only just had some dialog about how SMALL the ship was… but yeah, these days things only make sense if we assume the highlighted spots are significantly oversized. There’s just too many jokes that really depend on the ship being much bigger than originally implied.
That does mean that the number of people who left the Mad Scientist Convention grows every time the ship’s size is implied to be larger.
Actually, I think that the ship would still have more rooms than most hotels even with what we’ve seen.
There was still easily enough room for at least a hundred passenger rooms in those early viewings. We haven’t even seen the entirety of the Observation Deck at once, and what we saw on page 37 is easily enough for five passenger rooms, and that was probably half the room at most. Give the ship the 20 floors I assumed above, take half away for miscellaneous use like vending machine and passenger storage, or the Observation Deck itself, and you have 50 rooms not even a third of the way into the ship. Another 50 on the opposing hallway and you have a minimum of 100 rooms and still only reaching the middle of the ship’s frontal ball.
The only problem with this is the fact that, on page 37, the Recreation Room is shown to be about the same width as the Observation Deck, but the viewpoint we get makes it look much smaller. Then again, the Rec Room is shown to be an oval, so they could have entered the smallest part of the room and there is more than another dozen TV’s in there.
I feel like there’s a joke to be made here that the exact number of rooms on the ship is equal to the result of adding together the main cast’s exact ages.
Is that age in Earth Years, Earth Days, Earth Hours, the equivalent of the planet Trigger and Layla grew up on BEFORE it was moved to be closer to the sun, the equivalent of the planet Trigger and Layla grew up on AFTER it was moved to be closer to the sun, OR the equivalent for whatever planet they last landed on?
I feel like it would be the last one, personally, but what do I know?
As far as pausing the animated PNG file in-browser – I used to have a plugin that would pause (or at least toggle, not sure it could pause on specific frames) animated gifs, and possibly other animations as well, but changes to Firefox several years ago caused it to stop working, and frustratingly it hasn’t been updated to work with newer versions of Firefox. I haven’t found a good replacement for it.