Thursday Night Is Movie Night: This Island Earth

Tonight! Rex Reason, Jeff Morrow and Faith Domergue in the classic This Island Earth.

TRIVIA QUESTION: The art department at Shoreline of Infinity Group, creators of Scotland's award winning science fiction magazine is called Unit 16. Why?

Movie Night is brought to you with the help of The Interent Archive.

Burns Night Tonight

It's the day we celebrate Scotland's bard and one of our great exports to the world.
So here's a wee extra movie, with the great Brian Cox reciting Tam O Shanter.

 

Tam o'Shanter from Spiral Productions on Vimeo.

Thursday Night Is Movie Night: The Arctic Giant

Superman takes on the Arctic Giant in this classic Max Fleischer animation.

TRIVIA QUESTION: Which story came first: Gojira, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms or The Arctic Giant?

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A Frosty Day At The Spaceport

The freezing fog has visited us here at the Space Pilot Comics spaceport. I often take my camera out on interesting days like this with the intention of capturing some reference images. However, it's the act of photographing these scenes that embeds them in my brain and I rarely refer directly to a photograph when drawing a comic. That sort of fiddling around slows up the process.
So here are a few shots for wintry inspiration that we can lock away in the mental reference library for another day. I've scaled these to be suitable for wallpaper in your computer and I'll allow that kind of personal use.

New Beachcomber Tale Coming To Shoreline Of Infinity Magazine

The Beachcomber relates a scary tale in the March edition of Shoreline of Infinity, the award-winning science fiction magazine. All I'm saying at this stage is, "Watch the streets!"
The tale of terror links events from 1964 to similar events in 2019. Needless to say there's an alien influence but also some vehicular involvement.
I had a lot of fun drawing this one. I hope you can enjoy it too.
You can order copies of Shoreline of Infinity in the Shoreline Shop at www.shorelineofinfinity.com.

Thursday Night is Movie Night: The Original Buck Rogers

Here he is: Buster Crabbe as the original Saturday morning serial Buck Rogers in the feature version Planet Outlaws.

Movie night would not be possible without the Internet Archive.

TRIVIA QUESTION: If I was putting a crew in suspended animation I would choose a whole team named Rogers. Who is the other Rogers who survived an aircrash and was frozen for decades before being revived in the present day?

Toons Invade Edinburgh

This is brilliant.

SF Stories - Where Do They Come From

I've just been looking at the newspaper headlines this morning and came across a headline in The National about a volcanic eruption spotted on Jupiter's moon Io. Following this up I discovered a nice video and background information on the Space.Com news site. You can see it here: Volcanic Plume on Jupiter's Moon Io
Earlier in the Christmas holiday period we also had a lot of news coverage on China's Jade Rabbit 2 lander which is patrolling around the far side of the Moon right now. This was a huge technical achievement and rightly reported widely. There's a nice technical report on the Chinese Moon mission on the ESA site, here: Chang'e-3 Moon-landing Mission
So, where do we get inspiration for SF stories? We follow science news stories like these and ferret out the technical stuff. I'm working on the 2019 run of Tales of The Beachcomber right now and you can be sure that some of the science in these stories will work its way in there. Watch out for the new comics.

Postscript

Today I wrote a comic script that addresses the growing number of white vans in my street. Feeling a bit Ray Bradbury about that one. :-)