Tree ref courtesy of finishing this page while looking out the window on the train from Seattle to Portland.
The title of this page and the previous one is a reference to Rush’s song “Red Barchetta “. What’s your favorite song about COOL CARS WHAT GO FAST VROOM VROOM?
Also holy cow this is page #92. This is getting close to being the biggest thing I’ve ever done.
Pretty darn lovely!
What a beuatiful page! Any chance it could be made into a wallpaper?
Fav fast cars song? “Crawling From The Wreckage” by Dave Edmunds. Really more of a drunk driving song, but…
Thank you for starting to update again! The artwork is delightful and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when the several story threads start to braid. Or tangle.
Hard to beat “Hot Rod Lincoln” for a cool car song, but Danny Elfman’s score for “Batman” always makes me think of the Batmobile blistering toward the heart of Gotham.
You’re welcome! I’m delighted to be back in the groove – winter just sucked.
Hmm — I imagine there must be a bit of flex between the wheel pods and the chassis if Carol feels comfortable catching that much air. Otherwise the wheels might rub the insides of the wheel wells, and that’s just not a recipe for a good time.
p.s. panel 2 is the best Micali sales pitch ever.
Oh, drat, you’ve guessed my SUDDEN TWIST ENDING where the wheels lock against the wells and the whole car goes flying end-over-end, leaving Carol a dying pile of unbacked-up meat in the middle of tangled wreckage, and Rita a very sad lady.
No actually yeah all that wild curling around that the fenders do has some serious active suspension craziness going on inside and I am totally not making this up as I go along.
With the kind of computational resources they seem to have widely available, I have no doubt whatsoever that the suspension system is incredibly sophisticated. Actually, it would probably be even better to have the wheels descend automatically when the system detects that it is catching significant air so that the suspension has a longer distance to travel — that way you don’t have to worry about the chassis impacting the road surface overly hard (although I’m betting that it has a skid plate anyway) but you still get the advantage of a lower center of gravity for cornering purposes.
This car is not smart enough to have citizenship, but it is certainly smart enough to flex itself in preparation for a hard landing!
Heck, rally cars pretty routinely catch air like that, and they don’t even have the benefit of sophisticated active suspensions…just long suspension travel and a sturdy chassis.
I don’t know why, but something in this strip’s Panopticon really creeps me out. I mean, even much more so than the average Panopticon scene does…
PORTLAND <3 (I'm a local there xD)
Also, LOVE your art. I'm sure you get it a lot. Saw your Tarot deck, loved that. Looked you up and loved your other stuff too. Pretty much no-lifed this comic up until this point. Can't wait to invest in Volume 2 :)
Yay, new fans! Glad you like the deck and all my other stuff.
You’ll get your chance at book 2 in a month or two. And your copy of book 1 should be in the mail this weekend!
New fan on an archive binge here. “Red Barchetta” is high on my list, but Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” tops it, easily.