Chapters: HijiNKS ENSUE Classic

Wheaton Comic Dare: Check Your Bag Before We Wreck Your Bag

Ewok Stare Shirt

When Southwest called me to tell me they had found my bag I was in the back of Jason Finn‘s car with Wil on the way to meet Stepto and Marian Call. Jason and Wil were talking Mini Coopers and there was talk radio coming over the car speakers, so I pressed my phone against my right ear as hard as I could and plugged the left one with my little finger. I asked the woman on the other end of the line to repeat herself. “Shredded,” she said. “Shredded?” I replied. “Like we were a polar bear and your suitcase was a seal covered in maple syrup,” she responded.

They couriered what was left of my bag to my hotel later that night. From the extent of the damage I was completely unable to come up with a scenario by which this violation could have actually occurred. It hadn’t simply been dropped or snagged. It seemed as though some sort of manimal had clawed into (or out of) my small rolling suitcase in a blind rage. Can a creature truly hate a piece of luggage? I dare say it can. In my search for a reasonable explantation, Wil offered the Sarlacc pit theory and thus a comic was born. Later in the weekend I would prototype this comic in Wil’s copy of HE Book 2.

[Special thanks to Wil for contributing his first line in panel 1, a reference to his character in the Penny Arcade D&D Podcast.]

I toyed with the idea of continuing the Emerald City Comicon Sketch comics [Part 1 and Part 2] another day, but decided instead just to show you the rest of the sketches I wanted to share in this blog post. I will call this series “Sketches For Celebrities: Both Internet And Otherwise.”

Commenters: Feel free to offer up more examples of how and why specific airlines lose your luggage. Does JFK have to pay off the mob in “misplaced” golf clubs? Does Newark purposefully chuck your bags in the river to remind you not to go to New Jersey? How about some new slogans for Southwest? I like “Southwest: Hey whattayou Expect?” “Southwest: No Guarantees,” “Southwest: Come Fly The Functional Skies,” and “Southwest: This Whole Thing Is A Scam To Move Pretzels and Diet Coke.”

The Captain’s Prerogative

AND MY AXE!
MEEEEDLY MEEEEEDLY SQUEEEEEEEEE!!!!!
ALL NEW REDESIGNED “AND MY AXE” SHIRTS ARE IN THE STORE!

And My Axe - Gimli shirt by HijiNKS ENSUE at Topatoco

Last chance for Ladies Heather Grey “And My Axe” shirts!

NEW HE Podcast in which we discuss the possibility of Nathan Fillion buying Firefly.

OMG EMERALD CITY COMICON IS THIS WEEKEND!!! It is by far my favorite show of the year. Come see me and Angela at booth 307. Here’s a MAP to all the other webcomics I know that will be there. I will be at the Marian Call show in Seattle Thursday night. If any Fancy Bastards are in the audience, feel free to comic up and say hi. Due to my traveling, there will an unusual comic schedule this week. Probably a guest comic and maybe a few more Lo-FiJINKS comics than normal await you.

Nathan Fillion wields a strange power over geeks. If he were to tweet the word “jump” we would probably knock the Earth off its axis. But no amounts of tweeting or jumping or wishing or clapping can bring Firelfy back from the dead. At least not the way it was. Most of the actors have moved on and many of them (including Captain Castle) into a higher pay grade. A few years ago I might have thrown my hat into the “hopeful Browncoat” ring, but the older, wise, more frequently disappointed me just wishes people would stop reopening the wound.

I suppose there is one way we could raise enough money to force Fox to give up the rights to Firefly. We could sell Charlie Sheens moon-sized balls for their weight in… sperm, I guess. It does have monitory value. At this point in his meltdown cycle, when Charlie finally bursts into actual flames from snorting cocaine and kerosene out of the barrel of a machine gun, I expect a new baby Sheen will rise from the ashes. A Sheenix, if you will. Will you? Excellent.

COMMENTERS: If the planets aligned and you could really have more Firefly (on actual TV), would you really still want it at this point? I’m sure the answer is a resounding yes (followed by a string of incoherent Chinese cursing), but I can conceive of a world where there are people that feel the show ran it’s course. In this fanciful scenario where the actors were available and affordable, as was Joss, what would you want to see? The River Tam storyline is rather resolved, so where should the weekly adventures of the crew of the Serenity go from there? Don’t take the comics into consideration when you answer this one.

Through You, We Feel As Giants, Once Again.

AND MY AXE!
MEEEEDLY MEEEEEDLY SQUEEEEEEEEE!!!!!
ALL NEW REDESIGNED “AND MY AXE” SHIRTS ARE IN THE STORE!

And My Axe - Gimli shirt by HijiNKS ENSUE at Topatoco

Last chance for Ladies Heather Grey “And My Axe” shirts!

My home internet was down from Wednesday night until late Thursday afternoon. Thus, without my normal information conduit, I nearly missed the space shuttle launch. Luckily I checked Twitter via my phone and was able to catch the broadcast on HDNet with 5 minutes to spare. I realized that this would be one of my daughter’s only chances to see a space shuttle launch, so I made sure she sat in for the broadcast. She’s turning four in a couple of weeks, so I was pretty pleased with the 3 minutes of attention she was able to devote to the event. There were plenty of OOH’s and AHH’s and “ARE THEY REALLY GOING INTO SPACE?” and such during the ignition sequence, but just as the booster rockets dropped she asked to go play frisbee outside. She asked of we [mean she, my wife and I] were also going to space today. I wondered for a minute if she might be able to tell her children or grandchildren yes to that same question. Or maybe such questions will be rendered irrelevant due to the unfavorable outcome of the Robot Wars. [Unfavorable for filthy humans that is. Long live the robots!]

I’ll be uploading HE Podcast #80 later tonight [Friday night] [UPDATE: HERES’S THE LINK] and we talked quite a bit about the shuttle launch and various other space related events of import throughout our lives. I’ll update this post with a link once it’s available. Make sure to listen if you want to find out what movie made me decide NOT to be an astronaut when I was around 10 years old.

COMMENTERS: Let’s make it a space exploration free for all. What should we be doing next? Better space planes? Commercial space flights? Moonbase? Mars mission? Or should we just watch Moon, Moonraker, Mission to Mars, Red Planet and Apollo 13?

Urban Renewal

The only geek greeting you’ll ever need! The Sci-Five!
Get up on that Sci-Five shirt business!

Sci-Five Shirt from HijiNKS ENSUE At Topatoco

I thought we were just joking around, but apparently some dudes took the “we should build a murder robot statue” thing pretty seriously. Good for them. I expect the Robocop statue in Detroit will quickly get vandalized with street teens trying to pry open his leg hoping to find a machine gun within.

Another thing: The HijiNKS ENSUE PODCAST Crew makes a cameo in this Guilded Age. I have no idea what’s going on in that comic plot-wise, but the likenesses are great.

Assisted Mobility

Sharktopus Vs. DinoVampire Vs. CyberYeti!
The Science Fiction TV-Movie Title Generator Shirt!!!

SciFi SyFy Tv-Movie Title Generator Shirt

Here’s some reference material in case this comic is causing you to have a confusion stroke. If it isn’t then we can probably be best friends.

As I delve deeper into the world of the Doctor (currently all caught up on 11, about half of 10 and just started on 9), I see more and more parallels from the rest of science fiction as a whole. It really is a sort of “everything to everyone” sci-fi series that borrows as much from Star Trek as it does from Ray Bradbury. That isn’t to say Doctor Who isn’t original. Far from it. It’s just that with a premise that has literally NO boundaries as far as what kind of stories it can tell and in what setting or with what characters, it is helpful that it tends to stay grounded in familiar sci-fi tropes. I think that helps you not to feel lost despite the fact that each episode introduces you to a new setting and a wholly unknown set of circumstances. If Doctor Who were Star Trek, Science Fiction as a whole would be the Enterprise. The genre is the comfortable surrounding that creates the “walls” of the show.

Thanks to my buddy Wil for helping me flesh out the idea for this comic. I actually came up with it while talking to him about Doctor Who a few weeks back [that sentence was nearly too geeky to type]. You should totally check out his recent appearance on The Nerdist Podcast. He is just a genuinely great guy and the more I learn about him, the more I respect him.

Regarding the Daleks: When I’m designing evil major appliances with the intent of taking over the universe, I might want to pull out the old space tape measure and jot down the dimensions of a few average sized doorways. Seems like a narrow foyer is enough to stop these demented dish washers in their tracks.

Regarding Captain Pike: Look, I know it was the 60’s, but if you can imagine interstellar travel and super computers, why can’t you imagine a world where a paraplegic can do a little more than go forward, back up, and answer “yes” or “no” questions? This “future-tech” doesn’t work as well as taping a laser pointer to his head and pointing him at a Ouija board. I rewatched “The Menagerie” in preparation for this comic. I was surprised how good the story actually was. The 60’s camp and occasional extreme over acting was still there, but at it’s root there is a very cool sci-fi idea. I do, however, think it would have been a better idea if captain Pike was told to beep once for “truth” and twice for “dare.” Also, does anyone else get the impression that if you open the hood on pike’s chair it’s basically just a Port-O-John inside? I bet they just park him over a drain and turn on the hose.