That’s going to wrap up this story line.  Thanks!  I’ll let everyone know on Twitter when the comic comes back from hiatus.  It shouldn’t be more than a month or so, just need to earn some extra cash for more art supplies.

For those who were available to tune in to the comic drawing on USteam, I talked for a good half an hour on all of the background to this story.  I won’t put it all in here, but this is the gist:

If you were wondering why there was no paradox, seeing as the guy went on to invent time travel just to go back in time to prevent himself from doing so, then you’ve overlooked the lobster.  It turns out, he was fundamental in pointing the guy to the breakthrough necessary to make time travel work.

If it still seems like it doesn’t work, well, I went in to some rampant speculation about how a time-like curve might be non-orientable (like a Moebius strip) and even if you go around the whole time curve, you might end up with left being right, up being down, and different events providing the same key future progression.  I don’t know, I’m no expert on General Relativity.  It’s time travel.  Just accept it.

This does point out some very important things about the lobster.  He’s smart.  Very smart.  Smart enough to figure out how to interface with a femtoSD card (thanks, Lisa!)?  Maybe.  It’s just as likely he’ll wait twenty years until you can pick up a USB 6.0 femtoSD card reader on NewNewEgg for $15 plus shipping.  I think it’s fair to assume the secrets to time travel are on that card, or at least the information he’ll need to make it work.

Of course, a comic has limited space, and I can produce a limited number of comics, so it’s something that will never be visited.  These questions and answers are not important to driving the comic forward, and as such, I cannot give up precious comic space to answer them just for the answers’ sakes.  If we do decide that we’re going to make time travel a device, we’ll pin down what we have to and nothing more.  Notice that I did say “we”.  You, dear reader, do have a voice in that you can let me know how you feel by e-mail.  Heck, the only reason the lobster became a recurring character was because y’all made a big stink about keeping him around.  If you have opinions on what loose ends you’d like to see explored in a future story line, well, fire away.

I had some things to say about this comic, but I’m at a complete loss for any of it.

Oh, I remember part of it now!  I’m not sure what direction I want to go with this comic.  Normally, I run outlandish stories either in parallel universes (say, Mary and Joelle: Paranormal Detectives) or I let the lobster carry the story, since he’s an oddity anyway.  Here, I’ve introduced something commonly accepted as impossible (time travel) and woven it in to the common story.  There’s plenty of ways to avoid having to deal with it in the future, but I am more interested in what it means for future story lines.  Do I continue to run odd stories in parallel, or do I let the strip itself break natural laws and keep everything in one narrative?  So far I’ve kept the strip subject to the common interpretation of how the world works (taking a few legal liberties), and I always thought I’d do that.  Now, who knows…

Of course, it’s really not an important question.  Not by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s just an example of the things I think about.

What exactly did happen here?  Don’t worry, I will drop hints in upcoming strips to clarify.  Since I’m probably the only one who catches that kind of stuff, I’ll also put what’s going on in the commentary.  I don’t want to write myself into a a corner, but I also don’t want to leave you guys hanging.

On another note, I chose the word “subatomic” because I thought it fit nicely in the space.  ”quantum” also was a consideration, but in the end it was purely an aesthetic choice.  I wanted to hint at the micro.  Yes, I’m aware that General Relativity has room for the possibility of closed timelike curves, but that’s not really the same thing as what I think about when I think of travelling back in time (though for a proper space-time topology, it’s functionally identical and a moot point).

My point is, I wanted to invoke the micro because there seems to be this common thought that newer theories replace older theories; that somehow because subatomic particles behave as wave functions we can no longer speak of Newtonian principles when discussing macro objects.  That’s ridiculous — It’s not that we can no longer ask the questions of where and how fast something is, it’s that for certain classes of problems we don’t need to ask the questions because in those certain classes the questions make no sense.  In some way, I hoped that people would read this last panel and consider what they thought of physics and science in general.  But that’s probably asking too much of one word in a comic strip.

Philosophy, literally translated, is lover of wisdom (philo-: friendly, virtuous love, soph: wisdom, plus some implied declension for possession).  It is common to hear philosophy referred to as the pursuit of truth.  If that is true, then physics is the pursuit of a perfect model:  A deterministic truth of the Universe.  Just as we don’t throw out all previous philosophy when we find a new field (such as the philosophy of government or economy), we are best served to remember not to throw out established physics models at one scale just because a model at another scale explains something new, or parts of the old model in a more accurate and/or precise way.

Anyway, you’re probably all waiting for me to click the Publish button so you can read the comic.  Well, hang on, I’m going to click it right after I finish this sentence.

I’m doing a few things different now.  I’m tweaking my shading work to better reflect form, but that’s not much more than some minor improvement over time.  I’ve made extensive use of mask layers (I think that’s the right term) in Photoshop, which has allowed me to do many things faster than before.  For example, I have a high-resolution scan of some sketchbook paper which I now make into a clipping mask over my background to give it that hint of texture.  I may do more of that in the future.  I’ve also started to experiment with different brushes, though nothing is evident here (I wasn’t happy with what I had).  I’ve tried a few new tools, too, like BPelt Flatten and Multi-Fill.  Multi-Fill is pretty neat, but Flatten doesn’t work for me and without that the whole package doesn’t give me good color coverage under the line work.  It probably doesn’t work because I’m using Photoshop LE 3, but regardless of the reason I can’t use it with my current setup.

I want to address a few things for the observant.  Yes, this is the same time line I showed earlier.  The dashed line indicates a high probability of the end of the user’s existence (time travel deals in probability spaces, not in discrete values).  Also, the text is always legible to the reader, in this case the woman and the audience.  This is intentional: These displays are designed to put their information up in any orientation the operator desires.  This allows the operator to give presentations or adapt to any other situation as necessary.  You’ll also notice the huge size of the old guy’s arm computer.  I had originally written a joke about the size of computers getting smaller but his eyes getting worse, so he couldn’t see the buttons.  If this computer were a cell phone, it would be the Jitterbug.

For all his effort and dedication to the cause, well, he’s still the same guy inside.  In a future where people are more relaxed in areas not related to our ability to perform work  (I’d like to see us younger people eventually reach a critical mass of power and influence), he still chooses to wear something “futuristic” when he comes back in time for effect.

I was going to have the twenty years away comment in the first panel be a punchline all its own, but since I’m doing two strips a week I need to keep the pacing brisk.  I felt bad about throwing that away, though, because I liked it.  That’s why I wrote it in to the first panel.  It seems the future is always twenty years away: Fusion because it’s not as easy in practice as people want to believe, and flying cars because…well, lots of reasons, but would you want today’s drivers behind FLYING VEHICLES?  Better start building your bomb shelter/house now.

I was originally going to call it an “eye strain inducing high definition screen”, but I cut the text for clarity and pacing.  I also dropped the words “from fifty years in [the future]” from the last panel to save space.  While sometimes I really get wordy and I think it can be appropriate, I don’t think it helped anything in this particular case and I’d rather have the writing be concise to not distract from the art.

I also axed a strip where the guy was confused as to how to operate the coffee maker.  Though a drip coffee maker is a pretty simplistic device, I felt it was in character for him.  I axed it because, quite simply, how many “I’m from the future, things are so different in the past!” jokes can you make?  I plan on making a few, and I thought it was the weakest one, so I cut it out.

There’s a lot going on in this comic, or at least a lot that went through my mind.  I tightened up the writing by leaving out an exchange which affirmed that the guy here is, indeed, the main character.  I thought it was obvious from context, both written and graphical, and it saved me a good two panels.  The second panel shows the guy working out theory on a white board.  I actually had some equations and data picked out to slap in, but I felt that it would have overcomplicated the panel and, frankly, distracted from the pseudoscience.  Both are significant concerns when telling a story in a box 800 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall.  In that second panel, you’ll also notice the coffee is not steaming.  This is the only time I have intentionally shown a cool coffee cup, and it is there to be a subtle reminder that the guy is engrossed in his work.  The wall behind the board, what little is exposed, is painted the same color as their bedroom.  He has converted the bedroom to a research lab, so he can spend nearly his whole life in one place, working.  A lot happens in those fifty years, and I’ll touch up on the high points in the coming strips.  If I have to cut out material, you know where to find it: In the comments of the strips.

On another note, I have the main characterette (MCL for Main Character-Lady, as the astute will remember) wearing a pink shirt.  When I was originally doing the character designs, I insisted that she would never wear a pink shirt.  I wanted her to be a modern-day independent woman, one who would never wear that girlie pink.  As I thought about it, I decided that was pretty dumb.  Why wouldn’t she wear pink, unless she actually didn’t like the color?  An independent woman can wear whatever she likes,  doggone it!  I decided that pink would be in her wardrobe, but it would not be common.  Stereotypes exist for a reason: They make it easier to convey ideas in comics.  Well, I gave in when coloring the very first strip, and from then forward pink was canon.  There’s a lot I regret about the first dozen or so strips, so much that I set up and now can’t take back (reasonably), but in a way it’s neat to look back and think about some of the decisions I made over three years ago.

If nothing else, it makes for fun pieces of trivia that my devoted fans can cling to tenaciously.

Not only will I be bringing back the more lighthearted side of the comic, I will be bringing in the lobster more and weaving through a short story arc as well! A happy confluence of chance occurrences gave me a few good ideas, and with barely a moment to spare.  I’m actually glad I missed the Sunday update, because I was ready to execute a poor comic just to get one up.

I’m playing with how I do backgrounds and painting color more, thanks to Rob Lundy over at http://www.consolehopping.com.  His tutorials are at http://www.youtube.com/user/ArtOfRawb (amongst other places) and if you have any technical curiosity you should definitely check them out.  I played with the smoke today, but I want to start applying this to backgrounds in general.  Let me know what you think as I start tying it in.

This wraps up the Baby Talk story line.  I left things pretty wide open, because I’m having a huge creative block that’s been sticking around for almost a month.  I don’t know what’s going to come up on Sunday, so hopefully we’ll all be pleasantly surprised.

One more comic in this story line, then on to some one-offs and more lobster.  Things are a bit disappointing here, but the next comic will leave this story with hope.  Clearly I will not be introducing a baby for the time being, though I may revisit the guy’s inner dialog with the daughter he imagines he will have.  It is a great mechanism for exploring his maturity.