Early Superman appearances in Action Comics featured what has to be the best supplemental information ever to accompany a comic strip:

It’s Dan Ackroyd!!! Today’s Heritage Moment is an encapsulation of the story of the Avro Arrow. That was an impressive jet plane that Canada built this one time and then didn’t build.

According to research I did a decade ago and don’t feel like re-checking, this Heritage Moment is pieced together using clips from some movie about the Avro Arrow, which explains how they got Ackroyd in there. I’m all for recycling, so I approve of their repurposing of the clips. Plus, it has the benefit of making the filmmakers aware of the fact that they probably spent two hours to tell a story that can be told in a minute.

As a side note, my most significant Avro Arrow-related memory is the time, during high school, when a fellow student angrily insisted that the program being shut down was the turning point when Canada could otherwise have been the world’s military leader. I have never cared as much as he did about Canada’s military prowess, that’s for sure.

Time to rate it: It’s certainly one of the great quotable Minutes, that’s for sure. And it’s arc is pretty sad, really: “We want to make a plane, but it is hard to do. Then we made the plane! We’re awesome. (Later we didn’t make the plane.)” This is hardly the stuff out of legend. But it has Dan Ackroyd in it. Four out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.

As always, here are the Phone Guys:

Tomorrow, the Thirteenth of August, is Jenny Everywhere Day. As I have mentioned, I like the concept of an open source superhero character, so I have done a few things in the past. Now I’ve done another thing:

Where, last year, I drew an image that went with a story idea that I have, this year I just drew something on the spot. I’d love to try to make something of it, but who knows when I’d have a chance?

Mouthlaser

Ty Taylor accidentally drank a secret formula. It was a secret formula intended to work as computer fuel, which means people aren’t supposed to drink it. To keep Ty from dying, vomiting was induced. Ty ended up vomiting for a long time, and when he ran out of vomit, something strange happened: Ty started vomiting lasers. Eventually Ty felt better, but could still vomit lasers at will. Still, he lost his job and had to pay the company for the computer fuel that he ruined.

Unemployed and able to shoot mouth lasers, Ty did what anybody would do in that situation: he sewed a costume and started picking fights with crime. So far, that’s working out for him. Good for Ty.

The story behind the creation of Mouthlaser is simple: shooting lasers from one’s mouth has been Kip’s choice for favorite super power for years. I have to admit that if I were ever to do anything with the character, I bet I could do a better job with the costume. For now, though, this works.

The Orbzoid

It is unclear what exactly the Orbzoid is, though it is known to be of alien origin. It was a Summer day when a large orb crashed to Earth and crawled out of the resulting crater. The orb was given the name “Orbzoid” by during a frenzy whipped up by a twenty-four hour news cycle, and it was clearly intelligent. Its motives, however, could not be discerned. For days it wandered the world, apparently at random. On one occasion it smashed through the window of a hospital and roamed the halls for hours. Reporters lost sight of it for weeks as it submerged itself in the ocean waters. More recently, though, the Orbzoid has apparently constructed a body for itself. It has also begun interacting with humanity, though it still remains mysterious. The Orbzoid has appeared at the scenes of crimes and prevented violence, and also stopped several buildings from being destroyed by fires, so humanity is accepting it as a hero. Still, the unknowable orb has been seen digging large, apparently useless holes strange locations, and moving parked cars in the middle of the night. Humanity can only hope that if the Orbzoid’s motives ever become clear, they will be benevolent.

The Orbzoid came to me in a dream, the design and the name, at least (and it happened only a short time after I decided I had to stop using the suffix -oid in character names). You can’t tell because of my drawing style (aka crappy-style), but the big Head Orb is supposed to be floating a few inches above the weird triangle shoulder thing, disconnected physically from the rest of the body, but still somehow connected. It’s weird, but that’s what he’s for.

Hey, isn’t it about time for a new painting by master artist Patrick D Ryall? I bet it is! I was right! It is called Dream Dong:

Thanks to my friends Allison and Kip, who respectively provided the idea and the name for this piece.