And on that note, another thing that we’ve seen before: a warning of likely missed updates. I’ll be doing a quick trip that will keep me in motion for much of the next 48 hours, so there may not be a post on Thursday or Friday. I imagine we’ll all manage somehow.

• It’s been a considerable time since we’ve had regular updates at The Last Halloween, and with new characters and storylines introduced in the brief preview back in the Fall, my jonesin’ for TLH is at a high point. There’s been good reasons for the delay, as creator Abby Howard has been working on other projects — projects that pay a damn sight sooner than webcomics do — so this is not a complaint! And, as we learned earlier today, one very large reason for delay is approaching its own end:
  

  AAAAAHH

  Speaking as a backer of the Kickstart to print volume one of TLH, one for whom the book will be the reward for my support, I wish to echo that AAAAAHH because godsdamn is that pretty. Ya done good, Abby, and the decision not to mess around with softcover for this book was briliant That thing looks like a tome of secret and forbidden knowledge.

• Speaking of things coming back into the spotlight, David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™^etc¹ wrapped up his very fun experiment in learning to draw cartoons, Planet Of Hats, back in August. It had taken him about two years (once you account for a two month break) to recap all of the episodes of old-school Trek, including the animated series of my childhood, using twelve panels per hour of story.

  It was particularly fun to see how, when forced to condense descriptions to a few panels and not many words, how silly (or outright bad) some of the old Trek stories were, but also how so many of them can be rightly regarded as classics. And then he was done, no more Original Series stories to tell; he’d decided not to carry the recaps into the subsequent series, and so there was a Trek-shaped void in Wednesdays.

  Until — and I can’t believe I forgot about this until I saw him link it — today.

  Planet Of Hats is back for a final, 12 week run of movie recaps; given the longer nature of the films, each one will get two weeks of recapping, starting today with part one of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This means that in two weeks, we’ll get to see Wrath Of Khan; on the other hand, it means that we’ll have to see Trek V as well (but it’s not worse than some of the third season stinkers … probably).

  There will be plenty of artistic choices for Morgan-Mar to make; for example, ST:TMP is kind of notorious for a couple of things: a scattered crew, a recycled plot, a screaming Chekhov, a transporter accident that was hinted at but not precisely shown⊃2, and a seemingly-interminable fly-around of the Enterprise that took approximately half of the movie’s runtime to conclude. Morgan-Mar is able to dispose of the latter in a single panel that nevertheless hints at the very slow pace of the original³. All in all, a nice way to spend the rest of winter (in the Nothern Hemisphere) or summer (if you’re Morgan-Mar).

Spam of the day:

Read your message before it gets deleted

You’re a psychic — couldn’t you tell on your own I would delete your email without clicking your link?

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¹ I should really program a macro or something for that string; every time I need to type it, I have to go searching through my own archives to make sure I get it right.

² At least not until it was referenced in Galaxy Quest, which is still one of the best three Trek movies ever.

³ And the transporter deal? Pretty tame in the film, low-grade icky here in panel eight, and downright horrifying in the novelization. I know that Reg Barclay took a lot of grief for his transporter phobia in TNG, but keep in mind that this is a guy for whom getting mashed up with another person and turned inside-out while still alive is historical fact.