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

What Comes Next

The war is over, but This Means War has a ways to go. Novo Paolo/Bubbleopolis is still in a nebula/stellar nursery, no one knows what happened to the planet Sharen (center of the Intergalactic Council), and the status of the now-surrendered Invaders is yet to be resolved. What will they do when they learn their homeworld is basically destroyed? Will Alyss and Li be re-united? How about Diana (the real one) and Otto?

These questions will be resolved in the next few weeks, before This Means War part 3 wraps in late May.

After that, I plan to go BACK in time about 400 years, to when Alyss and Li left their home in the Sol System to colonize a new world on the far side of the galaxy. As one might expect, hijinks ensue. New subtitle yet to be determined, start date sometime in around the start of July. Stay tuned!

A Little House Cleaning

I can't tell you how much I appreciate everyone who backed our Kickstarter project. One small matter remains: a couple of you have yet to provide your shipping address for your rewards. As soon as possible, please either fill out the Kickstarter survey request found on the Kickstarter site, or simply send us an email Orders address and we will ship your reward soon after. If you're wondering why you haven't received a notice about this via email, please check your spam folder.

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!