Astounding!

And now for something completely different...

2009-09-21T14:48:00.003-04:00

Astounding Returns remains on hiatus for right now, but we've got an even bigger announcement to make. Wait, let me adjust the font accordingly:

Chronopolis is here!!!

That's right, it's an all new weekly comic strip by Alasdair Wilkins and Joseph Shivers, set in the same world as Astounding. Head over to the Chronopolis blog page to check it out!

An Announcement

2009-07-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

Kevin and I are really bummed that we have to keep doing this, but Astounding Returns has had to be delayed for a little while longer. Kevin rather heroically agreed to do this while juggling a ton of other summer commitments, which have unfortunately proven to be more time-consuming than he had hoped. However, we still intend to tell the story of Astounding Returns, and our current plan is to forge ahead as best we can. What that basically means is we won't be promising regular updates, because that's just not realistic at this point. The upshot of that is we'll post new pages as soon as we get them, but it's hard to say exactly when that will be. I might suggest adding us to your RSS reader or whatever similar gadget you happen to have so that you know when we update. I might also contribute some textual stuff if I come up with anything worth doing. I'll promise this right now - there is absolutely zero chance of me doing Astounding Annotations Annotations. I will not subject you to long-winded explanations of my long-winded explanations. That's a promise.

Anyway, thanks for bearing with us as the summer proves busier than we expected. I promise we'll have some great stuff to share with you. I just can't exactly say when that will be.

Astounding Annotations Week 14 Part 3

2009-06-24T12:00:00.001-04:00

Wow, so here we are. The very last batch of Astounding Annotations. Astounding Returns will finally be starting up for good next week. Until then, enjoy my prose in a more extended, less illustrated format. Self-indulgence ahoy!

Day 42

Panel 1: I really wanted to make it clear that this was an ending to the story, whereas the previous two days were apart from the main plot. I think that should be fairly obvious if you, well, read them, but this was my acknowledgment that I still vaguely remembered what the story was ostensibly about.

Panel 2: And I even remembered what the resolution supposedly was! I think it's fair to say that Astounding has a somewhat amorphous plot. That's partially because of its serialized structure, where I tried to come up with a cliffhanger every twelve panels and some sort of punchline or twist every four, and it's also because of how I wrote it, starting with not much more than an idea that I then followed to its somewhat logical conclusion. Of course, I had to invent my own logic, but still. My point is, I suppose, that I think the characters care more about the exact workings of the plot than I necessarily do. I was more interested in what the characters themselves (OK, OK...the plot was also of considerable interest), which is why I tried to make this final day as plot-light as possible. Even if I bent over backwards in previous weeks to make everything make some sort of bizarro sense, here I just wanted to bring the character to the thematically appropriate place.

Panel 3: That's as much my own personal philosophy as anything else. I think regret is an important part of life. Like Ted says, it's just proof that you had to make a choice. I imagine this is a theme I should follow up on a bigger way at some later date.

Panel 4: And if I had to do one thing differently, I'd probably find a way to restructure this first line so that panel is a closer match for the one from week 1. Ah well. Can't have everything. Love the way Joe slowly made Ted corporeal again, by the way.

Panel 5: This was all drawn on location (is that a thing?) at Lamont Library, just like in week 1. Joe really nailed all the interiors and exteriors. I realize not all of my readers will necessarily know the place, but I do think it helps anchor the reality of this universe to have such clear reference points.

Panel 6: Oh, Bill the librarian. Always with the one-liners. How many funny characters does that make? Agent Campbell, I guess, and maybe the Corpsman? As a general thing, I really tried to resist the urge to give my characters a lot of one-liners. Mostly because I didn't trust myself to come up with actually funny lines, but also because I think it's an easy trap to fall into where all the characters become quip machines. Which would have been a hell a lot more boring than what I actually made, I promise you that. Well, at least the way I would have written it.

Panel 7: I really like the energy of this scene. There's something very natural to the way Ted is leaning against that panel. He's not in motion, so I can't exactly compliment Joe on that (although that girl walking also looks great), but there's just something very real about his posture there.

Panel 8: I probably shouldn't have said "still" twice there. Also, are the flowers clear enough? Eh, they become clearer later, if nothing else. Besides, they're meant to be a bit of a non sequitur, at least at first glance.

Panel 9: Could he still become Mr. Astounding? Hmm, it's an interesting question. I mean, the magical lightning doesn't exist in this universe, so that could be a real stumbling block. Considering the multiversal gateways are now closed, I would speculate that his powers are limited to this one universe. That would mean that he can, say, rearrange atoms in the air to create those flowers, but he probably couldn't do something completely impossible like be Mr. Astounding. But we'll never know...for now.

Panel 10: Are you guys ready for me to get pretentious? I mean, it's the last three panels, so it's now or never. (OK, fine...this won't be the first time I've been pretentious. Just indulge me a little bit more. We're nearly done.) I thought a lot about Watchmen throughout the writing of Astounding, in part because the (pretty decent) movie came out during the writing process, and also because any aspiring comic writer really should try to learn (and then rip off) as much as possible from Watchmen. I wanted to do something here that isn't based on any specific scenes. It's more just an attempt to replicate how I feel when I read parts of the book. There's a lyrical quality to Watchmen, which isn't something I can really properly describe beyond calling it, well, "lyrical." If I had to put my finger on it, this principally involves lines with several meanings, at least one of which is an overarching callback to everything we've seen before. It's an attempt to couch everything we've seen in a couple of lines. That's what I tried to do here.

Panel 11: And this exchange is absolutely crucial on that front. I'll leave some of it up to your own interpretations, but the part most directly germane to the last panel is how much Ted developed as a person. As he himself acknowledges, he never really was forced to grow, at least not until his big decision in week 13.

Panel 12: This was a huge change from how I was originally going to end things. My initial plan was basically to end with Ted saying, "Nora, I've got something I have to tell you." OK, that might not sound like much, but the implications are vastly different. In the original, the idea was that he had realized he needed to act on his emotions and he was simply going to confess how he felt. That is, in a word, lame. That ending was fundamentally passive, particularly with the idea that he "had" to tell her, as though he wasn't really make a choice. And that goes against everything Ted should have taken away from this crazy adventure. I never would have considered it if I wasn't such a passive loser myself when it comes to this sort of thing. (Eh, I'm working on it. Hell, writing Astounding was one big way of working through it, particularly in week 4. Chronopolis will have much more active characters when it comes to romance and the like. Promise.) What saving the multiverse as a superhero has given him is, naturally enough, confidence. It's more than enough confidence to actually try to, um, court a woman. (Did I really just call it courting? Like I said...I know nothing.) That starts with the far less serious opener that we see here, something that doesn't scream "Ooh boy here comes a confession" quite like the original incarnation of the line, which is just the sort of thing likely to weird Nora out. Whatever it's about to say, it's coming from a more confident place where Ted actually believes he's capable of winning Nora's affections. I ended things here because I wanted to show that Ted didn't need his powers to make choices, although he had grown as a person because of them. Whether his advances actually win over Nora is something I didn't feel the need to show - indeed, I couldn't quite bring myself to end on an openly romantic note - but I think the fact that I call this "The Beginning" should be a fair indicator of how I think things worked out. Oh, and Joe's art here is absolutely perfect. I'd say more about it, but unlike with my writing, I don't think that's necessary.

Well, consider Astounding well and truly annotated. Join us next week for Astounding Returns! As always, thanks so much for taking the time to read.

Astounding Annotations: Week 14 Day 2

2009-06-17T12:00:00.000-04:00

The next part of Astounding Returns isn't quite ready to go yet. If you saw last week's opener, I'm sure you'll agree with me when I say it'll be well worth waiting for whatever Kevin comes up with. In the meantime, here we go again with the penultimate edition of Astounding Annotations. Try to contain your excitement.

Day 41

Panel 1: A lot of this is ultimately going to be explained - or, at the very least, made clearer - in Chronopolis, so I'll only address what's directly pertinent to Astounding. At its most basic, this epilogue came about because I realized that it was kind of unsatisfying to never provide even the slightest explanation for why Ted Ellis got his powers. (It was also unsatisfying to never reveal his name, something I also rectified.) With only a week or two to go in the writing process, this scene with the gods suddenly clicked into place.

Panel 2: Lord Hawksmoor is a very blatant homage to Authority superhero Jack Hawksmoor. Incidentally, Joe simplified the godly font quite a bit. I think it still looks great. Even better, perhaps.

Panel 3: I will say this much - there are five gods in this scene, and four of them speak. There's a good reason why the fifth remains silent. And the other four all are meant to have reasonably consistent motivations and characterizations, even if they're fairly rudimentary. For instance, the one who has been talking for the bulk of this panel is the least imaginative, most objective of the group.

Panel 4: "The anomaly" is the Corpsman. Just so we're clear. I don't know how easy it is to pick up on that right away - to be honest, I'm still not sure whether any of this epilogue makes sense unless you actually wrote the damn thing - but there at least is a pretty big reveal at the end of the day which should help make things hang together.

Panel 5: So the gods had lost a member of their pantheon, and they needed to give the powers to someone else. For some reason, Ted Ellis was the ideal candidate to receive such godly powers, but the Ted Ellis of this universe - Mr. Astounding, in other words - refused. Thus they reverse engineered the perfect Ted Ellis by finding someone who would choose to live in this exact universe but would also be receptive to the powers of godhood. In the multiverse, the Ted Ellis we've followed for all these weeks is the one who would choose to live in this exact universe and be this exact superhero. There are other Ted Ellises who might choose to be Batman or Spider-Man or some other copyrighted character. But that's another, much more litigious story.

Panel 6: Ah yes. "The Chief". A reference to Isaac Asimov's "Spell My Name with an S" with maybe a pinch of "The Last Trump" in the implied mechanics of godly relations. Both very much worth reading, like pretty much any Asimov story. And yeah, the Chief might be God. I'm not saying either way.

Panel 7: Agent X-20 lives in a godless universe. I sort of like the idea that every single religion plus atheism is right, one way or another, but it just depends on which universe you live in. I decided to make the spy's universe godless because of James Bond's ultra-atheistic attitude in Quantum of Solace. Is that the most subtle reference of all time? It just might be.

Panel 8: The reference to agents here is meant to be as obvious as it hopefully appears. I like to play fair as much as I can, and I'm pretty much signposting the reveal of Byrne and Campbell at this point.

Panel 9: We're getting a bit meta here, as the next day is exactly that - a happy ending.

Panel 10: At this point, these are pretty much all narrative contortions meant to make the two other days of this week make sense. In this case, I'm explaining why the powers Ted Ellis still has in the next day's panels are there. I think this sort of ties into philosophical concepts of the inseperability of body and soul, but I might just be talking out of my ass.

Panel 11: And this is meant to explain why the original Mr. Astounding showed up in yesterday's panels. The gods let him out.

Panel 12: And no, I didn't know the shocking truth about Byrne and Campbell when I first wrote them into week 7. Does this twist make perfect sense in terms of what we saw there? Eh, it's debatable. I think it can all be made to cohere well enough. But that's just me.

Astounding Returns - Part 1

2009-06-10T12:00:00.004-04:00

So this is Astounding Returns, our web-only sequel to Astounding. It's written by Alasdair Wilkins and drawn by Kevin Burrows, and it follows the Corpsman, the Mentor, and the original Mr. Astounding as they come to terms with their very new roles in a strange universe. Or something like that. It will run every Wednesday at noon for the next several weeks, just in time for new comic book day. Enjoy!

A Couple Quick Announcements

2009-06-05T23:30:00.001-04:00

The final two rounds of Astounding Annotations will be delayed somewhat. I will be on a rather long plane flight tomorrow and am currently busy getting ready for that. Hopefully, I will be able to get these out before the first page of Astounding Returns, which is still on track for Wednesday, July 10.

Astounding Annotations - Week 14 Day 1

2009-06-04T23:40:00.001-04:00

So here we go again with what I'm calling "Astounding Annotations." Basically, this is an opportunity to explain some of the more obscure references I threw in (and there were a bunch of them), and to give some idea as to why I did this in the first place. This is the comics equivalent of director's commentary, so if you've just stumbled upon our little site you might want to check out the story itself first (I recommend starting here). And yes, I'm aware this is all pretty damn self-indulgent, so I'll try not to go on and on. And away we go...

Day 40

Panel 1: So, let's take this one day at a time. This particular epilogue is primarily designed to set up Astounding Returns, our sequel web comic (starting next Wednesday!). As such, I wanted to wrap up the various storylines we've seen all the various secondary characters go through over the course of Astounding and raise some more questions the future. But first, I wanted to put the Mentor in a Magneto-style jail in Mr. Astounding's basement. It just seemed right. Oh, and I leave it up to the reader to decide whether the Corpsman really would kill the Mentor, or if he's just using Mr. Astounding as an excuse to not have to get his hands dirty. Not that I would blame him.

Panel 2: This is, if I'm being perfectly honest, somewhat clunky writing. As becomes clear at the end of the day, I needed the Mentor to have access to a sophisticated enough computer system for the original Mr. Astounding to punch his way through that. To do that, though, means granting him a hell of a lot of power, which doesn't really jibe with the whole imprisoning him thing. This highly vigilant A.I. that the Corpsman talks about is meant to get me out of that logical problem, but yeah...really not sure it actually makes any sense. Eh, maybe the Corpsman's just a little too desperate to give him a shot at redemption. It's happened enough times between Superman and Lex Luthor, I suppose.

Panel 3: I think that's known in the writing world as "setting up conflict." Or something. I just liked the part where they said stuff that sounded badass and hardcore.

Panel 4: Another big logical question I had to address - why didn't the Mentor or Corpsman just use the machine to go home? My answer, mundane as it might be, is that it's broken. There are deeper reasons for this, as we see tomorrow, but it seemed like a straightforward reason for them to be stuck here. I guess I also could have had Mr. Astounding send only the Mentor and Corpsman to his universe, keeping the machine in the void. But then, the Mentor could theoretically build another one. I think, at least this once, my first choice was (thankfully) the better way to go.

Panel 5: Thanks, Corpsman, for asking all the other big logical questions. Really taking one for the team there on the exposition front. Although it was actually kind of important for me to remind people that, according to the rules I had set up, there had to have been a Mr. Astounding before our protagonist transferred his mind into Mr. Astounding's body. If I hadn't pointed that out, I'm pretty sure the twist at the end would have been completely befuddling.

Panel 6: I tried really hard to find a non-creepy, non-weird emotional register for this scene. Can either of them really understand the idea that this person - who looks exactly like someone they know very well - is basically a total stranger? Is Nora trying to cheat on Mr. Astounding here, and would that even be cheating if she was? And is the Corpsman even really attracted to Nora? The answers are, in order, "Probably not", "I don't think so", "I'm not completely sure, and it's something my characters should probably debate down the road", and "Not nearly as much as Mr. Astounding is." There you go - you just learned something. You're welcome.

Panel 7: Nora's line here was the big part of my effort to make it clear this wasn't a romantic scene, but instead one built on a bond of mutual survival. Again, totally up to you as to whether I pulled it off.

Panel 8: Hey! It's his name! Isn't that...something! I thought it would be nice to finally reveal his name after all these weeks because, in the end, it really wasn't meant to be a big deal. I just couldn't come up with one in time to write week 1, and I thought it would be better to just leave it alone once I got a few weeks in. I was worried that revealing his name would have to be a big, well, reveal, but I felt I could slip it in the epilogues as an afterthought. More on the exact origins of his name tomorrow, but I will say this - Ted is a great superhero name, and I was glad to give it to Mr. Astounding/The Corpsman/The Mentor (though the Mentor is probably an Edward). If it's good enough for the Blue Beetle (got to love Ted Kord), it's good enough for them.

Panel 1: I thought the coin flip was a good enough gag to waste a panel on. What can I say? Cold fusion is hilarious.

Panel 2: I wanted to call the world he tapped into the "underverse", but that was already taken by Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman series. "Mirrorverse" works just about as well, and it even vaguely ties into something I mentioned in a radio play. Ooh, that's good vague continuity!

Panel 3: I had to be really careful here, as the Mentor had to logically react as though Mr. Astounding - the man who he had tried to destroy - had suddenly returned. Of course, that's not the case, and so I didn't want to tip the audience in that direction lest they get confused. So the Mentor's line had to work on a number of levels. It had to, on a storytelling level, make the action clearer, not fuzzier, which meant reacting to the sudden arrival of a person without saying who that person was. And then, on a narrative level, it had to make sense upon rereading that he was reacting to what he thought was Mr. Astounding. Even I get confused just trying to figure all of that out.

Panel 4: Is it a plot hole that Mr. Astounding knows to refer to himself as "the real one"? Maybe, but I guess he's fairly aware he was displaced by some sort of presence and relegated to the mirrorverse. I think it just about makes sense. Well, I don't know about you, but after all that narrative gymnastics I'm really ready for some Astounding Returns, coming next Wednesday, June 10 to this very website. What? Nothing wrong with a little self-promotion.

Astounding Annotations - Week 13

2009-06-03T23:40:00.000-04:00

So here we go again with what I'm calling "Astounding Annotations." Basically, this is an opportunity to explain some of the more obscure references I threw in (and there were a bunch of them), and to give some idea as to why I did this in the first place. This is the comics equivalent of director's commentary, so if you've just stumbled upon our little site you might want to check out the story itself first (I recommend starting here). And yes, I'm aware this is all pretty damn self-indulgent, so I'll try not to go on and on. And away we go...

Day 37

Panel 1: Ah, Week 13. I'm going to warn you right now - this won't be the longest entry I've ever written. Just a crazy schedule right now, so I'll try to keep this to bullet points. Big thing here is we introduce the gods. I'm not sure if we clarify that they are actually gods, but that's their deal. The script is a mix of Norse Runes and the Tengwar script from Tolkien. It proved a little too ornate so we cut it down for the next week. This is also meant to set up the narrative conceit for how we're presenting this week. They're accessing and replaying people's recollections of the event, so that's why people narrate this week.

Panel 2a: I'll say it right now - if we had had a week 15, we wouldn't have done the diagonal boxes. To call this week rushed (as I know some people have) is a fair criticism, but I really tried to justify this in terms of the change in pacing that comes with going from four panels to eight. The vague in-story reasoning behind it is that this is meant to replicate the fact that Mr. Astounding can't allow himself any complete thoughts for fear of activating the bombs. I think my original line made that idea slightly clearer than what he ended up saying here.

Panel 2b: I really only did this because I knew Terror-Saurus was a fan favorite and he deserved a return appearance. Well, as much as anything in Astounding can be considered a fan favorite. You're welcome, five people I happen to know!

Panel 3a: I liked the idea of bringing back the other versions of himself our hero had become. Still, I was mostly working backwards from the fact I knew I'd be talking about them in Week 14, and it would be good to see them again.

Panel 3b: And then I created the Robo Rockers in Week 12 because I knew I needed someone the winged version of our hero could plausibly impale with a sword. Huh. I really wrote this thing backwards, didn't I?

Panel 4a: If someday Astounding becomes a major motion picture, I think this is the scene I'm most looking forward to seeing. Who doesn't want to see a secret agent have a martial arts battle with an ape in a spacesuit? Nobody, that's who.

Panel 4b: This is a vague reference to the series finale of Justice League Unlimited, where Batman grabs onto the back of Darkseid's head while he fights Superman. It's not exactly helpful, but you've got to appreciate the effort.

Day 38

Panel 1a: I wanted to make it clear that, as much as Mr. Astounding had tried to create a threat for his allies specifically so he'd worry about them and remain distracted, these heroes were far, far too good to have much trouble with these villains.

Panel 1b: I was really going for ludicrously, awesomely over-the-top narration with lines like this.

Panel 2a: Joe described what the Corpsman does here as a mix of Captain America and Oddjob from Goldfinger. Yep, that sounds about right.

Panel 2b: This is probably the part of the comic where we most hurt from our confined space. Joe did his absolute best and I think he just about pulls it off, but I'll be the first to say I put him in a really difficult situation by trying to condense two weeks worth of action into one.

Panel 3a: This is pretty much where you really you need something for narrative reasons - in this case, I needed to get rid of everyone except the Corpsman and the Mentor - and you sort of hope you managed to unintentionally come up with a good reason for that earlier in the comic.

Panel 3b: Fortunately, the idea that the Corpsman was a cosmic anomaly and thus had no true home world to return to just about worked. I guess you could argue what he did to Mr. Astounding in Week 8 made their universe his home world, as his consciousness became the permanent controller of that universe's version of him. Still, I think that point is ambiguous enough that this just about makes sense.

Panel 4a: Again, I really wish we had a full panel to really explain this. Actually, that probably would have needed two or three to make it clear visually.

Panel 4b: If I can ask a logical question of my own comic (and I'm going to say I can)...who the hell thought it was necessary to build a "multiversal map" the size of a billboard and put it near all the bombs? Eh, I guess the Mentor just felt there were some spare Men-Taur robots who needed something to do. It's also a bit of a plot hole how the Corpsman knew the universe they were headed to was the void, but keep in mind we don't show any of the dialogue from this week. The Mentor probably recognized that universe as the one he had just visited.

Day 39

Panel 1a: I was glad I was able to keep the narrators fairly straightforward. It was going to vary quite a bit more at one point, but giving Mr. Astounding the first and third days and the Corpsman the second day seemed much cleaner.

Panel 1b: Again, creating the void was sort of a happy accident. It was only when I was desperately trying to resolve this threat (which in and of itself was just a desperate attempt to make an abstract problem a concrete one) that I realized he could bring all the bombs to the void by making that the one thing he thought about them. Of course, they really should explode the instant they arrive. Maybe they can only detonate once every bomb has left the Mentor's universe. Yes, that'll do.

Panel 2a: I didn't exactly want Mr. Astounding to say he was going to let these bombs kill him, but, yeah...that's what he's doing here.

Panel 2b: Again, I would have liked more time for him to deal with the Corpsman and the Mentor.

Panel 3a: Although I think the pacing here works sort of well. I think the motion of Nora running towards them works nicely with the idea that we're speeding towards the ending. Well, I think so. This also sets up why they're still in the Astounding universe in week 14.

Panel 3b: This was where I wanted to make it clear what the hero had learned and how he had changed. He had been given a power that meant he never had to make a difficult decision, but now he's ready to do just that.

Panel 4: This was, in a sense, the payoff for there not being any dialogue. I really wanted the fact that no one else (other than the gods) had spoken this week to emphasize the importance of what Mr. Astounding was saying here.

Astounding Annotations - Week 12

2009-06-02T23:35:00.000-04:00

So here we go again with what I'm calling "Astounding Annotations." Basically, this is an opportunity to explain some of the more obscure references I threw in (and there were a bunch of them), and to give some idea as to why I did this in the first place. This is the comics equivalent of director's commentary, so if you've just stumbled upon our little site you might want to check out the story itself first (I recommend starting here). And yes, I'm aware this is all pretty damn self-indulgent, so I'll try not to go on and on. And away we go...

Day 34

Panel 1: I think this week was probably the toughest to write. I'm not exactly sure why - I guess I just finally realized I had an entire story to wrap up and, since I was devoting the final week exclusively to epilogues, only two weeks to do it. As such, I had to set up a multiverse-spanning threat and quick, which required an absurd amount of exposition, as we'll see. To counteract that, I decided to throw in the craziest shit I could come up with, and that pretty much took the form of a Washington D.C. remade in the Mentor's image and an army of robotic centaurs.

Panel 2: Thematically, I suppose it's kind of appropriate that the Mentor and Men-Taur are walking on water, what with all the god stuff I've thrown around. But really, it just seemed inelegant for them to walk around the Reflecting Pool, so they had to go over it. I also felt like I had to explain why the hell he's so powerful he's apparently become the dictator of, at the very least, the United States. It seemed like discovering the secret of multiversal travel might be enough to do that. Keep in mind, the Mentor is, like all the other versions of the character, only 18. Thanks to Alexander the Great, the idea that he could conquer the world at that age is not as utterly absurd as it really should be, but I just thought I'd remind people (including myself) of how young the Mentor is.

Panel 3: This is kind of based on the Planet of the Apes remake (which in turn was kind of a ripoff of the Chasing Dogma comic Kevin Smith made for his Jay and Silent Bob characters), if only in the sense that that stinker of a movie put the whole "Lincoln Memorial with someone else's statue in it" idea out there. But having him wear his two gloves from previous weeks is, if I say so myself, a pretty good twist. Also the idea that he'd keep a human-sized replica next to the giant statue. Yeah, this day is pretty out there.

Panel 4: That is a great bow from Men-Taur. You just don't get that sort of respect from today's robotic centaurs. Incidentally, I created Men-Taur because I wanted a robotic version of the Mentaur (for reasons that will become clearer in Chronopolis) and I wanted to do something really different. Making it a centaur certainly qualifies as "different", and it ties in nicely with the fact that this is set in the same continuity as the Golden Age comics from Centaur Publications.

Day 35

Panel 1: The Oarsman is one of the characters Joe created for week 6, and I was glad to get him in here before he takes on a leading role in Chronopolis. To be fair to him, I'm not sure Nora's joke is funny either, but I wasn't exactly intending it to be. I guess I wanted it to be just funny enough that somebody's boyfriend - like Mr. Astounding - would find it funny because he loves the person who said it. Oh, and the Robo Rockers were created so we'd have more villains in week 13, and because I thought evil robotic versions of famous rock and roll stars was suitably absurd. According to Joe, here's who they are based on: "The fat bearded one is Jerry Garcia with a turtle body, a reference to the song Terrapin Station. the one in the suit is Paul Mccartney. he's supposed to have retractable 'wings,' but I never got a chance to draw. The tall one with the afro is supposed to be like Jimi Hendrix and the short one with the beard is after Levon Helms, the drummer for The Band. He uses a motorized vehicle with built-in drums to move around, a reference to the song Cripple Creek." So there you go.

Panel 2: The whole "you brought...him" bit is meant to emphasize that, as far as this Nora knows, the Corpsman is still the enemy who defeated Mr. Astounding and banished him from his home universe. Mr. Astounding's response is pretty much the understatement of this geological epoch.

Panel 3: I really thought I should acknowledge how convoluted the story had become, and this seemed like a good place. The shape of the mansion is a bit of a reference to Titans Tower, by the way.

Panel 4: The Corpsman's line there is a twist on a gag from Runaways, where one character points out how emasculating it is to be carried in a flying superhero's arms, and so he refuses to do it. I felt the Corpsman is far more self-assured and determined, so he'd just acknowledge it and move on.

Day 36

Panel 1: Putting the Corpsman's name in quotation marks was my acknowledgment of how absurd it had become for these characters to have conversations with each other. Would the Mentor seriously refer to him as the Corpsman? I mean, I suppose it's a decent shorthand, as using their name would be confusing as to which one he was talking to. There was also the little problem that I still hadn't revealed their name, so my hand was kind of forced there.

Panel 2: Yet another absurd glove for the Mentor, this time with a steampunk vibe. Since I satisfied the comedy rule of three with these gloves, I'm just going to assume this third glove was hilarious to all who saw it. I was also glad I was able to repurpose old quotes as hopefully badass callbacks.

Panel 3: I liked the mathematical progression of billion to trillion to quadrillion, and they all seemed to make sense. I mean, an explosion big enough to blow up the entire planet would roughly be a trillion times as bad as one that damaged a city block (actually, a trillion times would probably take out the Moon as well, but a destroyed Earth is a destroyed Earth). And a billion bombs on a billion worlds with roughly the same population as ours would mean put the death toll at roughly the number I said, as one billion bombs times six billion people per world would equal quadrillions of deaths. Also, the population of the Galactic Empire in Asimov's Foundation books is said to be in the quadrillions. (Technically, it's said to be less than a quintillion, which led to a lively debate with a friend as to just which order of people there were in the books before we bothered to look it up, but I was absolutely right when I said it was in the quadrillions. That may be the dorkiest thing I've ever written, and there are plenty of contenders for that title.)

Panel 4: This is a reference to a similar panel in week 3, although the emotions are very much reversed. I wanted the emotions on the Mentor's face to show how deeply humiliated he was and how that just might lead him to want so much death. It's a cartoonish turn, to be sure, but then we're talking about someone willing to call himself the smartest person in the multiverse. He's a guy with a cartoonish egomaniacal outlook. Anyway, to quote Hot Fuzz and Bad Boys II, shit's about to get real.

Astounding Annotations - Week 11

2009-06-01T23:25:00.000-04:00

Astounding Annotations - Week 10

2009-05-28T23:35:00.001-04:00

So here we go again with what I'm calling "Astounding Annotations." Basically, this is an opportunity to explain some of the more obscure references I threw in (and there were a bunch of them), and to give some idea as to why I did this in the first place. This is the comics equivalent of director's commentary, so if you've just stumbled upon our little site you might want to check out the story itself first (I recommend starting here). And yes, I'm aware this is all pretty damn self-indulgent, so I'll try not to go on and on. And away we go...

Day 28

Panel 1: I think that's one of the better recaps. If nothing else, it broke up the format a little bit. I was so glad to stop having to write those. Onto the actual first panel, this is another example of me seeing something cool and then incorporating it into Astounding in real time. In this case, it was the Comedian's armory from the Watchmen movie (which I thought was pretty good, for what it's worth).

Panel 2: Uh. So much text here. At least Nora keyed in on the important word. For the record, the Corpsman isn't in love with any version of Nora. He's not even particularly attracted to her, but that's mostly because he's so dedicated to the mission. Like I said, he's truly Batman (and not post-Hush willing to let romance into his life in the form of Catwoman Batman either. That was one hell of a tortured sentence, wasn't it?)

Panel 3: This is pretty much all you need to know about the Corpsman. His search for identity is his biggest insecurity, what with being a cosmic anomaly and all, but he's making himself far, far too busy to really deal with it. Oh, and I'll admit I wasn't crazy about Joe putting somebody in the room up above. The dialogue in Week 8 had meant to suggest Nora was the only person in the entire dorm, but since it never said that explicitly, well...no continuity error! Woo!

Panel 4: I'd be interested to know who people think is the hero at this point. I'd generally say I rooted for the Corpsman the whole way through, but I admit I made him do some pretty vengeful, hardcore stuff, and this is a pretty brutal line.

Day 29

Panel 1: This is maybe the craziest, most self-involved continuity possible, but for what it's worth I had this planned out the whole time (well...at least going to back to when I wrote week 5). But man, Joe sure does love roughing up our hero, doesn't he? I mean, he did get struck by lightning and plummet three stories, but still...between this and the burnt hand in week 6, you start to wonder what Joe thinks of the poor guy.

Panel 2: Since the dialogue pretty much speaks for itself, I'll just briefly discuss the Corpsman's look, as I've kept promising to. Basically, I'd been reading Paul Cornell's awesome (and, tragically, soon to end) run on Captain Britain and MI13, which features Captain Midlands, a gruff British superhero who has fought the good fight since World War II. I'm not exactly sure why I wanted a militaristic look. I suppose I thought that, in a world without superheroes, the Corpsman's outfit is fairly non-ridiculous. I threw in the gun as a nod to the new version of Captain America and we went for the full brim around the helmet - something I had erroneously imagined Captain Midlands having - mostly because it looks awesome. Oh, and the boots are pure old school Captain America. For what it's worth, the boots were made using the fabric of Mr. Astounding's cape from the outfit he left behind in week 6. Actually, I believe the entire outfit other than the helmet and the sewed-on symbol is made out of the Astounding costume.

Panel 3: This is where the Corpsman pulls the stupid fictional character cliched mistake of talking too much and giving away the solution to Mr. Astounding. I knew it was sort of lame for him to point out the full scope of his powers like that, since what happens next is really the only reasonable thing to expect. I justified it on the grounds that the Corpsman knew it was only a matter of time before Mr. Astounding worked it out anyway and decided he might as well risk it now than wait for his next reappearance. I don't know if you buy that or not, but that's my own theory.

Panel 4: Joe really nailed the transition here. By the by, I know this week makes it pretty ambiguous whether or not either character was planning on actually killing the other. I'd say, on balance, that neither character would cross that line, but both have been pushed to the edge and the thought has crossed their minds. If either were actually a killer - and I don't think they are - they might have gone through with it. Maybe. Honestly, even I'm not sure.

Day 30

Panel 1: "I'm just an aberration created to patch a hole in cosmic continuity." Ah, don't you just love self-referential humor? The "cosmic" part makes it meta without being too meta.

Panel 2: I think this panel is where the relationship melodrama part of Astounding gets it ass kicked by the superhero action movie part of Astounding. Very much as it should be.

Panel 3: Wow, this day is so meta that it almost hurts. Generally speaking, I wanted to avoid the whole "This is just like those comic books I read" angle, not because that doesn't interest me as because then you run the risk of the characters spending more time discussing the genre than actually being involved in a story within said genre. (I think movies in the late nineties had a tendency to fall into this trap. Or maybe it was the early 00's. I get those two mixed up. Also, seriously, what the hell are we calling this decade?) Anyway, I thought here was the perfect place to step back and have the Corpsman admit how ludicrous his life is, particularly by the standards of his otherwise normal universe.

Panel 4: OK, OK, "Fun With Copyright Infringement" probably beats "Stop Hitting Yourself", if I'm being honest. Oh, and I know what we see in week 11 is most definitely not what the Corpsman was talking about here, but what the hey. Next week is meant to be fun. And boy, is it ever. But we'll get to that tomorrow.

Astounding Annotations - Week 9

2009-05-27T23:45:00.001-04:00

So here we go again with what I'm calling "Astounding Annotations." Basically, this is an opportunity to explain some of the more obscure references I threw in (and there were a bunch of them), and to give some idea as to why I did this in the first place. This is the comics equivalent of director's commentary, so if you've just stumbled upon our little site you might want to check out the story itself first (I recommend starting here). And yes, I'm aware this is all pretty damn self-indulgent, so I'll try not to go on and on. And away we go...

Day 25

Panel 1: If I can go back to last week for a second, the "Next Week" caption for week 8 (and thus this week's title) was far and away my favorite. If I can nominate one thing that I did as actually sorta inspired, then titling the big Astounding/Corpsman brawl "Stop Hitting Yourself" has got to be it. Also, I love that Joe put a couple random people between Mr. Astounding and the Corpsman in this shot. I'd love to know what those two made of what they were seeing.

Panel 2: These next two panels probably win a shared prize for most ludicrously obscure references. "By the way, that was a complete lie about the healing factor" is a reference to The Young Ones episode "Oil", where Vyvian says pretty much exactly that about the oil he had claimed to have discovered. Oh, and since this is our first really good look at the Corpsman's symbol, I'll point out that, like Joe said in the description from the last post, this is a caduceus, which is the symbol of medicine where two snakes are wound around a staff. However, the two snakes are actually positioned such that each is biting the other's tale, thus also forming an ouroboros. That last part is easier to explain - it's a reference to the fact that the Corpsman and Mr. Astounding are alternate versions of the same person battling for control, which is pretty much the closest two superheroes can come to devouring each other. The caduceus is on there for a few reasons. Mostly, I thought it would be cool to combine the two images, but it also fit nicely with the name "The Corpsman", as a corpsman is a medical officer in the US Navy. And, since I'm going through the character's conception completely backwards, I called him "The Corpsman" in the first place because that pretty literally means "The Body Man", which made sense as he was the body left behind when Mr. Astounding's mind went elsewhere. Honestly, after a while this all jumbles into a vague idea that "The Corpsman" is a pretty cool name and has a pretty great design, which is ultimately all we were really trying to accomplish. More on his look in a little bit.

Panel 3: I need a breather after all that. Anyway, the reference here is to the Justice League Unlimited episode "Dark Heart", where Batman also flies through the air and says "Now would be good." Here's the exact moment:

Panel 4: Wow, this might just be the most hideously overwritten day in the entire series. I don't know why there are so many convoluted sentences. I guess I just really fell in love with these particular phrasings. I mean, I stand by all of them, but I'm the first to admit I'm taking twelve words to say about three or four.

Day 26

Panel 1: Just in case this wasn't completely clear, the Corpsman goaded Mr. Astounding into punching him on a very carefully arranged trajectory that would send him flying towards Nora's room. To ensure he actually landed in her room, they used a powerful electromagnet to pull him through the wall. I admit this is completely nutty, but I hope it's nutty in a cool comic book kind of way and not in a lousy writing kind of way.

Panel 2: I wanted the Corpsman's narration in the previous panel to suggest he too might feel something for Nora, and then for his narration here to completely undercut that suggestion. Also, I believe Nora gets to be the first person to swear in Astounding. She sure as hell won't be the last.

Panel 3: Radion is the substance that killed a bunch of New Gods in the recent insanity that was DC's Final Crisis. I still don't know what I make of that whole mess, but radion clearly stuck with me enough to throw in a tip of the hat here.

Panel 4: Got to love Darth Vader's cameo in our big dramatic moment. And, for the record, the Corpsman shot first. He always shot first. Just want to make that clear while Star Wars is on my mind.

Day 27

Panel 1: This panel does some serious heavy lifting in terms of making the Corpsman's plan even remotely sensical. (That's not a word, is it?) For the Corpsman to have any chance of defeating Mr. Astounding, he needed to have weakness. After all, Batman couldn't really defeat Superman if he couldn't use Kryptonite. But since Mr. Astounding's powers are just a chosen manifestation of the protagonist's larger, godlike abilities, it doesn't really make sense for him to have weaknesses. Thus why the Corpsman made Mr. Astounding specify radion was his only weakness in the previous day, and thus why here the Corpsman connects radion to the magic lightning from Week 5. I think I just about played fair here, but I'll admit it's close.

Panel 2: This isn't exactly a reference so much as a further link to the larger comic book universe I connected Astounding to - the world of Centaur Publications. Those comics from 1938-1942 featured tons of mind control and involuntary hypnosis, in particular from the heroic Dr. Hypno. Of course, hypnotizing people against their will can be found in pretty much any speculative fiction, but I felt way more comfortable putting this in knowing that, yes, the chosen universe in which Mr. Astounding lived did indeed have involuntary hypnosis.

Panel 3: Really going for the dramatic moment here.

Panel 4: Whether we accomplished it is up to you.

Astounding Annotations - Week 8

2009-05-26T22:45:00.001-04:00

So here we go again with what I'm calling "Astounding Annotations." Basically, this is an opportunity to explain some of the more obscure references I threw in (and there were a bunch of them), and to give some idea as to why I did this in the first place. This is the comics equivalent of director's commentary, so if you've just stumbled upon our little site you might want to check out the story itself first (I recommend starting here). And yes, I'm aware this is all pretty damn self-indulgent, so I'll try not to go on and on. And away we go...

Day 22

Panel 1a: This day's setup was something I had in mind pretty much from the beginning of the strip. There's only so much you can do to play around with the stylistic conventions of a comic strip, but I thought cramming in eight diagonal panels was something worth trying. There are two main things I wanted it to achieve. First, the smaller panels are meant to quicken the pacing - hopefully, people will read this strip faster, which was meant to match the frenetic nature of this day's events. Second, it's meant to suggest the fact that we're quickly cutting back and forth between Mr. Astounding and his alternate version.

Panel 1b: I wanted to remind people (including myself) that just as our hero leaves his body behind in the regular universe when he becomes Mr. Astounding, so too does he leave a normal Mr. Astounding behind when he returns to his original universe. Thus, this "other" Mr. Astounding (all a bit confusing, I know) was having a nice dinner with Nora before our hero jumped back into that world.

Panel 2a: I don't really have anything to say here, but I want to have a comment for every panel. What? Eight panels in a day is a lot! Oh, OK...that's some great acting that Joe drew, particularly for Nora's concern. It really brings out the depth of their relationship in the instant that we have to devote to that subplot. Huh. Guess I really did have something to say after all.

Panel 2b: The doctor in this panel is based on Doc Cottle from Battlestar Galactica. No real reason other than the fact that I love the new BSG. (I suppose one might remember that Mr. Astounding himself is visually based on Jamie Bamber, who played Apollo on the show, but honestly I think Mr. Astounding is pretty much his own distinct visual at this point.)

Panel 3a: I have no idea if any of this really makes sense. I mean, I think somebody who reads this relatively carefully can work out what is going on, but I don't really think the alternate version of our hero - eh, screw this, let's jump ahead and just call him the Corpsman already - I don't really think the Corpsman's plan really works. He's set up a system where the second he sits up - something he won't do but he assumes Mr. Astounding will do - he will be electrocuted, killing him.

Panel 3b: This causes Mr. Astounding to sever his mental link because he assumes he's dead back in this universe. Well, that body does die, but only for a minute or so. I think my medical science here is dubious at best, but hopefully it works in a comic book context.

Panel 4a: That panel is based on Lois cradling the dead Superman at the end of, well, The Death of Superman, which is pretty much where you'd expect to find a dead Superman.

Panel 4b: And that is based on a very early Superman comic where they showed a doctor trying and failing to puncture Clark Kent's skin with a hypodermic needle. The difference in scenarios makes it far from an exact match, but even if Joe didn't exactly quote the original panel, he certainly paraphrased it. (Does that make sense?)

Day 23

Panel 1: And so another day of mountainous exposition begins. I tried to mitigate this a bit by throwing in the "three weeks later" gag and the "yes/no/yes" run (which I don't think can honestly be called a joke, but at least it's almost something). Joe also has some fun with the Corpsman's hairstyle and the progression of him bulking up. Nora's also still wearing a Windmill Club shirt.

Panel 2: "This isn't all some sort of weird, kinky thing you're doing on the taxpayer's dime, is it?" Ooh, that is some top drawer writing there and no mistake. This panel in particular has to do a ton of heavy lifting in terms of explaining how the hell everything that happens in the next couple of weeks even vaguely makes sense.

Panel 3: You know, considering what we ultimately learn about Agents Byrne and Campbell in Week 14, I'm not actually sure their actions make a lot of sense here. In particular, I'm not sure why Campbell would wait nine weeks to give the Corpsman the Mentor's video when he was never really working for an agency at all. Of course, the gods in Week 14 do say they were working undercover, so perhaps they actually were planted in some official capacity and had to go through a certain amount of red tape. Maybe. This is what happens when you go for crazy twists in the last week, I guess. Not everything is going to make perfect sense anymore.

Panel 4: I think that panel is where I really decided the Mentor is religious. I thought that was an interesting way for the Mentor to frame the discussion - after all, Agent Campbell had referred to Mr. Astounding as the Corpsman's "soul" the previous week - and I think it tapped into the ideas of "destiny" that the Mentor had thrown around in previous weeks. The Corpsman is very much a man without a destiny or a proper place. For now.

Day 24

Panel 1: Wow, the Corpsman is ripped. One of the vague thematic notions I kept in mind while I wrote Astounding was that this was a very twisted take on the Superman/Batman relationship, with one of the heroes just getting his powers handed to him and the other having to actually work for even a fraction of those abilities. In previous planned incarnations of this story that would have had more time for dialogue (like one version where I thought of trying to do this as a radio play, which would have been pretty much impossible because the story is so fundamentally visual), this would have been more explicitly acknowledged, with the Corpsman's character actually saying the Astounding character was Superman and he was Batman, "just without all the angst" (this was back when I thought the Corpsman character would be a more lighthearted character than the fairly grim person he ultimately became). To this, the Astounding character would say, "So, what, you're the Blue Beetle?", which would prompt the Corpsman character to quip back, "So you're not completely lost." Ah, shameless geekiness. You people have no idea how hard I worked to make Astounding as accessible as it was. Yes, I said accessible.

Panel 2: I wanted to make it clear that time had also passed in the Astounding Universe. I suppose it might be interesting to wonder precisely what happened between Mr. Astounding, the Mentor, and Nora during those three months. Hmm...maybe that's something for Astounding Returns - coming in two weeks!

Panel 3: Joe thought it would be funny if Mr. Astounding kept a giant picture of him and Nora in his mansion. I think he's correct.

Panel 4: Ah, the Corpsman. Probably my favorite character. There's a lot to talk about here, but I'll save my thoughts for tomorrow. For now, here's Joe's description of his design: "Classic Captain America boots, New Captain America sidearm, Captain Midlands mask/helmet, caduceus/ouroboros on chest, a military-ish vest, and a ring of thigh pouches as an homage to Rob Liefeld." Put that all together and what do you get? Awesomeness, that's what.

Astounding Annotations - Week 7

2009-05-25T22:15:00.000-04:00

So here we go again with what I'm calling "Astounding Annotations." Basically, this is an opportunity to explain some of the more obscure references I threw in (and there were a bunch of them), and to give some idea as to why I did this in the first place. This is the comics equivalent of director's commentary, so if you've just stumbled upon our little site you might want to check out the story itself first (I recommend starting here). And yes, I'm aware this is all pretty damn self-indulgent, so I'll try not to go on and on. And away we go...

Day 19

Panel 1: I think it's fair to say that Astounding doesn't slouch when it comes to insane plot twists. This was probably the craziest, if only because I'm not sure whether it really plays upon any existing comic book tropes. (Of course, my general theory is that, if you've come up with something no one has ever done before, there's probably a very good reason why no one else has ever tried it.) When I came up with the basic idea for Astounding a couple years ago, the notion of splitting the hero into two characters was one of the original ideas and, when I came to actually tell the story, was one of the key story beats I started with. But more on that in a second. Basically, this panel is trying to pull of a tricky balancing act wherein we clearly flash back to a previous scene but manage to show it slightly after the timing of the original panel, as the Mentor is now gone. The recap helped as well. This week probably has the best recap, actually, as it's melodramatic in the best tradition of old cartoon narration and does as good a job as anything else in clarifying what the current situation is.

Panel 2: I was very proud of myself for only using one word after all the (completely legitimate) complaints of unnecessary verbosity. Although I doubt anyone who didn't actually, you know, write the strip would understand what the hell's going on. I guess I just hoped people would remember that, in the previous week, Mr. Astounding had successfully traveled to his universe, meaning this body had now been left behind. I also was banking on people remembering his comments in weeks 2 and 4 that made it fairly clear somebody was remaining behind while he was having his adventures in other universes.

Panel 3: Fourth degree burns go right down to the bone. If you check out the previous week, there's no doubt his injuries were that severe. And I decided to have the chart use the decidedly non-medical phrasing "something like a bolt of lightning" to better explain why the Mentor had used those particular words in the previous week. For whatever reason, I had become very unhappy with the Mentor saying that, so I threw this in as a continuity patch. No, even I don't remember what was bothering me there.

Panel 4: It only took seven weeks, but this thing finally has decent supporting characters who aren't Mr. Astounding or Nora. Agents Byrne and Campbell are based visually on Chiwetel Ejiofor (you may have seen him in Inside Man or Serenity, which are both unspeakably awesome movies in completely different ways) and, well, Bruce Campbell, as a commenter pointed out. More on them in a second.

Day 20

Panel 1: I'm going to take a break from rambling about me and take a moment to recognize Joe's awesomeness. For instance, I love the fact that he took the completely unnecessary (and no doubt time-consuming) extra step of adding the painting "Christina's World" to the background of this panel. I now challenge our readers to work out the intricate thematic relationships between "Christina's World" and Astounding. And...GO!!!

Panel 2: That was a long way to go for a "Meh" punchline. Worth it though. By the way, Agent Campbell is rather obviously named after Bruce Campbell, and Agent Byrne is named after Burn Notice (which stars - you guessed it - Bruce Campbell) with maybe a dash of actor Gabriel Byrne thrown in for the spelling.

Panel 3: This panel (along with the last panel of week 6) is what sets up one of the big conflicts going forward, namely that Mr. Astounding's powers endanger the universe, which pays off in a big, big way in week 11. Also, Agent Campbell ejecting the tape was one of those little details I wanted to make sure we got in there so that what happens in week 8 makes total sense. I am way too obsessed with things making perfect sense.

Panel 4: Another cool detail Joe threw in: he felt Byrne and Campbell would give our hero a shirt they thought he'd find cool, which explains the eighties goodness that is a G.I. Joe shirt. By the way, when I saw the trailer for the upcoming G.I. Joe movie before the new Star Trek, the entire audience erupted with laughter when they saw the title card. Words cannot convey how badly that film is going to bomb.

Day 21

Panel 1: Between the reference to the monkeys writing Shakespeare and that allusion to Einstein's claim that God doesn't play dice with the universe back in the previous day, I felt I had really hit my geeky joke quota with this week. That is some deeply, deeply nerdy humor right there. Oh, and notice how this version of our hero has his eyes closed. Just trust me on that.

Panel 2: Another panel where I wanted to keep things nice and punchy. This was very much the moment where this character becomes a hero, and it's specifically where he does something our other protagonist hasn't had to do yet, in that he actually has to make a difficult decision.

Panel 3: And hey! Here's the other version of the character, again with his eyes closed! That's parallelism at its finest, folks.

Panel 4: Again, the posing of the characters between panels 2 and 4 is meant to match, although it's not quite as explicit as the connection between 1 and 3. The key difference is that the Mr. Astounding version has his eyes closed, indicating he's about to leave for a different universe, consigning his alternate version to death in a fire. Indeed, both think they're about to kill the other, hence the mutual "I'm sorry." Much like week 5, I was really trying to build to a bit of a dramatic crescendo here, at least with my mind. I'm not sure whether it's actually possible to do that in a comic strip. Still, I think it's a cool moment regardless.

The Complete Astounding

2009-05-24T00:00:00.011-04:00

We'll have our second batch of Astounding Annotations over the next two weeks, and then we'll begin this summer's follow-up adventure, Astounding Returns. Until then, enjoy the entire saga in one place...

Week 14

2009-05-22T12:00:00.009-04:00

Day 40

Day 41

Day 42

Week 13

2009-05-15T12:00:00.003-04:00

Day 37

Day 38

Day 39

Week 12

2009-05-08T12:00:00.001-04:00

Day 34

Day 35

Day 36

Week 11

2009-05-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Day 31

Day 32

Day 33

Week 10

2009-04-24T00:00:00.002-04:00

Day 28

Day 29

Day 30

Week 9

2009-04-17T00:00:00.002-04:00

Day 25

Day 26

Day 27

Due to circumstances beyond our control...

2009-04-14T18:19:00.002-04:00

...the Harvard Crimson accidentally ran the wrong strip in today's paper. Day 27 went out when it should have been Day 25; as a result, things likely won't make a lot of sense this week if you're following the strip in the paper (which is usually a pretty fun way to do it). Anyway, just wanted to acknowledge the error and say we'll be posting Week 9 in the correct order this Friday. Thanks!

Week 8

2009-04-10T00:00:00.004-04:00

Day 22

Day 23

Day 24

Week 7

2009-04-03T00:00:00.001-04:00

Day 19

Day 20

Day 21

The Story So Far...

2009-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

The comic resumes this week after its spring break hiatus. Until then, here now is the entire strip so far in one place. Enjoy...

Astounding Annotations - Week 6

2009-03-29T00:00:00.004-04:00

So here we go with what I'm calling "Astounding Annotations." Basically, this is an opportunity to explain some of the more obscure references I threw in (and there were a bunch of them), and to give some idea as to why I did this in the first place. Yeah, I'm aware this is pretty damn self-indulgent, so I'll try not to go on and on. And away we go...

Day 16

Panel 1: The Mentor is wearing the Fing-longer, an incredible device invented by Professor Farnsworth on Futurama. I have no idea why I included this, other than (a) I thought it was a cool visual (b) it sort of created a loose motif along with the electrostatic glove he wore back in week 4 (c) this seemed like the most absurdly obscure reference I could come up with and (d) I thought it was amusing to imply the Mentor's society was impossibly advanced because he had in 2010 something it took until the 31st century to develop in its original incarnation. OK, I guess I had a bunch of ideas as to why I included it. My mistake.

Oh, and the Mentor saying "Hush" is totally a shout-out to Batman: Hush, which just might be my favorite Batman story of all time.

Panel 2: I think the introduction of "telepathic hacking" is when Astounding finally and irretrievably moves into absurd comic book science. Not that it hadn't been going that way for awhile.

Panel 3: This explanation clears up a few more things about our hero's powers, although there's still way more to find out, as we'll see in coming weeks. By the way, the degree to which Joe burned our hero's hands is almost disturbing. That thing looks like a charred skeleton. Not that I disapprove.

Panel 4: Incidentally, the Mentor's constant insistence on calling his Astounding counterpart a "god" is meant to indicate the Mentor's spiritual and religious side. I'm an atheist myself, and I've never really thought much about the possible beliefs of my characters, but I thought it seemed interesting to make one of my characters fairly spiritual, even if it wasn't something that was ever concretely mentioned. The fact that I made my religious character the smartest person in the multiverse is just my way of saying there's no hard feelings between me and religion. And for the record, any of his negative character traits were conceived of long before I decided he should also be spiritual, so I imply no correlation between the two.

Day 17

Panel 1: Ah yes, the Superman shirt rip (which has recently become possibly better known as the Spider-Man shirt rip). I would have felt Astounding was hopelessly incomplete if it wasn't included, although I'd like to think we came up with a relatively novel way of working that image in there. This partially came about because I thought it was important to show our hero could do more than simply transport injuries and energy - we needed to make it clear he could bring matter through as well, and after going through a lot of frustrating possibilities that I couldn't incorporate easily (the best I could come up with was alt-Nora's baseball bat), I realized the suit he was wearing actually made a ton of sense, and could even be used to explain some stuff that happens later.

Panel 2: I realized this was a bit of a plot hole (and one of the problems I alluded to when I first discussed the Mentor in Week 3) - why couldn't Mr. Astounding simply travel between universes with his powers intact by using the Mentor's machine? This panel is the beginning of an explanation, although I'll say right now there's more going on here.

Panel 3: By the way, if you're wondering why the medical staff didn't remove his Astounding suit, it's because it's DNA-locked - it can only be opened by Mr. Astounding himself (or someone with identical DNA, like any of his parallel universe counterparts).

Panel 4: The debut of alt-Nora as a superhero. She's modeled visually on certainly outfits worn by female Kryptonians (I think the headband also recalls Majestic). There's already a superhero by this name, so I don't think I can technically call her it in the strip itself, but as far as I'm concerned, her codename is Nova.

Oh, and her line is meant as a minor rebuke to the ridiculous amount of exposition I've had to cram in lately.

Day 18

Panel 1: This whole panel is my homage to Grant Morrison's Final Crisis. I also rather liked the idea that the most exciting thing that happened in the entire story was reduced to a throwaway reference in one panel. By the way, the dude helping out Mr. Astounding with the dual uppercuts is Captain Turbo. The Cap is another character who first appeared in Mental Man, the radio play I mentioned in last week's annotations. Oh, and Space Ape was first mentioned in that play as well.

Panel 2: We pushed Nova and Mr. Astounding off to the side partially to emphasize their separation from other heroes, but the much less pretentious reason was we wanted to cram a bunch of other heroes in there. From Mental Man, there's the previously mentioned Captain Turbo, Josiah Phelps, and Psyclone, along with Turbo Boy, who is standing next to the Cap. Between Turbo Boy and Josiah Phelps is the Voice, a superhero originally from Centaur Comics that was mentioned in Mental Man and actually appeared in yet another radio play I had a hand in, the "Men are on Venus!" segment of The Wondrous Exploits of Archibald Blair. Confused yet? No? Good, because the two embracing and the dude to their right are, in order, the Fash, Barbara, and Zendar, three characters based on three Harvard archaeology professors who appeared in my other comic book, Archaeology's Finest, which I first wrote when I attended a Field School in Honduras that they were teaching. The other three - the dude with the oar, the anthropomorphic fox, and the rather eccentric-looking woman - are of Joe's creation. He's told me that the Oarsman is like the Silver Surfer or the Black Racer, another cosmically powerful character who uses a ridiculously human mode of transport. The other two don't exactly have a clear backstory yet, but they'll get one when Joe and I return to this universe for another story (more on that later).

Panel 3: You want to catch your breath after all that? Well I sure do.

Panel 4: Wait...what? What on earth is happening in this crazy strip? Sorry folks, I have no explanation to offer for this shocking turn of events...but I suspect that next week's Astounding just might. Till next time!

Well, that was the first batch of Astounding Annotations. I'll do another round of these once the entire story is complete. Thanks for sticking with us while we took the week off, and get ready - things are only getting crazier from here on out!

Astounding Annotations - Week 5

2009-03-28T00:00:00.003-04:00

Astounding Annotations - Week 4

2009-03-27T00:00:00.003-04:00

He said, "Ug, the caveman, observed his mate running to him in tears, her leopard-skin skirt in disorder. 'Ug,' she cried, distraught, 'do something quickly. A saber-toothed tiger has entered Mother's cave. Do something!' Ug grunted, picked up his well-gnawed buffalo bone and said, 'Why do anything? Who the hell cares what happens to a saber-toothed tiger?'"

Incidentally, I'm really glad Joe was able to get some lines of text below the big "Calendar" text. It always bugs me when information placards seem to only have the title written on them.

Panel 4: Nothing says rousing superhero adventure like a little collegiate melodrama.

Day 11

Panel 1: For some reason, I thought it was really important for there to be a clock in all three of the flashback scenes. I don't think even at the time I was clear on why this was so.

Panel 2: They're watching the episode "Arrival" from the unspeakably classic television series The Prisoner. Originally, I was thinking of making them watch Battlestar Galactica, which led me to searching through three years worth of SciFi channel TV listings to figure out when they could have theoretically watched the episode I wanted them to have watched. Turns out, it was pretty much impossible for them to have watched either of the three possible episodes I was considering ("Exodus Part 2", "Pegasus", or "The Eye of Jupiter"), so I decided they would just be watching DVDs. But then it became fairly obvious the dialogue from those episodes I wanted to use didn't seem immediately cool and badass when selectively quoted, so I went looking for something else. I decided on this iconic dialogue from The Prisoner, which I can't help but think almost connects thematically with what's going on in the strip. Not quite, but it's close.

Panel 3: It was around this time I became obsessed with working out the chronology of the comics. When I thought they'd be watching an episode of BSG on the SciFi channel, I started entertaining the notion that the strip could be set in 2007 or 2008. This was tricky as the only possible dates for such showtimes were in March or May, making it impossible for that to have happened "two months ago" and for them to still be in school. Also, there was the issue that Nora was wearing a Windmill Club t-shirt that has only existed for the last few months, which pretty much meant the strip had to be set in 2009 if I cared about all aspects of continuity (and, as you can probably tell, I do). The only other problem was that the Week 2 scenes that our hero says happened three weeks ago clearly occurred when it was relatively warm out, meaning I had to place this scene as late in the school year as possible. Thus, this particular scene takes place towards the end of April 2009.

Panel 4: Phew, that wasn't so hard, now was it?

Day 12

Panel 1: I thought it was important that the protagonist didn't seem too pathetic throughout these scenes, and I thought the best way to accomplish that was to point out that, much as he might have a crush for Nora, he's self-aware enough to realize that it's probably unrequited and that, given enough time, these feelings would probably pass. It seemed like a relatively mature opinion, although what he's about to do is decidedly not mature.

Panel 2: Indeed, that's part of the reason why I decided to set this whole scene in Annenberg, the freshman dining hall. I felt that what the protagonist does here - abandon his entire life and everyone who cares about him so he can live out a heavenly existence elsewhere - is the sort of thing that one might do as a lonely freshman still struggling to find a place in the world. Actually, let me rephrase that: it's the sort of thing anyone might do at pretty much any point in their life. I just thought it was slightly more justifiable if he did this as an 18-year-old than as even a 20-year-old. Of course, I don't really establish his age either way, so all of that was primarily for my own benefit. I also think I made him a freshman partially because that's when I came up with the idea in the first place.

Panel 3: Man, these have been pretty long tonight, huh?

Panel 4: This is based on a really beautiful panel from Superman: Red Son, where the Soviet Superman and Wonder Woman dance in mid-air.

Astounding Annotations - Week 3

2009-03-26T00:00:00.003-04:00

So here we go with what I'm calling "Astounding Annotations." Basically, this is an opportunity to explain some of the more obscure references I threw in (and there were a bunch of them), and to give some idea as to why I did this in the first place. Yeah, I'm aware this is pretty damn self-indulgent, so I'll try not to go on and on. And away we go...

Day 7

Panel 1: That's our homage to the ultra-famous Action Comics #1 (see it here). I thought we should up the ante a bit from the original car that Superman hoisted. A tank seemed like a good substitute, although I think I originally lobbied for a train. The actual dialogue is an homage to intentionally absurd modern descriptions of superpowers, something Wildstorm's Authority comic is especially noteworthy for.

Panel 2: A word about the costume. Basically, I didn't want to do anything too Superman-ish, so instead I went with two of the most noteworthy alternative versions of the Man of Steel: Captain Marvel and Wildstorm's Majestic, who respectively are the most light-hearted and most hardnosed versions of Superman, which seemed like an amusing basis for a combination. Mr. Astounding has the buttons of Captain Marvel, and to some degree his cape. His boots and his emblem are both more based on Majestic. Together, I think they actually make for a pretty awesome design.

Panel 3: Regarding the name Mr. Astounding - I'm always shocked that there are a few decent superhero names left, and Mr. Astounding is definitely one of them. My original impulse was to go with "Astounding Man", but there was a Silver Age Superman comic where an alien had his robot pretend to be someone who called himself Astounding Man (long story). Considering the hyper-obscurity of the original, I probably still could have used Astounding Man if I had wanted to, but I started thinking about other superhero naming constructions, and it seemed as though the "Mr. [Name]" formula is sorely underused. The only really good example is Mr. Fantastic from Fantastic Four, and even he is usually just plain old Reed Richards.

Panel 4: That's a reference to the one stellar sequence from Superman Returns, where Brandon Routh's Superman hangs out in space and spends the night answering distress calls. It's a remarkable moment in an otherwise tragically unremarkable film.

Day 8

Panel 1: This day is almost nothing but references. This panel is our sole Marvel homage, as this is based on the first full reveal of Mary Jane Watson to Peter Parker in Spider-Man. I thought it was the most iconic representation of beauty in comics, so it seemed like a good choice for our reveal of the perfect Nora. Oh, and I felt justified in making alt-Nora a supermodel because that's what Mary Jane was.

Panel 2: This is a reference to Detective Comics 27, which first introduced Batman. We made a couple of changes, including turning the gangsters in the original cover to the cops in this panel. Oh, and we cleverly removed the rope that Batman used. Because Mr. Astounding can, well, fly, making a rope a bit redundant.

Panel 3: And this is an homage to the cover of All-American Comics 16, which marked the debut appearance of the original Green Lantern.

Panel 4: No comic references here, although the Mentor's machine is meant to look like H.G. Wells's time machine.

Day 9

Panel 1: In my earliest conceptions of this idea, I had Mr. Astounding traveling to the universe in which the Mentor lived. There, he would find the Mentor waiting for him, who would then proceed to give something like this spiel (at the time, I hadn't really decided what he was going to say). For various reasons (which I'll get into later), that idea probably would have made much, much more sense, but I instead decided that for time constraints I would have to have the Mentor travel straight to Mr. Astounding. Giving the Mentor so much power pretty much meant I had to make him a much more powerful character in general, which I think worked out fairly well in terms of the interplay between the various versions of our hero.

Panel 2: I thought it made sense that if the original version of our hero was scrawny and Mr. Astounding was really buff, then the Mentor should be fat. Considering I did base the character on Battlestar Galactica's Lee Adama, whose brief stint as a fat version of himself remains his most famous moment, this was probably highly appropriate.

Panel 3: I tried to make this sound pretentious. It wasn't too hard. I've decided not to explore what that says about me.

Panel 4: And there you go - this comic is officially another superhero deconstruction. I lasted all of, what? 12 panels of superhero heroics before I made Mr. Astounding more than a superhero. Oh well. By the way, the next week title "Revelations & Remembrances" is a reference to two of my favorite stories from the original run of the cult British science fiction show Doctor Who, Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks.

Astounding Annotations - Week 2

2009-03-25T00:00:00.003-04:00

Astounding Annotations - Week 1

2009-03-24T00:00:00.005-04:00

So here we go with what I'm calling "Astounding Annotations." Basically, this is an opportunity to explain some of the more obscure references I threw in (and there were a bunch of them), and to give some idea as to why I did this in the first place. Yeah, I'm aware this is pretty damn self-indulgent, so I'll try not to go on and on. And away we go...

Day 1

Panel 1: The whole thing starts at Lamont Library, which is Harvard's main undergraduate library. I also work there. You can probably guess which was more important when it came to deciding to use it. Basically, I needed a place where someone could plausibly doze off, but could equally plausibly be awoken by somebody. A student workplace seemed like a good solution, and I just wrote what I knew. Although I've never fallen asleep on the job. I swear. Well, I may have come close once.

Panel 2: I actually came up with this idea two years ago, back when I was a freshman. (That's part of the reason why our main character is himself a freshman, but more on that later.) It went through a bunch of possible ways I could go about making this a reality, including a radio play, which would have proven difficult when so much of the story is visual, and an amateur film, which wouldn't have worked because there's no way I could have pulled this off on the sort of budget I would have had. I then pretty much shelved the idea for a couple years until Joe mentioned the possibility of doing a comic strip for the Harvard Crimson. When I realized my other ideas were too big to tell in the time and space given, I went back to this concept. This first day fell into place really quickly.

Panel 3: That might have something to do with the fact that this strip has about 1% of the average day's worth of dialogue, what with only having one word split over two panels. You might find this hard to believe, but I'm actually a pretty wordy guy.

Panel 4: For the record, I generally feel "OK" is spelled as just two letters. But "okay" seemed to read better when separated across two panels. That's the kind of scintillating inside dirt you just can't get anywhere else, am I right? (Please don't tell me I'm wrong.)

Day 2

Panel 1: This is totally a reference to the Terry Gilliam classic Brazil, in which the main character, Sam Lowry, has dreams in which he wears pretty much this exact getup.

Panel 2: The idea here is that if you could suddenly make any fantasy real, I just sort of think the first dream would be flight. Maybe that's just me, but I felt it was strongest fantasy to start on.

Panel 3: One of the things we really tried to do was be fairly consistent in matching panels in one universe to the next panel in another universe. This made for some rather tricky poses for Joe to pull off, although I think he did a brilliant job (especially on the end of week 2, but we'll talk about that when we get there).

Panel 4: Bob isn't based on anybody that I know of, either in character or appearance. I couldn't even clearly tell you whether he was the hero's boss or just a coworker. I usually like to work that sort of stuff out, but we got the go ahead from The Crimson to do this on a Thursday, and we had to get the finished panels in by Sunday at noon. This didn't leave a ton of time, especially when I was spending the weekend in New York covering Comiccon. Yes, I'm that much of a nerd.

Day 3

Panel 1: Might as well go ahead and explain the title. I'd never really come up with a title for this idea, so I went through a couple possibilities before settling on Astounding. I first considered Escape!, partially in reference to a short story by Isaac Asimov, my absolute favorite author of all-time, and partially because that's what the character was doing. I decided that title didn't really fit the full arc of the comic and so went with Astounding Escape for a moment, but then I just went with Astounding, which was again partially a reference to the magazine Isaac Asimov published a lot of his best stuff in, Astounding Science Fiction.

Panel 2: Then there's the main character. Another casualty of writing so quickly is that I never did get around to naming him, and after not figuring it out in week one I decided the time had passed where I could come up with something satisfactory. I think this actually works out sort of well, considering the fact that, despite his great powers, he's definitely meant to be a bit of an everyman. Besides, with so many different versions of him running around, it's not like a name would have been that useful anyway. Although I guess the fact that he's hung up on someone named Nora does provide for a rather obvious possibility as to what his name might be. (Think of a recent Michael Cera movie, or the Thin Man series, if you're a fan of old mystery comedy series.)

Panel 3: Our hero is the only person in the entire series who I gave Joe a visual reference for. Specifically, I told him to base him on actor Jamie Bamber, who plays Apollo on the recently concluded Battlestar Galactica reimagining. I'm not really sure why, other than the fact that I thought he'd make a good physical match for Mr. Astounding, and I have a huge weakness for throwing in references to nerdy stuff I'm currently watching. This is obviously a very scrawny version of Jamie Bamber. I'll leave it to you to google him, as all the results I look at leave me rather, erm, confused.

Panel 4: With flight out of the way, how's about James Bond? That's pretty much the idea here, although Agent X-20 is a reference to a character on the sixties puppet show Stingray. The dude was a villainous half-man/half-fish thing, but it seemed like a good codename for a secret agent. And it was hopelessly obscure. Great combo from where I'm standing.

Week 6

2009-03-20T00:00:00.004-04:00

Day 16

Day 17

Day 18

Previous | Annotations

Week 5

2009-03-13T00:00:00.008-04:00

Day 13

Day 14

Day 15

Previous | Annotations | Next

Week 4

2009-03-06T00:00:00.021-05:00

Day 10

Day 11

Day 12

With big thanks to Jake Augenstern for helping us with the research for this week.

Like Nora's taste in shirts? Check out The Windmill Club for more cool designs just like it!

Previous | Annotations | Next

Week 3

2009-02-27T00:00:00.004-05:00

Day 7

Day 8

Day 9

Previous | Annotations | Next

Week 2

2009-02-20T00:00:00.004-05:00

Day 4

Day 5

Day 6

Previous | Annotations | Next

Week 1

2009-02-13T00:00:00.001-05:00

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Annotations | Next