“Striking Sparks” — Page Twenty-One
Ooo! Does this mean we’re engaged?
More below!
Bobservations
Playing With Fire
I think I would be a terrible mole. Not that anyone has ever asked me to be one, but this idea of being a double agent or working as an “inside man” on some sort of caper would just terrify me. I guess plenty of people do it — in real life, even — but it always seems to me that getting involved with dangerous criminals is just asking for trouble. Kind of like going into a creepy old house with a couple of your friends in order to look for a lost baseball and one of your buddies suggests brightly: “Hey, let’s split up, gang! We can search faster that way!”
I think at that point I would just leave. Let someone else start discovering your buddies in various dismembered states as the doors vanish and the dark hallways begin to stretch into eternity. I know how these things work.
But it appears that Wallend had debts or pressure points or some other way of allowing Fynch to get his hooks in him, and now he’s in deep. At least at the moment, Fynch seems to feel Wallend still has some use, so he honors his end of the deal. But not without making Wallend do a little sweating first.
Speaking of sweat, and playing with fire — my Other Son John and I were asked to do some custom footage for a commercial. Footage that would have been easy as pie if we could just have been allowed to use our flamethrower inside a parking structure (as I groused about in Page Nineteen‘s post) but the stubbornness of parking facility management remains unyielding. However, it is possible to purchase sheets of a concrete-like substance from construction-supply stores. So we did this, painted them black, and managed to create something we could work with to a limited extent. Here’s a couple of raw clips.
The footage got used, too — the company sent me a peek at the final commercial (for a Canadian amusement park called Cedar Fair) and they mixed the fire with some of our embers footage from earlier to create a damn cool dragon-fire effect with it. The commercial hasn’t aired yet so until I get permission I can’t post the link, but when I do, I will! In the meantime, lots of new fire footage for us to work with. Safer than making deals with underworld kingpins.
UPDATE: Permission granted! Here’s the finished commercial.
— Bob out
Ok, now we have the obligatory corrupt mole (caucasian male… liberal obligatory).
We also have a street smart crime lord who can enter a police station undetectable by normal means (again, caucasian male). His toughest thug (again, you guessed it) has been neutralized by the strip’s hero (what? also caucasian male? the liberals won’t like that).
Ok, enough venting about the stupid liberals (they dig their own graves well enough).
This strip has been going very well and I like it. I wish you didn’t have to deal with the libs, but you do. At least you didn’t have to include a clergyman in your story. You KNOW the libs would want him to be the most corrupt of all.
I know what you mean. Any movie with a clergyman or a cop immediately pegs said character asa ccorrupt antagonist. It’s so cliche. That’s why I love old school Robocop and Zorro: the cops and clergymen are always the good guys. Kinda refreshing in a retroactive way.
Admittedly it’s really my own fault for bringing up the whole Ethnicity of Tropes thing in a previous post, but rest assured that Max and I have no agenda here other than the story, no one is looking over our shoulders, and our character choices are entirely based on our own life experiences plus whatever we think would be interesting. 🙂 That’s the fun of webcomics — we really can do whatever we want.
Aaaaand… let’s leave it at that, shall we? Moving on.
Bob, it is clear that your family needs their own parking lot. Isn’t there one you could buy, maybe one that belongs to an abandoned and now creepy shopping center or such? 😀
And to me, Fynch doesn’t look evil or scary on this page. He looks rather reasonable. Unlike Wallend, btw.
Does Cedar Falls plan to release their commercial?
They did, it turns out Cedar Fair is the parent company for a series of amusement parks and the ride is an interactive 3D experience at “Wonder Mountain” called “Guardian.” I’ve seen the finished commercial on the ad company website but it’s behind a client wall. Since it was a Canadian spot and probably local I’ve never found it on YouTube. Closest I’ve found is a promotional still here.
Ah! They just contacted me about doing something else, so I asked them about the commercial and they sent me the final, plus permission to post it. So it’s up on the blog now!