Apologies for posting this a few hours late, but better late than never!
No costumes this time, but we got your ghosts and rats…. The original plan had been for something more along the lines of a pin-up, and then I started thinking about the possibilities of a gag strip, and then this evolved. Needless to say, by the time I had settled on doing a full page, I realized I’d never have enough time to ink it properly. So please enjoy my rough and skritchy penciling! Maybe I’ll have it inked in time for next Halloween.
(By the way, if you came looking for the most recent page in the ongoing story, you can find it here. See you Tuesday for the next one!)
I so LOVE their expressions. Aria in panel 4, when Patty startles her, and then all at the bottom of the page – Mal looks so suspicious in panel 7, and then in 8 Aria looks down as if something just ran near her foot!
Don’t worry… rough and skritchy is fine.
I love that look on Ari’s face in panel 4!
Heh. The hat is perfect for this gag.
By the way… what sort of hat is Patty supposed to be wearing here?
My old boat was haunted by the ghost of a chief petty officer who was killed on board. He never made any scratching noises, but he was known for shifting equipment lineups and making a mess with tools.
Never had rats, but we did we have a cactus once…
J, that’s all kinds of awesome. I may have to borrow from your ghost’s antics if/when I ever do anything more with the Galaxion’s apparent ghost. So when you say you had a cactus….?
Insectoid, I had a notion what kind of hat Patty would be wearing, but I ran out of time and space (space in the panels, you know, not time and space in a Doctor Who sort of way) to tweak the image enough to make it clear. I’d tell you what that notion was, but after reading Shoe’s comment I think I’m supposed to just nod conspiratorially and say Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. (I really have no idea what brilliance you think I’ve made here, Shoe, but I’ll accept it anyway!
)
Tara, in four years on board, I only ever had an encounter with him once. It was something of an unwritten code on board that no one discussed Chief Joe unless something happened, and as far as I know, there were only three or four times during my tenure on the boat where something happened that could not be explained away somehow. FWIW, the Chief wasn’t so much the mischievous type as he was running the AMR1 space *his* way. If Joe really was a ghost, he did not know that he was dead.
The cactus came along with us when we left the shipyard in Mare Island. Someone had tucked it away in an out of the way spot in the bowels of the engine room, but it was discovered once we were at sea. Being a submarine, sunlight was a problem, but when we had a port call for Midshipmen ops in San Diego, it was set up topside next to the shore power trunk. I recall a duty officer making his inspection tour of the boat topside, noting the cactus with no little puzzlement, then shrugging and continuing on with his tour. Sadly, the cactus met its end when the boat took a steep down-angle on the way to Hawaii. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I’m told it was quick.
Will rats follow man into space?
Will fruitflies, cockroaches or fungus?
Ask Joe Straczynski.
No problem with sketchy art here, either, but Patty’s lines are a tad hard to read!
Good stuff as usual, though.
I think their expressions are all the more evocative for being sketches.
Yes… I’m sorry about the word balloons. I’d make the italic text more clear in an inked version. But the dialogue is:
Patty: “I’ll tell you the tale of a disturbed designer, a frustrated engineer, and MURDER most foul…”
and Mal’s line is: “I’ll tell you the tale of a creaky old ship, two weeks layover at a seedy space station, and a large family of RATS…”