Strip 215 -- First Seen: 2009-07-10
Escape From Terra is updated with new pages every Monday through Friday.

Halfway there!

The Kickstarter campaign to print the next volume of Quantum Vibe: Novo Palermo - Part 1 is now halfway to our goal. We need your help getting the rest of the way there. Tell your friends, family members, and your pets to back our campaign.

Every little bit helps! The campaign ends midnight (US central time) November 18. So there's still time to get the word out, or maybe add another item to your current pledge.

Your reward for backing our campaign starts with a personalized signed copy of the perfect bound printed collection of the online strip. You may also choose the ebook edition, a PDF downloadable from DriveThruComics.

And back by popular demand, coasters, magnets and stickers. Click on the art on the left, to go to our campaign page where you can back our campaign.

QV on a short break

QUANTUM VIVE is taking a break for a few weeks, as we prepare for Part 2 of the Novo Palermo story, and also for a Kickstarter campaign for Part 1, which will start in September.

In the meantime, Not-Safe.Space will continue, as a murder mystery begins and the relationship between Eithne and Diana develops in unexpected directions.

Not-Safe.Space is a NSFW strip but more than half the pages are SFW so I've set those to *not* require a Patreon membership. Readers should be able to follow the story without seeing the NSFW pages. If I've done this right.

The Transcript For This Page

Panel 1
Establishing shot of the exterior patio. The brothers and Tobi are seated at one of the tables with an umbrella. Bert is at Ernie's left. Each man has an iced drink, and there is a platter of finger-food on the table. Drenkowski is no longer present.

Tobi: Now comes the fun part. You have a million questions and I get to be all professorial on your ass.

Tobi (2): So fire when ready.

Panel 2
Two-shot of Bert and Ernie.

The brothers: The gravity!

Panel 3
Three-shot of Bert and Ernie and Tobi.

Bert: There is no way this little piece of pea gravel could be dense enough to have a surface gravity this high.

Ernie: So we're guessing you have had some sort of physics breakthrough and created a gravity machine.

Panel 4
Looking past the brothers at Tobi, who has a partially-eaten canapé in one hand, and talks while chewing (he really is a nerd).
Tobi: Ha! I wish!
Tobi (2): I do have some cutting-edge research going on out here, but that isn't it.
Tobi (3): Guess again.


Panel 5
Two-shot of Bert and Ernie, looking at each other and shrugging their shoulders.

Bert: I'm dry.

Ernie: Me too.
Panel 6
Show, don't tell: Flashback scene of a survey ship (about the size of Little Toot but configured differently) flying in an arc past the Little Prince as it was originally – an apparent rocky planetoid, almost perfectly spherical. We see a tiny inset of Tobi's head in the upper left corner. Leave some room along the top for his caption box

Caption (Tobi): 'One of my survey ships stumbled across this planetoid in the Kirkwood 2:3 Gap. It made no sense so we brought in an astrophysicist, who got it immediately...'

Panel 7
The interior of the planetoid – and its micro black hole. It should look like a tiny black dot with a bright accretion disk (about an inch wide in the panel) around it. Surrounding the dot and its disk should be a very dark texturing which represents the neutronium (a super-dense type of matter) surrounding the singularity.

Caption (Tobi): 'At the Little Prince's heart lives a microscopic black hole!
Caption (2): 'The event horizon is about 50 nanometers in diameter and it masses something like 2.1 times 10 to the 18th kilograms.'

Panel 8
Medium close-up of Tobi, sipping his drink and looking really pleased with himself.

Tobi: How cool is that!