Page 216
Archive First Page Previous Page Next Page Latest
(Jon sez:)

Your Writer: Jon Kilgannon I'd like to thank Peter Ravn Rasmussen, who wrote in from Copenhagen, Denmark, to tell me that in his Mars trilogy Kim Stanley Robinson made errors a lot more egregious than my misremembering the size of Deimos. I note that none of Robinson's highly-paid editors discovered the errors before the books went to print, while Mark caught the problem and corrected it before beginning to draw.

Tyler Montbriand wrote in to say that page 215 rocked. His praise was more effulgent than that, but I figure I'm allowed to summarize.

Last but not least, Bingming wrote in to ask for the answer to Mark's question regarding the creator of a real geodynamic device. A prototypical mad scientist reportedly created an earthquake machine by that name, and I had it in mind when naming Benjamin's weapon.

Of course, Mark will get to unveil the scientist's name since he posited the question.

(Mark sez:)

Your Artist: Mark Sachs "Recovering." I'm beginning to wonder about that part.

Oh, right, the mad scientist. It's Nikola Tesla, of course. Tesla claimed that he had invented a machine that created self-amplifying resonances in any object, and that it could split the Earth in half if left running for seven days. Although Tesla was a certifiable genius, he was also just plain certifiable towards the latter half of his life and so it's unlikely that his invention was for real. Um, quite probably, anyway. Ouri M. and Psy-Kosh both wrote in with correct guesses, and win a handsome 200 volts of alternating current for their trouble!

I have also, after a lengthy period of slacking compounded with accidentally losing the source material, re-uploaded our April Fools' fake ending page from earlier this year. In retrospect it may have been a mistake to do this as a number of people thought the comic was actually ending and our readership numbers dropped noticeably. Oops. It's also a pity we never did do that Martian hot springs sequence.