Max Zing is back to conquer the universe! Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day. He'll get around to it.

Just when you thought the laziest Space Tyrant was gone forever, he rolls slowly back into view and lies on the couch. 

Check out the ongoing strip over at The Duck!

I aim to keep it going indefinitely, or until I get lazy. 

Whichever comes first.

Ah, the people...

As the dictator said, "I have succeeded. It's the people who have failed."

Driedger on Mearsheimer

This was an interesting counter-point to John Mearsheimer's claims about the war in Ukraine. 

Mearsheimer has made the same claims repeatedly for years now. I can't say I've seen evidence of a CIA coup, but then, I wouldn't necessarily expect to. 

Mearsheimer has not held back in criticizing into Biden and Harris, calling them warmongers, and has repeatedly lambasted US foreign policy. 

I've never heard Mearsheimer criticize Putin, however.

Maybe I've missed it. 

On the other hand, I've heard Mearsheimer claim that Putin is a savvy politician and smart operator, that Putin is trying to avoid civilian casualties in Ukraine, that he did everything he could to avoid the war, that Putin is deliberately avoiding frontal 'meat' assaults to minimize Russian casualties, that the US should ally with Russia against China, and so on.

Even though the opening act of the invasion was a fiasco, featuring a thoroughly thwarted airborne assault and a massive armoured convoy that literally ran out of gas, Mearsheimer hasn't, as far as I have seen, criticized any of this. 

He's likely right that Ukraine's cause is doomed in light of the recent US elections, and I suspect he's also right that (given the disparity in artillery between Russia and Ukraine) Ukraine is suffering much higher casualties than is generally known, but his seemingly selective silence is a little... odd.

Exercises in the quixotic: The Max Zing pitch deck!

Once upon a time, I was invited to pitch my comics to film and TV studios.

So I did up a number of pitch docs, based on my limited understanding of the format, and gave it a shot. I'm not a natural presenter, alas, and you're up agains the best of the best. 

My stuff went nowhere, ultimately (in other words, I would advise taking the above pic as a lesson in what NOT to do! Obviously should have a picture of Emma Appleseed on it, but doesn't... I have no excuse).

Everything got jumbled around.

I eventually realized this ever so convoluted, complicated, nuanced, long, arduous and challenging path was not for me. I won't be climbing Everest, either. 

Graphic novels are so, so, SO much simpler.

Page One of Warlord of Io!

I'm pretty happy with how the style of Warlord of Io turned out. 

If you look close, you'll notice that there are very few lines in it.

Everything is defined with gradients. 

Works well for some things, not so well for others. 

There's nothing else out there quite like it. 

Zing, coups and the nature of power

Max Zing oblivious to the world

Running a vast totalitarian empire is like riding a T-Rex: it's great while you're on top, but heaven help you if you fall off. 

I have no doubt Putin has given that possibility more than a passing thought of late. 

Yeltsin famously chose Putin as his successor because Putin promised to keep Yeltsin and his family safe from prosecution for all the loot he skimmed from the Russian people. 

The instability and suppressed violence of a dictatorship was one of the things I was trying to get at with Warlord of Io, where a cabal of power hungry generals overthrows the new, ostensible supreme leader, Zing, who's oblivious to the danger he is really in. 

He just thinks everyone will obey him Because Fancy Title.

I got that impression from many people I talked to at the time, who felt a Supreme Leader was just accepted by everyone, and had their orders automatically obeyed. It struck me as a mind boggingly naive view of power structures and how they are maintained in dictatorships.

The politics of totalitarian states are complex, but the mechanics are submerged beneath a facade of Everything Is Wonderful All the Time (unless they've got a purge going on, in which case wonderfulness is suspended until The Wrecker pustles can be lanced), and results in periodic outbursts of extreme violence. 

As a result, dictators rarely retire.

Except for Diocletian, who grew cabbages. 

The Bitter Adventures of Jett Lagrange, Ex-Astro Legionnaire

Times change, even for famous space legionnaires. 

I forget what the impulse was that drove creating this particular strip, it's now lost to the mists of time, but I suspect it had something to do with getting on social media for the first time...

Available at Indigo?

 Apparently Warlord of Io is available at Indigo. Who knew? I thought it was strictly direct market.

Zing and the Password of Doom

Because we all love passwords... don't we?

Fin

Aaaaand that completes this little arc of Max Zing, Warlord of Io, Ruler of the Solar System and Rock Star of Jupiter Orbit.

You'll have to read the set backwards, of course, starting with the earliest in the sequence, for the full effect.

Yes, I know. So annoying. Such is life.

It's best read with a pastry and a beverage; coffee or tea is recommended. French Roast or even a strong Starbucks brew, but depends on your temperament.

The pastry should be large enough to last the entire sequence, but does not need to be entirely consumed by the last strip, so don't rush.

Enjoy!

Micrometeors from Hasbro

Totally nuts

Transcendent immortal perfection

Max Zing is all about innovation.

Masterpiece

Sometimes, our dear little dictator Max Zing is bewildered by the avant garde. 

Form, function, meh

Get Liebeskind! Wait, I mean...

Franchise infringement of dooooooom

Zing's super weapon

Because you gotta impress the plebs to keep them in line.

Every space emperor should have one.

And Max Zing is no exception.

Max Zing and 3D

I've always loved the work of Frank R. Paul, the man who single-handedly designed the Retro-Future.

Cover artist for Amazing Stories and many other pulp magazines, he created candy-coloured universes of honeycomb  landscapes, bulbous space ships, and bizarre creatures that have never left me.

Enormously productive and endlessly inventive, Paul's work influenced concept design in film, television, and comics for decades afterward.

Frank R. Paul's magnificent alien landscapes.

When I wrote my ode to sci-fi, Warlord of Io (a play on Edgar Rice Burrough's The Warlord of Mars), I was adamant that it should take visual inspiration from Paul. Warlord of Io would be the basis for Max Zing, a spin off collection of joke strips.

Retro-Future scene from Warlord of Io. You can see the Frank R. Paul influence.

It took several years of experimenting before I was able to develop a style that fit the Warlord of Io story. That's right: years. It went through half-a-dozen different looks (I didn't work on it all the time), starting out with a flat abstract approach and eventually evolving into a three dimensional cartoon look constructed with blends.

The result I think of as 'Vector Deco': it uses gradients to define form rather than line, which is hardly evident at all, anywhere in the book (not counting word balloons). It's a drastic change in approach from Nil.

The Terror in colour; lense flares to cover my low end 3D models.

Design of Maximillian Zing's flagship, The Terror (above). A mash up of Frank R. Paul, Buck Rogers, and a US Navy battleship. Must have been quite a collision.

It fits with Retro-Future design, all smooth spheres and swooping curves. Major relief! I scaled the universe down into a cute mini-verse, where life's round and cuddly and slightly impractical. Or hugely impractical, the sine qua non of cinematic concept design.

That's right. You heard me. When it comes to movies, the cool factor is inversely proportional to the design's practicality. Form is at odds with function.
But who cares? The results are better off for it. Imperial Walkers look awesome.

It's about making stuff that looks neat. It doesn't have to actually work. I mean, who wants that, anyway? Much harder to write.

Once I had a look developed for the characters, I plunged into backgrounds and had a blast. But I also needed spaceships, lots of them, for the numerous chase scenes. Nil: A Land Beyond Belief was very flat and graphic, and I took a shot at doing it that way, but discovered I needed depth. I was altering the viewpoint continuously, and the ubiquitous gradients emphasized volume.

Drawing complicated spacecraft from multiple angles and perspectives would be a grueling and time consuming process, and I was already trying to squeeze a great deal of work into what little free time I had available.

I decided to execute the ships in 3D. Once a design was complete, I could rotate and light it however I needed, reducing the work load and improving the integrity of the ships appearance from shot to shot.

3D programs are tremendously complicated, hurt my brain, and have a long learning curve, so I picked one that is relatively simple and can export vector format files: Swift 3D. It's a good basic program, and easy to get into. My inexperience proved not as much of an obstacle as it might have (Ten-year-olds are far more adept at 3D modelling), as the designs needed to be simple.

In this case, the child like simplicity of the designs worked for me.

Battlebrick and escorts come zooming out of the sun.

Anything too elaborate wouldn't mesh with the mini-verse.

The vector exports that I thought I'd be able to seamlessly integrate into the panels were not up to scratch: bezier points were placed haphazardly and there were odd artifacts. The shapes just weren't smooth enough. So I changed approach and instead rendered them as bitmaps. Left them untextured, so they had smooth gradients, just like the 2D art work. Again, the designs had to be very simple, too, and consist of basic geometric shapes.

I was happy with how they ultimately meshed together; it isn't as perfect as I'd originally hoped for, true, but nothing ever is. Many mainstream cartoons use 3D elements that are blatantly artificial and stick out far more than my ships do from the surrounding environment. Think of the ballroom scene in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, for example. My ships go with the vector graphics like Elvis and sunglasses by comparison.

Designing the ships was a lot of fun, a chance to play in the realm of pulp sci-fi. I established a number of common elements to unite the look of the ships (hydrogen scoops, antennae, gun batteries, sensor pods), and then set about creating the most impractical and ridiculous designs I could. 

Test shot of Space Wiking ships. Each has free wifi connection to Wikipedia.

Once I started work on Max Zing (for Maximillian Zing, the boy emperor from Warlord of Io), I needed ships in colour. That meant going back to Swift 3D and colouring the vessels. Max Zing was intended to be a 3 panel strip comic, however, and doesn't require changing camera angles.
After some experiments (covering the extreme simplicity of the designs with lighting effects and lens flares), I decided it'd be a lot less bothersome to just do up some simple vector ships from the side and rotate them from shot to shot. The 3D models need more detail and textures to hold up when transferred into full colour anyway.

This is one of the unfortunate things when you experiment: you can lose a lot of time going down a dead end and wind up with nothing but experience and bruises.

The colour tests I threw together wound up not being used in Max Zing, although they may be at some future point.

Warlord of Io was been described as "Rip-Your-Brain-Out-Of-Your-Head-Because-You-Won't-Need-It-Anymore-After-This Awesome!" by Michael May of Robot Six. You can check out the rest of his review here.

Available for sale from SLG Publishing here. Heck, it's on sale for only five bucks right now! The deal of the 25th century, I tell ya. Fire up your jet pack and get on over there for a dose of Retro-Future adventure!

UPDATE: And now there's also Max Zing, available online from Amazon.

There's something behind you…

Characters enter swamp. Fewer characters leave. If only Ewoks were one hundred feet high weighed twenty tons and had teeth as long as swords...