Fcking Brexit

Dear the rest of the World; we, the UK, are sorry.

Being English is normally excellent, it's normally great, great fun. Everyone loves (or jokingly hates) the British. We're jolly, jolly good fun normally.

Blimey.

But fucking Brexit has pissed me right off mate. Blimey crikey cor blimey I'm reet off me tits on .... whatever the opposite of national pride is. National shame.



We seem to have sided with the most moronic elements of the world. Only Donald Trump (don't get me started), Boris Johnson (demonstrably lying), and ISIS thought it would be a good idea to leave the EU. But no, we thought we'd ignore every economist and historian and the advice of every technical institution and industry we have, and side with the racists. Great.

(For the foreign amongst you, the EU is the European [economic] Union).

Brexit does not mean we will be leaving the continent of Europe itself and physically floating away, nor does it mean (as some true ignoramuses actually believed), that we have voted to get the 'foreigners' to 'leave'.  No, it simply means we have utterly shot ourselves in every bollock we posses, all in the name of giving two fingers up to David Cameron (not an entirely wasted effort I must confess), and has left our dear nation sadly lacking ... well ... a government, for a start. And for number two, at the mercy of every racist and xenophobe we posses.

Talking about a number two, we're off back to the fucking Bronze Age for a bit. Byee!

In the meantime, comic update; I've done 140 pages now. I'll be hard pressed to finish it in under 150 pages, but we're definitely getting there :)

Something to look forward to as our glorious nation folds itself into a singularity and falls foul of the total thuggish mentalists who normally stay in their bedsits and keep bloody quiet.

Lots of English rage right here. Sorry about that. Cup of tea? Two sugars?

OMGoodness

Seriously you guys, comic 19 is going to be the best one yet. Like, it's amazing.

I don't normally say that; I normally say "It's a good one, this one", or "Weeeell this one had to have lots of plot so it's more about the tension...", but not for this one. Oh no. This one's the best.


I've done 126 pages so far but it'll be maybe about 140 by the time I'm done. So there's about 300+ renders, 9 characters, all individual poses for each render (I don't tend to duplicate renders to fit more speech in, I hate when comic artists do that it just lazily interrupts natural flow), all depth of field, lots of memes and silly bits and goodness me a lot of very, very nice flesh.

*cold shower*

 

Oh don't keep hitting refresh though, I'll let you know when it's a few days away, reveal the title, stuff like that.

Ix Glow Facto

So then. Huh.

Someone mentioned to me a few years back it'd be cool to have Ix's dots glow sometime. Damn right, I thought. But there'd have to be a reason; a trigger for them to light up.

So I've been working towards that; towards the situation in which every part of her little body is utterly,
profoundly orgasming in one huge torrent of spine-breaking craziness, towards the moment when her subconscious is entirely opened out and joined to the person she's with. Can't fake that kind of sex, but if you've had it in real life, you'll know what I mean. So to that end I've been slowly moving the plot; isolating Ix from the crew a little since we met her really; there haven't been many intimate sex scenes with just her and the other characters. I've been getting her theoretical subconscious to the point at which the release would be just like real life: epic.

And we're finally there. Difficult to upload pics to this blog without giving away spoilers this late in the comic rendering process, so you can have these lighting tests instead (you know me and lighting tests, it's this fetish I have...). We're at about 120 pages and ready for the dots to start glowing, baby!

Don't check back every five minutes; it'll take at least a fortnight of work to get the comic ready. At least. But we're getting close to that stage :)

Gotta be honest I'm proud of this one, there's more funny bits than normal I think, and ... wait what am I saying there's nonsense in every comic. But this one is more haha than the previous ones. To me, anyway. And it's more ... I dunno, intimate I guess. Just what I was going for, and lovely to have some warmth after the fairly bleak plot environment of comic 18 - Shadows and Dust was really good but necessarily a little dark and cold. This one has just a touch of chiaroscuro, but on the whole it's all about the comfy snuggliness.

And tons and tons of descriptive content so if you're blind and just have someone read it to you it's hot as heck. How accessibility-minded of me! You're welcome.

Publishing note: The blog title Ix Glow Facto was because I was thinking early last year (when I wrote the script for comic 19) that the comic should be called 'Ix Xho Facto', but I thought people probably wouldn't get the 'clever' play on words from the Latin Ipso Facto, nor get the link between the content of the comic and the meaning of the Latin phrase. So I thought bollocks to Latin references, let's have it subtle rather than convoluted. Anyway, there you go. I might have Luce whisper "Ix Xho facto" to Zan instead; I like their conspiratorial stuff, they're a good couple to play with. Just ask Tom. Or Becky. Or ... well, anyone really :D

If you click on the pics below there's higher quality renders. Just sayin :)

Chiaroscuro

The recent Comic 18 was full of Chiaroscuro (high contrast lighting, lots of shadows etc), largely because I wanted to get some of the cool lighting I had lucked on when I did the corridor [anal] scene between Ix and Tom in Breakfast in Tacspace.

When I created that scene in Breakfast in Tacspace, I threw a few spotlights in and it just kinda worked - I remember blogging about it at the time and someone was like "Hey amazing chiaroscuro!" - and I'd never
heard the word so googled it and discovered it was a real thing! Yay!

So wanting some of that harsh/atmospheric lighting back, the title of #18: Shadows and Dust just kinda fitted with what I wanted the comic to be; Luce being a shadowy character who used stealth to get onboard the ship, and because (1) there were lots of shadows generally (corridors, the galley, main ops room all shadows), and (2) the pivotal use of the hyperdrive as a weapon was to shunt rock around the galaxy. ie dust.

Also Gladiator is a great film and having just watched it (and randomly given my PB Google account the name Marcus Aurelius Bellerophon for shits and giggles), having a reference to that film sorta fitted. In an obscure film reference kinda way, even though the universe of Gladiator and that of STFW are literally lightyears apart.

AAAaaaaaaanyway, in the above page from the upcoming comic (don't hold your breath; it'll be about a month yet), Xho is clearly looking for Ix. Just thought I'd blog it up because I liked the lighting; looks super scifi having such strong contrast and reflective surfaces. I quite like the way Tacspace fits nicely with Stonemason's scifi corridor prop - again an amazing scene from that guy, which with a bit of light play can look super atmospheric.

Note the subtle x-wing in the corner of tacspace - that's the only hint we ever see of it in this comic, just chucked it in there for consistency with the previous comics, though I figured Xho's had time to clear all his tools and junk away since his work on the hyperdrive.

Yes I think about this stuff too much. No there isn't really any reason because nobody but me would likely spot those details. Yes plenty of readers would skip all these pages anyway because there's no boobs on them. No I don't care.

I'm just gonna keep doing what I do :)

Hot physics flipchart action

Remember I garbled on about Loop Quantum Gravity a while back? You know, how it explains a big plot twist that's been rumbling on under the radar for a few comics and will be fully untangled in comic 20?

Well this is where we're at: I've done over 110 pages of comic #19 now. That's right, it'll be
another epic. But we're about to meet the most exciting new character yet: THE FLIPCHART

AAARGHH!!!! I know, right? I've just created this sexy three-legged bastard, and damn it's got me all hot under the collar. Winking its inky eyes at us as it squats and presents Xho's meandering sketches on LQG to the world (no I didn't draw those equations I just googled LQG pics, yes I'm lazy). Daaaaamn baby, turn a sheet for me, mmmm, yeahhhhh.

Anyway ... fun thing about this is it's not going to get explored/explained in #19, the flipchart's just going to sit there in the background of one of the sex scenes so that when we (ie the crew) realise the importance of LQG in comic #20, they return to explore the physics that Xho's already been doodling about.

Fun!