Random Panel: The “hosaurus” was the sluttiest of the dinosaurs

(From "Fantastic Comics" number 15, 1941.)

META: Site slowdowns

Over the last week, this site's been having some connectivity issues. In an effort to track down why, I've made some back-end changes, disabled the rotating "Featured Character" box in the header, and essentially removed the "Hall of Fame" page for now. If any of that helps, I'll add them back one by one to see which is causing the problems.

Basically the hosting company is telling me that some scripts were taking too much processor time and so were shutting down access to the page. Since the latter two scripts are the only ones I've added recently, I'm figuring they're probably the culprits, but we'll see.

Character Contest 69: Faceoff

With thanks to Hammerknight for the suggestion, your Character Design Challenge this week is to create an awesome face. That's right, all entries this time around must be a portrait only of someone who looks interesting, cool, and/or awesome. When I say portrait view, I mean a close-up of the character's head, roughly from the shoulders up to just above the top of the head.

I'm particularly interested in cool-looking faces, though that's not a strict requirement. In other words, if you're doing an image of a knight, it's probably a good idea to put his or her visor in the up position, but you won't be disqualified if it's down instead.

For me, I'm going to be most impressed by faces that look distinctive, as if it could be a picture of an actual human being versus a sort of generic comic book person.

That's not to say you have to make a human face, of course. I'm sure we'll see our fair share of aliens, robots, and "other", all of which I look forward to very much as well!

In addition to the above constraints, the usual rules apply as well:

  1. Use only a HeroMachine applet (no PhotoShopping except for basic cropping) to create a PNG or JPG of your entry, named as [your name]-[character name].[file extension]. So DiCicatriz, for instance, would save his "Bayou Belle" character image as DiCicatriz-BayouBelle.png.
  2. Post the image to a publicly accessible website (ImageShack, PhotoBucket, the UGO Forums, etc.).
  3. Enter the name of your entry and a link directly to the image in a comment to this post. The image cannot have been used in any previous HeroMachine character design contest.
  4. The link to your image should go directly to the image (like this) and not to a hosting jump page (like this). If you see "preview" or "rotate" somewhere in the link you're probably doing it wrong.
  5. I'll choose a winner next Monday, who will receive his or her choice of any item or a portrait to be included in the final HeroMachine 3 program, or a "Sketch of the Week" style black and white illustration (you pick the subject and I draw it up however I like).

No limit on entries this week, so knock yourselves out. Good luck everyone!

(Image from the awesome gallery of Michael E. Edens.)

Caption Contest 103 Winners!

Many thanks to everyone who entered Caption Contest 103, which challenged you to come up with the best replacement dialog for this awesome random comics panel:

The funniest lines in my opinion were:

  • Watson Bradshaw: Evolve your way out of a body-bag mammals!
  • MScat: “Say hello to my little arms!!”
  • Pandademic: Do it! Bomb ‘em forward to the Stone Age!
  • The Atomic Punk: “Cold blood and hot lead, baby!”
  • Moognation: Dammit! I asked for a scatta gun, not a chatta gun!
  • MartianBlue: LeRooaaarrrr jeannkinnsss!
  • TheNate: Welcome to Kick Yourassick Park!
  • X-stacy: Of course I’m gonna shoot you in cold blood! I’m a REPTILE.
  • dblade: “Tombstones! Meet the Tombstones!”

As the overall winner, I chose the very last one submitted, proving once again it's (almost) never too late if your idea is funny! For making me laugh right out loud on a morning when I felt like dinosaur poop, the win goes to ... dblade!

You have to admit, that's a darn catchy tune with which to meet your doom.

Congrats to dblade and all our Finalists!

Random Panel: “In fact, I’m a total wuss!”

(From "Fantastic Comics" number 15, 1941.)

Random Panel: When you gotta go, you gotta go

(From "Fantastic Comics" number 15, 1941.)

Power User Profile: Watson Bradshaw

Winner of Character Design Contest 55 and invaluable commenter Watson Bradshaw is the subject of this week's Power User Profile. He also has my all-time favorite profile photo, so bursting with joy and good honest geeky excitement it fills me with joy just looking at it. Enjoy!
Continue reading

Random Panel: Um, that’s a wall, Samson …

(From "Fantastic Comics" number 15, 1941.)

Sharing Day, Disillusionment Edition

When I was a kid, watching the original "Star Wars" trilogy was practically a religious experience. Those movies flamed the geeky fires of my nerdy little heart. I was already a big sci-fi and comics fan, but that first movie was like nothing I'd ever experienced. For a long, long time, those movies were my favorites, setting the standard by which everything else was measured.

Then I saw "Phantom Menace", a movie so bad (in my opinion) that it tainted the earlier movies, almost ruining them.

Today's Sharing Day is about that kind of experience:

Have you ever loved a geeky franchise or product -- a movie or series of movies, a novel or series of novels, etc. -- only to have a subsequent installment that's so bad, it ruined the entire thing for you?

I'd love to hear if you've had an experience like that. If you respond with your own story in the comments to this post, you can (if you wish) ask me a question about whatever you like, and I'll answer honestly.

Alternatively, I'd also accept answers along the lines of some geeky thing you used to think was awesome, only to revisit it years later to discover that in fact, it blows. For instance, I used to love "The Dukes of Hazzard" TV show when I was a kid. But a few years back I tried to watch an episode and wow, was it horrific. Virtually unwatchable. It was so bad, it reached back in time to taint my feelings of joy as a child.

Random Panel: The Playboy Club hits rock bottom

(From "Fantastic Comics" number 10, 1940.)