Okay, “stagnant” is not the ideal word choice, but the SecGov strip has reached a kind of status quo right now. I’ll sum it up here:

The Secret Government, a political entity staffed almost entirely by robots, has declared war with their ancient enemy the Beekeepers. The SecGov Defense Department blames the Beekeepers for several attacks which were, in fact, unrelated, or even accidents, but upon learning this has decided to stick to the war for the boost it is giving the SecGov economy. To date the Beekeeper Elders have not even acknowledged the war.

One SecGov bodyguard robot, Gladys Blue, has been training with an infamous super-assassin Jason Dante, in the hopes of learning more about the Secret Government, but is having trouble making the secret meetings with the city readying for war. Meanwhile, a SecGov army soldier, Zeke Purple, has killed an extradimensional entity with his mind and is now gaining the vast powers of that being and becoming the Army’s top weapon. But how much is his personality changing as these powers grow?

I think that covers most of the basics.

So we’re sitting here with that as the state of things, and now I’m getting a bit too busy to keep up the pace of three pages a week, so I’ll be scaling back down to two. The last few pages have also been standalones a trend that may continue for a while, though I do have plans for so many more stories.

You can blame homework for this.

Okay, yo. I guess it has somehow become the end of the month already, so I might as well do a post about how school is going.

I’ve written some tests already. I wrote a history test wherein I had to identify some regions in Early Modern Europe. I aced that one. I also had to do a punctuation test for English which I haven’t got the official mark from my professor back yet, but before handing them in we had them marked by fellow students and, assuming that student did a competent job, I did well and better than a large portion of the kids in the class. That’s what really matters.

Also in that English class I was told to write an essay about my writing style or whatever. I liked that one pretty well. I was able to write 700 words about how I don’t know what I’m doing, so it was basically like something I could do on this site if I bothered to do more than one draft. And the points of that essay was quite explicit: I don’t know how to write academic-style essays. Hey people I went to high school with. Hey. Did we ever learn that? I don’t remember learning that. But the fact that that is what the essay is about makes me feel that maybe it will be judged a little easier. After all, any mistakes I make in the writing will be supporting my thesis, right? I don’t know what the rules are for this sort of thing, but I’d like to have that essay up in this online repository of my self-obsession someday. I’ll have to ask about that. Anyway, the essay has also drilled into my head how much I don’t like the idea of writing in strict academic stylings.

What if I think ending a sentence with “f’realz y’all” is the best way to get my point across? Am I supposed to suppress such an urge just because it isn’t “intellectual” or whatever it is that they’re going for? I don’t think PDR can do that, f’realz y’all. I look at the sheer volume of essays I will apparently be writing for my English, Mythology, and History classes and I don’t like the look of it. You want me to write about the Epic of Gilgamesh? Man, I enjoyed reading the Epic, but I have nothing to say about Gilgamesh that hasn’t been said by people better at it than me. You want me to summarize these two articles and then give reasons why you assigned them to us? I would imagine you already know what they’re about, man, you assigned them. I’m probably going to be harping on this point a lot this year, but I’ll say it again: These assignments are just about me proving to you that I’m learning and I don’t freaking care if you think I’m learning or not. I care if I am learning. And these assignments only make me feel overwhelmed and pressured. I like writing when I want to write, but writing crap I don’t think matters is not what I want. I find myself wondering if I should just try to see how far I can stray from good essay-making without failing. That sounds more PDRish, but does come with the risk of actually failing.

And finally, my other class, Astronomy, does not require me to write essays. I like that. It does require math, though. I don’t like that as much. I had one assignment there too not due until the eleventh, and have finished it already. That’s nice. Unfortunately I have a Mythology assignment due tomorrow I haven’t finished. Whoops!

In the theme of learning, I can also mention I have been out driving twice times since getting my training license thing. A few more times and I will probably have doubled the number of times I’ve driven in my entire life. Anyway, I think it is going well. I’m starting to get the hang of it. I’ve stuck to parking lots and unused roads so far, though. I am not looking forward to getting onto places where there will be more than the occasional other vehicle. Driving, like most aspects of my life, is not improved by my proximity to other folk.

Well, looks like it is time to stop playing on my website and start pretending I care about this Gilgamesh essay.

We got this:

We got this:

Okay, today marks the end of the story of Stanislav Blue in Secret Government Robots. It has been great having Marq on the art duties for this one. He took a story I wrote off the cuff and made improvements that I couldn’t have done on my own, and it is great to see my words become images without actually having to be the one making those images. Thanks Marq!

Next week will start with a single strip that I made up at a boring night at work a few months back that I need to use before it becomes irrelevant, but then I can jump into my next full-length story. So that’s something.

In the meantime, I have not been living a completely artless life. I already mentioned my first watercolor painting, which I have titled “It’s Like A Metaphor For Life Or Something” and now I present my second:

I call it “Nude Ascending A Staircase (Inside A Rocketship)”:

And I’ve still got one more frame I want to use up. When the inspiration hits, look out art world.

I’m going to take a moment to talk about some superhero movies. The Avengers movie will be coming out soon, so this is a topical discussion, but the thing I am speaking about today probably isn’t going to be a factor in that movie. (But while I bring up the Avengers, there is an Avengers Handbook coming out sometime this month, I believe, that I did some work on, but I couldn’t find the solicitation on Marvel’s website, so I didn’t do my usual announcement post)

What I’m talking about is superheroes meeting their friends. There are a lot of superhero movies I haven’t seen, but something I’ve noticed in the Iron Man, Captain America, and Spider-Man films is that they all include a close bond between the hero and another character that I thought interesting in how it differed from the same relationship in the comics:

In Iron Man we are given the friendship between Tony Stark, Iron Man, and Jim Rhodes, his friend in the military who goes on to become War Machine. When the movie begins these two guys are already friends even before the whole Iron Man thing happens. Not so in the comics where Tony didn’t meet Rhodey until after his origin in a war zone and he needed to find a way home. The two became friends then. We never see how they meet.

In Captain America, Steve Rogers and James “Bucky” Barnes have been friends since childhood, then Steve goes on to become Captain America and Bucky becomes his ally in the art of punchin’ Nazis. Again, this differs from the comics, wherein, Captain America didn’t meet the orphan Bucky until after he became a super soldier. Like Tony/Rhodey, we’ve got a pair of friends established before we even get there.

And the one that bugs me the most even though I care the least, Spider-Man. In the movie we meet Peter Parker and the girl he has loved for all his life, Mary Jane Watson. As before this is different from the books. In the original stories it went like this: Peter (already Spider-Man by this point) had a ton of complications, one of which was his Aunt’s constant attempts to fix him up with her friend Anna Watson’s niece. Peter, who had never met Anna Watson’s niece, assumed the worst of her and was blown away when he met her. And even then the two didn’t become a couple right away. But in the movie, they went with the much more trite Girl He Always Loved idea, even though the comic version is much more interesting and new. (I understand the Spider-Man movies are being rebooted soon, so I don’t know how things’ll go there)

I can see a bit of why this is. In a movie you’ve only got so much time where you can story in there. To an extent, especially the first two examples, you’re just giving your character friends from way back who we’ll understand as being friends from way back and be able to relate. But there’s something the comics can do, as an ongoing medium, that the movies can’t. They can show us the start of a friendship, and its growth, and get us more invested into it. Obviously the comics also manage to mess this up plenty of ways (not least of which being contrived plot twists), but it is still a thing we can get from the books that we can’t in the movies. And when it comes to a romantic interest, I think this is especially important.

So, I guess, the way to meet a superhero, in the movies at least, is just to already know a superhero. I guess I’ve run out of rant on this topic now. Good night.