Inside the Event Horizon

I sketched a 35 page comic that involves San Andreas and Cascadia having to fight off an evil fault avatar from Venus that ended his planet's plate tectonics, and now intends to do the same for Earth. I don't think I will be able to color every panel, some will probably have to be monochrome. But these two panels here in particular I really wanted to color.

Basically Cascadia appears to defeat the evil fault by subducting him, but the fault manages to bore his way out of Cascadia's stomach. Cascadia is left with a big gaping hole in his belly that's erupting lava straight from the mantle everywhere, and combined with the wounds he got from the process of getting the fault into a weakened position where he could be subducted, he's in too much pain to continue fighting. I imagine dikes are like Cascadia's veins, so when wounded he bleeds lava everywhere. I imagine his wounds "heal" by having the lava on the wound solidify into basalt scabs/scars.

San Andreas sees the injured Cascadia collapsing while failing to chase after the escaped Venusian villain, and offers to help him heal his wounds. Cascadia is very surprised by this, as he has definitely not done much to endear himself to San Andreas:

-from turbidite deposits we know when the Cascadai subduction zone has a megathrust earthquake, it usually triggers the northern San Andreas to rupture a few years later. Basically Cascadia just kind of breaks San Andreas' face when he gets mad.

-he subducted the Pacific-Farallon Ridge millions of years ago, who is essentially the equivalent of San Andreas' mom

San Andreas chooses to be the better man (fault?) and help Cascadia, because he's not really into destroying other faults like subduction zones do. However, he has mixed feelings on this, and clearly isn't especially happy about it.

I did not realize this at the time I sketched these drawings, but someone pointed out to me that San Andreas is actually being kind of snarky here. When he says he doesn't dispose of those who no longer serve a purpose, he's implying the wounded Cascadia who can't fight or subduct anymore has lost his purpose. It's a subtle jab that I must have subconsciously put in. I've also had recently people say San Andreas is snarky in some of the comics I've sketched and stories I've drafted, which was not a conscious intent, and I didn't notice this originally.

However I think it does make sense for him. He doesn't mean any harm most of the time, but he is dangerous, and is wary of others getting too complacent around him. So he acts a little bit insensitive to keep people on their toes...but not too insensitive.

Other notes:

-if you look closely some of Cascadia’s volcanoes are making teary-eyed pleading faces

-San Andreas’ body where it’s under the ground resembles the famous fault trace in the Carizzo Plane

After two months I finally bothered to make two colored drawings.

The top one is the sketch in the previous post colored. I live in Dixie Alley now so I have to deal with supercells that are juiced up by the tropical moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. @seers-tower put this idea in my head of a Dixie Alley supercell sipping Gulf moisture from a martini glass so I just had to draw it. I've also added a very envious hurricane who is super hungry and really wants some of the Gulf moisture too, but it's not his turn because it's too early in the year for him.

The second drawing was inspired by a Convective Chronicles YouTube video that mentioned supercells often form on or near boundaries between hot and cold air. So here's mini/chibi Empress (my main supercell character) deciding she really wants to claim the boundary between the hot and cold air near Melissa's chocolate lava cake and vanilla ice cream.

Melissa is not amused, but she can't really do anything about it without getting struck by lightning. Since supercells are at their strongest when they're isolated from other storms and have all the energy for themselves, I imagine your pet supercell would very prone to resource guarding.

Was originally planning to finally do more colored art today but given there’s a huge tornado outbreak forecast for Alabama I dunno if I will.

In the meantime have this doodle of a supercell sipping Gulf moisture out of a martini glass while an envious and starving hurricane looks on.

The forecast for my area is just a giant gauntlet of supercells. I hope I’ll be okay…

(The concept is courtesy of @seers-tower)

EDIT: storms have reached me…

EDIT2: I think I’m out of the clear now

EDIT3: I made it through my first tornado outbreak

I imagine San Andreas can get hungry too, but nowhere near as to the extent Cascadia does. I imagine he’ll just forget to eat for years/decades/centuries until he gets a little rumbly in his Parkfield segment and then gets intrusive thoughts about taking a bite out of the Transamerica Pyramid lol. He eats by grinding up rocks in his gouge zone, and he can eat any kind of rock or mineral, or even derived stuff like ceramics. He doesn’t eat entire tectonic plates of the stuff or other fault lines like Cascadia though.

It is a bad disaster movie cliche that faults open up and swallow people. It doesn’t happen in real life. However I imagine that the reason San Andreas doesn’t do this is not because he can’t, but because he is horrified and disgusted by the idea of eating people (or really any living thing…he’s made of rock so he eats rocks, not organic material). Completely unoccupied and abandoned stone, masonry, and concrete buildings though? I drew a couple of comics when I was in undergrad where he did straight up swallow a couple. He might shear apart occupied buildings if his rupture passes through their foundation, but this is not really him trying to eat the buildings. And he feels terrible about it afterward.

I’m realizing I’ve always drawn his shearing jaws as having sharp teeth, but realistically, they’d be ground flat by the shearing motion. I’m not sure which I prefer. Sharp teeth look more ominous, but flatter teeth do suit his “eating” habits more.

I don’t just draw my characters? A lot of times I just doodle random creatures. Here’s some cute pterosaurs and a weird bird-horse-dragon thing with lots of whorls.

I don’t really do much with this art as it has less personal meaning to me than my characters, and also there’s tons of great creature art on Tumblr and I don’t have much to add.

There definitely is a shortage of personified subduction zones on Tumblr though.

More from the life story of the small black hole BOTHROS (NB: his name is actually an acronym given to him by scientists when he is used as a power source by them billions of years later).

He is forcibly relocated from the galaxy Centaurus A to our own Milky Way. Unlike Centaurus A ten billion years ago, the Milky Way never had sapient celestial objects. I imagine this story takes place in the same universe as Stella and Tartarus live in, and the stars that invaded Centaurus A from the wormholes in the previous post come from Stella's galaxy, the quasar Antiocheka. In this universe some galaxies have sapient stars and black holes, and others do not, and there are some that once had them, but the celestial objects lost consciousness over the ages. The Milky Way is one of the galaxies that never had them.

(It goes without saying but this is a fictional universe. There is no evidence in Real Life that any galaxy has sapient stars in it.)

Some excerpts of a science fiction story titled “The Jetsetter” that I haven’t finished yet. Of course given I haven’t finished my 4th draft of my novel, Part 2 of Melissa and the Allies of Gaia, or that San Andreas Fault story I’ve been working on, don’t get too excited*…

At least, I call it science fiction because it’s fiction based on science? But my writing doesn’t really conform to genre expectations, given the main characters with a character arc are always sentient natural phenomena (the human main character, if present, is mostly a facilitator to the natural phenomenon’s character growth). It’s not hard science fiction because I mean the main character is a talking black hole who has some measure of control over his own gravity? But it’s not soft science fiction either, as it uses a lot of real life science (some from my own research as an astrophysicist).

A card I made for a friend with all my main celestial body characters roughly to scale, with the exception of the T-Tauri stars as their protoplanetary disks would end up taking up the whole field of view lol. Well and the stellar black hole since he gets only a little inset.

From left to right they are

Cobalt-20 solar mass O-type star

Tartarus- 60 billion solar mass supermassive black hole

Astro-solar mass T-Tauri star

Astra-solar mass T-Tauri star

Stella- solar mass G-type main sequence star

Heliodor-0.9 solar mass G type main sequence star

Bruno- <0.08 solar mass brown dwarf

Rhodie-0.1 solar mass M type main sequence star

Chandra—-1.5-2 solar mass pulsar

Schwarzschild-15 solar mass stellar black hole

NO DINNER FOR CASCADIA TONIGHT

In a story I've been writing with San Andreas, Cascadia appears as this monstrous unstoppable juggernaut, an officer in Gaia's military with countless volcanoes, tsunamis, and faults as his soldiers.

But it's more fun cartoon-wise if Cascadia is depicted as slowly going insane due to not being able to eat subduct new chunks of the Juan de Fuca plate for hundreds of years. (There actually was a 1000-year gap between Cascadia earthquakes at one point...dude just had to go a millennium without dinner lol). Ophiolites are the chunks of mid-ocean ridges that don't get subducted, and are instead plastered onto the continent. If he couldn't subduct them before, it's doubtful he could now, but he's getting desperate...

In any case it's a moot point because this particular ophiolite rock is a piece of the Farallon-Pacific Ridge, aka San Andreas' dead mom. San Andreas of course does not let him have it, slicing through the ground and offsetting the ophiolite and Cascadia away from each other.

If you look closely, San Andreas' eye shines resemble a right-lateral strike slip focal mechanism, and he has a seismogram trace burning from his eye. He's normally a dork, but Cascadia has a tendency to get him really really mad*.

I should note Cascadia's not a selfish glutton. He cares a lot about his volcanoes, and they depend on the magma he creates using the oceanic crust he subducts. So he's literally eating for 20...or how many volcanoes you count as the Cascade range**.

Some art from high school I found lying around, involving my chemical and subatomic particle characters. Here Carbon gets a pet neutrino named Trina. She is shy and hard to keep contained (given neutrinos can phase through matter easily), but Carbon manages to earn her trust and heal her "injuries" (it's mostly to show the villain is so powerful, his attacks can hit neutrinos).

Trina cannot eat the photon-based food the molecules and compounds like, but she ends up liking upcakes. Which are cupcakes that are up-flavored, like the quark. She interacts primarily using the weak force so she only really can enjoy the flavors associated with it.

Lithium and neutrino designs have basically stayed the same for me, but in grad school I started drawing Carbon's body as black. I thought a green body made her look too much like the Pokemon Chikorita. Her leaves though, are still green of course. Carbon's most interesting property in my eyes is how it is backbone of life, so I imagine Carbon to be a nature-loving, friend-to-all-living-things type character who wants to bond with everyone.

CASCADIA’S LAVA BREATH

As is obvious by now I've been obsessing over Cascadia for like a couple of months. I have a huge backlog of things sketched out for him, some I plan to color, some not.

Cascadia is meant to vaguely resemble Godzilla (because I once read an emergency response worker say the Pacific Northwest essentially is built on a sleeping Godzilla) so he of course needs some kind of equivalent to Godzilla's atomic breath. "Magma breath" sounds cooler, but since it's basically being erupted out of his mouth, I guess I have to call it lava breath. The first page is a sketch of him charging up this attack (I imagine his throat starts to glow red, then orange, then yellow and the air shimmers as the heat builds up) while the second page is him launching the attack.

In 2018 I described Cascadia's lava breath as being inherently thick and viscous and explosive, thinking that subduction zones can only produce lava that is like that. But I've since learned they can make more runny, basaltic type lava as well. Since Cascadia's the one making the magma in the first place, I imagine he can control the composition of his lava breath. He can make it more fluid and stereotypically lava-like (like he is shown blasting all over a very angry San Andreas), or he can pretty much just spew out a pyroclastic flow on his victims (as shown in the last sketch).

I've mentioned this before, but Cascadia doesn't really eat with his mouth, but with his trench (or what would be his trench, if it weren't buried under so much sediment and the Juan de Fuca Plate subducted at a steeper angle), which is his true mouth. This would imply the mouth on his face is somehow itself one of his volcanoes? But bigger? It's kinda unclear.

Since the melting first happens in his stomach this makes Cascadia's lava breath like the stomach oil made by albatrosses and petrels out of the fish they eat, which they vomit out as a defense mechanism. Except in Cascadia's case, it's not oil or stomach acid, it's friggin' lava. And it most definitely is used offensively.

I guess it's like a literal version of how the stomach is depicted as a boiling lava pit in media like Cells at Work.

Some old and crude hurricane art from high school when I first got a drawing tablet.

I would not draw the scene of the hurricane fishing as being so innocent and peaceful nowadays. I once went catch-and-release fishing, thinking I was not harming the fish, but then one bass had the hook lodge deep in its throat and inside a major blood vessel. I watched it bleed to death before my eyes. It was then that I realized even if I wasn't intending to harm the fish, the hook was causing them injuries and suffering, plus the process of tiring out and being held up from the water by the jaws was stressful for them too. I don't go fishing for fun anymore.

In any case, I imagine a hurricane would catch fish by using its wind and storm surge to blow the fish out of the water.