Inside the Event Horizon

THE WRATH OF ENIGMA, PAGE 16 -- NOTHING RELIEVES STRESS LIKE SHEARING A BAD GUY IN HALF

Have you ever wanted a gory scene where San Andreas strike-slips someone in half?

...

Well now you have one anyway.

In this page San Andreas drags Enigma out into the Pacific Ocean and then shears him apart in a supershear earthquake.

Enigma is a bit mysterious in that he's a fault (avatar) that can bleed. It's one sign he's something of an Eldritch abomination.

Some doodles of a rather stressed out San Andreas.

He’s just kinda exasperated by how I still haven’t done an inked drawing of him yet like I planned.

Our boy ain’t doing so well…

'EEPY SCHWARZSCHILD

This comic was inspired by two things:

-how my black dog is normally cute but when she yawns I see all those knives in there

-a series of famous papers from the early days of AGN astronomy when the terms "event horizon" and "black hole" hadn't been in use yet, so the event horizon was instead referred to as the "Schwarzschild throat". (The innermost stable circular orbit, was, of course, the "Schwarzschild mouth.")

I just had to combine these things into a comic involving Schwarzschild (the stellar black hole in the comic) being sleepy. The T-Tauri star Astro is horrified to see Schwarzschild yawn, while the T-Tauri star Astra and the pulsar Chandra find it endearing.

"Dormant" black holes are those that are not currently accreting, so I imagine for the black hole characters, they feel exhausted when hungry and pass out from hunger pretty quickly. So when a black hole "yawns" they're really just trying to pull in matter so they can accrete again and not pass out.

Don't ask how these characters have to be arranged so that they are all similar angular sizes.

Here is one of the papers, if you're curious:

Microsoft Co-Pilot's can now summarize your Word documents. I tried it out on my close-to-done science fiction novel set in a distant quasar 11-10 billion years ago. The result is...interesting. I'm intrigued by how it managed to pick up on its themes.

Whether those themes were executed well, is of course, open to interpretation 😅

(The part where it says galaxies are characters is not quite right. Rather the galaxies are the star equivalent of countries/nations)

JOIN THE LINE

Finally, this comic is done after like a month of sitting on it half-finished. The tornado warning I went through a few days ago was probably the kick in the pants I needed.

In this comic, one of the regional Allies of Gaia centers host a get-together for all the Allies with storms as their disaster avatar partners. It's a way to get all the storms socialized with each other as much as the people.

Jeremy brings Empress, his supercell girlfriend partner, shown here in her miniature form where she's a cute cartoony thundercloud. He finds someone with a squall line, or as meteorologists call it, a quasilinear convective system (QLCS). This is a line of thunderstorms often found along cold fronts.

He tries to introduce Empress to the QLCS, but she is terrified of it. IRL, supercells often get destroyed or even absorbed into the squall line when the line collides with them. Many a forecasted tornado outbreak has turned out to be a bust because a squall line formed and killed all the supercells.

TWINKLE

I never liked Twitter, even before Elon bought it (I’m kinda glad you need an account to look at it now tbh so I don’t get tempted into checking it.)

I hated how you were always pestered into checking it for “academic networking” when the posts were always either a) people with better research than you bragging about how their research is better than yours b) people live-tweeting conferences instead of actually paying attention to people’s talks and c) callout posts. There wasn’t really much networking going on.

I’m probably never inking this comic as it will be a nightmare to letter all the text so I’ll just post a sketch.

I imagine in Stella’s galaxy of Antiocheka, the stars have their own social media site like Twitter called Twinkle.

Stella accidentally triggers the Twinkle Discourse(TM) when she dares to compare planets to black holes, as every star knows planets are harmless…while black holes…

...

I feel bad for not having any new art in more than a week so here have a sleepy Tartarus about to pass out from hunger.

THE WRATH OF ENIGMA, PAGE 15 --- SUPERSHEAR RUPTURE!!!!

The next page of the Wrath of Enigma. This time San Andreas finally joins the fight for realsies. He is reluctant* to use his earthquake powers but Cascadia convinces him to. One unique ability of long straight transform faults is they can create what's called a supershear earthquake. This is essentially the rupture traveling so fast it creates a sonic boom in the ground (seen as the straight lines/mach cone in panel 4) which dramatically increases the damage.

For the most part, I don't imagine San Andreas intentionally sets himself off, as opposed to just losing control and rupturing when he's overwhelmed with stress. One of the reasons for this is he doesn't have precise control over the magnitude. He can try to make a magnitude 5, but then have it snowball out of control and become a 7 instead. This incidentally is a real trait of the San Andreas Fault. Its sides have been ground smooth by so many earthquakes once an earthquake starts it tends to grow very big.

Some scientists think this sort of behavior is true of fault lines in general. This is the hypothesis that the Earth is in a state of "self organized criticality", or that it is always ready to break at any moment, and when it does break, it's almost impossible to know how much the rupture propagates. A common analogy is that of a big sand pile, and how when you remove a grain of sand, it can do nothing, or it can cause the whole pile to come crashing down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality

Some very stuffed Cascadia’s. Once he defeats Enigma for good I imagine he asks the Aleutian subduction zone to make him General of the North American Cordillera again. She refuses given he just doesn’t cover the entire West Coast anymore, but she does give him a buffet of oceanic lithosphere to eat. Which is almost as good as far as Cascadia’s concerned. Dude probably won’t have another megathrust earthquake for 10,000 years after that feast.

It may look like he’s about to explode, but don’t worry. There’s already multiple tectonic plates and subducted slabs down there IRL, and plenty of room for more lol.

THE WRATH OF ENIGMA, PAGE 14 — THE REAL FIGHT BEGINS

Another single-page post from the Wrath of Enigma comic. Here Cascadia starts fighting Enigma without his transforming thunderbird armor.

I had an idea that the ground would rise/drop when Cascadia thrusts his fist up into Enigma's head and drops his tail down on Enigma's body. However I hadn't even depicted it in the sketch so I completely forgot about this.

On the desktop version of my blog there is a page stating that one of Cascadia's abilities is "Orogenic Uppercut" which causes mountains to rise up and impale his opponent, and I have a couple of black and white ink drawings posted of it. I've never depicted it colored, though. It feels more like something he would use back when he was the Cordilleran Subduction Zone, which created the Rocky Mountains. The Cascadia Subduction Zone just doesn't generate non-volcanic mountains as obviously. Ultimately I decided not to have him use this ability in the Wrath of Enigma.

I have depicted here for the first time in color Cascadia using a basaltic lava breath attack. My dad actually was super grossed out by it at first, thinking it was vomit. Technically, though, he's kinda right, given Cascadia makes his magma using the tectonic plates he consumes. He essentially is disgorging the contents of his stomach.

I've pretty much never depicted (even in sketches) Cascadia using his tsunami powers. I think this is because I've only really drawn him fighting other faults/disaster avatars. Enigma doesn't need to breathe oxygen, so he can't be drowned. A 100-foot wall of water does indeed carry a lot of kinetic energy, but you know what has even more kinetic energy? A 100-foot wall of rocks. So Cascadia mostly just bashes Enigma with his giant rock fists.

It really ends up being a thing he only really uses to kill humans, whom he considers vermin*.

Some old drawings I did between high school and college

-some bacteria trading DNA plasmids like emails

-a walking atom bomb (his thought cloud is just a mushroom cloud lol)

-early versions of the space characters, plus the moisture probe!

-all my periodic table characters in one drawing

-the star Rigel wielding Orion’s sword and shield (I’m glad I stopped giving stars buff arms and legs)

The moisture probe is the guy on the upper left of the space characters drawing. He was a minor character I had for a while who was a space probe designed to seek out planets with warm, liquid water oceans

Last Sunday I was finally able to start inking and coloring a comic again.

This will be the first actual comic I do with Empress the supercell.