News You Can Bruise

Gather round, fanboys and -girls, and I'll tell you the noncanonical story of how the new universe in Starslip diverged from the universe in which the past several years of the comic took place. It looks like what Kris is writing is consistent with this model, but obviously if he contradicts it, what he writes takes precedence. I'm talking about this because, as I said earlier, this is too nerdy and boring to actually cover in the strip. But on my boring weblog, anything goes!

Two and a half years ago, in the universe that was destroyed recently (universe 1), Cutter, Holiday, and Mr. Jinx worked out the problems with starslip drive, realized that the conspiracy went all the way to the top and that they had to stay away from Earth. Of course, Vanderbeam chose that moment to send the Fuseli to Earth, where our heroes were confronted by military forces and blackmailed into silence. With a kind of penny-ante blackmail that doesn't hold up very well through later character development, but that's a different issue. Suffice to say they're stymied.

Note that the timing is very tight. A couple minutes delay and Cutter/Holiday/Jinx could have convinced Vanderbeam to stay away from Earth. One decision could change everything. In the model I presented to Kris, the point of divergence between universe 1 and the new Starslip universe (universe 2) is in the third panel of this strip.

In universe 2, Cutter didn't think of calling Jinx down to engineering to help them figure out what was going on. This bought them time in two ways. First, Vanderbeam actually dresses more slowly when Mr. Jinx helps him, because he's fussier when he's got someone to push around. Second, Holiday didn't have to explain to Jinx the problem with starslip just then. The downside is that Jinx wasn't around to put the final piece of the puzzle together. It took a little longer for Cutter and Holiday to decide to stay away from Earth. But there was still a net time savings, and Holiday had time to lock the starslip drive before Vanderbeam could give the fatal command.

In other words, universe 2 turned out differently because you weren't reading the comic in that universe, so there was no need for Kris to do a bunch of exposition. (Similarly, the art style is different in universe 2 because in that universe Kris let his drawing style change naturally instead of holding it back for consistency's sake.)

As you know, Bob, the fundamental problem with starslip was revealed when the Fuseli made what turned out to be a discontinuous starslip from universe 0 (where the strip began) to universe 1. (If you must nitpick, "universe x" is a label I give to an infinite number of very very similar universes.) Universe 1 was a worse place than universe 0 for a variety of reasons. For instance, in universe 1, Jovia, the woman who is not Vanderbeam's girlfriend, is dead.

She's dead, but the Fuseli has records of Jovia after her supposed death, back when she and they lived in universe 0. In universe 1, Vanderbeam just moped about Jovia, prevented by blackmail from going up against the powerful Directorate. But in universe 2, he was able to go public with these records and stop the investigation into her death from being covered up. This lead to the events described here. And now the Fuseli from universe 1 has made another discontinuous starslip into universe 2, and become aware of all this. So NOW YOU KNOW. Noncanonically.

This is actually one of the less complicated things we came up with for the semi-reboot.

It's tough to keep my big mouth shut, but now that Kris is name-checking me I guess I can say something. Over the course of the last week Kris and I have been hashing out the future of his comic strip Starslip, on which he just changed up his art style. Originally he wanted to reboot the strip to tell a new story, but like all comics nerds (which I guess I technically am) I love continuity, and we were able to figure out a way for him to tell the story he wants to tell within the existing metaverse. And a byproduct was some interesting plot twists and gags which you should see soon.

There's a very boring bit of continuity that I doubt Kris will want to discuss within the strip, but that should be interesting for continuity nerds. So if the story stays consistent with the thing I came up with, I may give a noncanonical explanation of "what happened".

PS: If you're a super Starslip nerd, see if you recognize anybody in the background of the third panel. There's a minor clue in there.

Josh Lesnick has reverted to doing random comics, at his Livejournal. Pretty Batman-heavy so far.

About once a year I like to read through the entire run of Cutewendy, Josh Lesnick's 2000 dadaist webcomic of sex, violence, 8-bit video game references, and same-sex marriage. Recently I was stymied by the fact that the Cutewendy archives had dropped off the Internet, so I had to buy the trade paperback for $12. But now it's back online, so I've destroyed the trade paperback and the status quo is restored!

Lesnick has a comic going now called Girly, about the daughter of the couple in Cutewendy, and it's a lot better drawn and plotted than Cutewendy, but you know me, I love comics full of random stuff.

Continuing my habit of clicking on Kris's ads I found the comic strip Station V3, which combines a ShaBot-esque sense of gag-based humor with a pretty good psychological study of being posted to a space station where nothing ever happens and you're surrounded by other dysfunctional people. A dimension that could be exploited to great effect by any number of other big-name media brands (I'm looking at you, Beetle Bailey), but never seems to be.

Strip includes cute fishlike aliens, and outdoes Battlestar Galactica in the low-tech science fiction aesthetic sweepstakes by having not just big clunky phones but big clunky payphones. Also you probably know this, but if you like science fiction comics with big space opera arcs and good character development you should check out Schlock Mercenary.