Splinter of the Mind’s Eye – Part 2
First off, mad props to Geoffrey Padilla who supplied us with our 3D cel shaded star craft. We added a few color tweaks and effects and ALAKAZAM you have our finest looking strip so far!
On the left is the Adam Hughes interpretation of Leia as she must have looked at the beginning of the Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. She piloted a Y-Wing… a nice little two-seater with C3PO in the back. Must have been hell! However, we don’t often see Leia in a rebel pilot outfit. I guess you can put her in just about any uniform, so long as she has those buns on either side of her head, she makes it work. Funny how that hair style should make her look silly, but she just ends up looking hot. I particularly like our BMS Leia, even though she’s a cartoon.
Also, it sounds like BMS Leia has been well received by our readers. That’s obviously a good thing as she’s been a favorite of mine in this strip for a while. Although the iPhone gimmick was fun, I didn’t want her to be a one-trick pony, as we have a few of those already. Fortunately, by turning to Carrie Fisher for inspiration we found exactly what we were looking for. We love you, Carrie!
We have a lot in store for Luke and Leia as we truly get into the Splinter of the Mind’s Eye parody over the next couple of weeks. New art, new spins on their relationship, the return of Darth Vader and the return of a surprise guest character. I soooooo doubt any of you will guess who it will be. Hint, we’re lazy. 20 BMS points to anyone who calls it before it happens. I’m not sure what I’m going to let you redeem BMS points for at this stage… we used to keep score. I’ll figure it out as soon as someone earns 100.
Don’t forget, we are looking for helpers at New York Comic Con on October 8 – 10, 2010 at the Jacob K. Javits Center. We will be there with a table in Artist Alley. If you’re interested in helping us out during the show, especially if you are planning to wear a Star Wars themed costume, please get in touch with us. 🙂
New to Blue Milk Special? Start reading from the beginning!
Is it Biggs?
BMS Leia is my favorite characterization. ^_^
Nope.
I think the obvious guest character would be another visit from Biggs. But if I was to guess an unexpected one, I would have to say Admiral Ackbar or Indiana Jones.
Nope, nope and nope.
I”ll guess Wedge.
– Since the movie was never made (and probably never will be) I wonder why they won’t re-print the book with original text of the Tie fighter dogfight (it would probably sell more copies). By the accounts I’ve read the story was re-written, so the original must exist somewhere. Now we can have special editions of cheeply done half-forgotten extended universe material and not just cannon!
You’re onto something! I think George Lucas would LOVE this idea.
Special Editions of the EU? Please god noooooooo…….
So, I’m to infer from this comment that the butt of this gag is there originally were editions of Splinter with a TIE battle instead of a Y-wing malfunction? I may have the original printing, somewhere, since I’m that old. I may have two, since my wife’s that old too. (Unless they were among what was lost in that storage center water damage fiasco of a few years back.) If I ever come across one I’ll check for TIE fighters and let you know.
No. The TIE fighters never made it into the book, but were in an early draft. The butt of the gag is that Harrison Ford cost too much for the prospective reduced budget of a sequel to a less successful Star Wars film.
I say Yoda.
Uh uh.
I was gonna say Biggs as well, so that’s one less. I’d also say Han, but he’s not in this. Boba would be too obvious. My guess is between two heavy set guys: Salacious Crumb and Old George. Since I have to narrow it down to one, I nominate Old George to make an appearance, mayhaps to justify the events of this story arc. Either way, I look forward to the result.
I’m liking the ideas, and let’s not say that some of these suggestion so far will not appear… however, so far no one has guessed the specific character who will be returning. It’s very obscure. Too obscure for any of you geniuses to work out… and yet, this character as appeared in the past. 😉
Whoever was the people’s favourite alien in the cantina? The Teen-wolf guy?
That’s a good idea… but no, not the character in question.
Is it Tarkins wife ?
God…It better not be Jar Jar… Y_Y
I think I know who it is, but I won’t say because I kinda cheated to find out. ^_^
Nah, I bet you don’t know. I’ll give you 40 BMS points if your guess is correct.
Don’t worry. That will NEVER happen. I felt ill just having Vader mention him in that ANH strip we did about torturing Leia.
It’s Padmé Amidala isn’t it? ^_^
No. Sorry. I’m now trying to visualize a scenario in which she would appear to the twins… who I might add, were not yet twins at this point when SOTME was written. That’s not a bad idea at all, but it’s not the character we have lined up. 🙂 And I’ll add that it’s way off the mark. So, as a tip, it’s not a character from the Prequels.
“It’s not a character from the Prequels.”
Her – hear! Not many of them HAD any character.
How about Skeletor?
LOL! No. Good idea, again, though.
Well dang, and you’ve killed off everyone else I rooted for!
How about Commander Bast?
Hey, not my fault! I never wanted Tarkin to die, or Obi Wan, or Biggs… :-/
Not Commander Bast. Although, once again, you guys are giving me ideas. Bast and Lak Sivrak may appear… but they are not the character in question. I’ve been giving too many clues and the said character will not appear for a couple of weeks yet.
How about The Blues Brothers?
It’s a character that previously appeared in BMS. 😛
Smoking Jawa?? Please let it be him!!!
Well, Smoking Jawa does “get around”. But no, not him.
I’m gonna go with – Young George or Bea Arthur
CONGRATULATIONS! Although it only took something like 30 comments and guesses from everyone. WampaChow guessed it! Bea Arthur will be back. Makes no sense, you say? Hmmmm… 😉
20 BMS points to WampaChow.
Nice!!!!!!!
All things lead back to Bea…
Can 20 points get me a Blue Milk Ice Cream cone?
No. 20 BMS won’t get you anything… not until you have 100. 😉
I say go cheap and send him the cone — sans ice cream. In a regular postage envelope. With a disclaimer that you are not responsible for any changes in the cone-ness of the cone during shipping. That should please everyone.*
And Bea Arthur. For some reason she scared me when I was a kid. Might have to do with her resembling my 2nd grade teacher, who really scared me. I did not like her (the teacher) for multiple reasons — she’s one of only 2 people I have ever known personally that I reacted with happiness when I heard they died.
The other was with Al Qaeda.**
* Pleasing-ness of recipient may vary.
** To be fair, she wasn’t that bad, but as a kid I really didn’t have much perspective on these things and was as cruel in my judgement of people as only kids can be.*** I’ve also since felt guilty at being happy about it at the time.
*** That and I have never heard about whether my grade 8 teacher has died, otherwise it would have been 3.
For some twisted reason I laughed out loud. You are a sick person, Scribb. Glad you enjoy our strip.
The emperor? Oh wait I already took my guess.
Smoking Jawa? (Note to self “stop it”).
When Lando finaly appars will he be trying to sell us Colt 45?
OK, it’s an obscure character you say? That has appeared before?
I’m going to lay odds on it being the Star Destroyer Gunner that let Threepio and Artoo escape with the plans.
That IS obscure!
That’s a great character Rod. if your strip needs a recurring IDIOT – that’s your man.
Itchy the Wookiee!
😉
Bea Arthur? like the person Bea Arthur? She is very old.
Will there be cheesecake?
RIP Eddie Fisher.
Sorry for your loss Carrie 🙁
Hey! Do you think BMS should have a You Tube channel? Maybe you can animate a 30 second thingy-thing every so often.
Carrie Fisher’s dad just died too.
Thought about it, even downloaded software and experimented… but we have to be honest… we just don’t have the time. We barely manage to get BMS done let alone all our other projects. Leanne works with Rob Zombie as the editor of his Baron Von Shock comic book series, she also illustrates an ongoing series of backup stories written by Rob that appear in the comic. I have various non-creative writing commitments, as well as the Once Upon A Super Hero comic which I’m about to launch. If someone else came along, who knew what they were doing, and was willing to work on animating our art, we’d definitely consider it. So glad that people like BMS enough to want to see it in other mediums… but most likely it shall forever be a webcomic.
Aw, I was going to guess Tarkin’s wife. I don’t know why, it just seemed like a good call back. But yay for Bea Arthur!
That was gonna be my guess too, but i guess we were wrong 😉
Star Wars radio? Link please. 🙂
I love this comic. For so many reasons. I know this is a way off, but are going to try to keep the comic going all the way through the NJO stuff?
That’s just too far off to contemplate right now. I mean, if we manage to get to ROTJ, or even if we manage to complete TESB, I’ll be impressed. It’s not easy finding the time to keep rolling the strips out, even though we frequently re-use our own stock art. I’d say on average one strip takes between 3-5 hours. That’s pretty scary to admit.
Yea, I hear that. Still its a great job. The webcomic I am impressed with is misfile, that guy puts out a page a weekday, and I don’t think he has missed a page a day (except maybe holidays) in all the years he has been writing the comic.
I hope the comic sticks around that long. ^_^
PS I now officially hate Gravatar
Yeah, Gravatar stuck me with this icon of Biggs. Appropriate for this site… but not for this email address. I guess I’ll just have to find the time to log in and fix that someday. *sigh* time….
And yeah, at our most prolific, we produced a new strip every day for a whole month, plus bonus Tarkin strips (two strips in one day) every Wednesday. But, we have full time day jobs AND professional creative commitments so it just can’t last at that rate forever. We will hang in there and when necessary take a week off. But we’ve done well so far, all things considered. TESB is a bit daunting to think about right now, but we’re having fun with SOTME.
3-5 hours is a huge chunk of unpaid work. It’s not like you’re a couple of kids or students living with your parents. Might be worth considering a donations button. What would a dollar a month pull in, if 10% of your readership gave it?
I think 10% is wildly optimistic. But at the same time, is it “right” to have a donations button? In essence, all we’d be doing would be riding the coat tails of George Lucas’ property and effectively exploiting that to make money. He never asked us to make this parody. As a fan work we are not entitled to profit from someone else’s work. That’s the truth. Sure, it may only occasionally get enforced by the property holder, but do we want that headache? Since we do this out of love for Star Wars, the last thing we would want would be to create bad blood between ourselves and the master of the Force himself. That would take the fun out of BMS (and no doubt kill this strip) and perhaps also our love for Star Wars too.
So again, we really need our fans and readers to help us out in terms of getting noticed, positive exposure and perhaps in some remote and distant future some sort of friendly acknowledgment or recognition that what we do is okay. An invite to Celebration VI or VII or VIII would be pretty groovy too.
I admire your honourable attitude. Yep, why tempt fate? Or… the wrath of someone you admire.
I certainly think donations to cover costs would be fair enough. The value of your hours aside – are there much in the way of financial costs? Site hosting and domain names are are pretty cheap though. Maybe the cost really is just your own time.
Personal time is expensive. Sometimes more so than what money can seemingly buy. We never started BMS to make money and I think that’s an important thing for us to remember. We did sell a handful of collected volumes of the first 50 strips for just a few bucks each when we were at our very first show, but we really didn’t make anything. I’d rather focus on the sale of prints of people’s favorite strips and commissions done at the shows we attend than selling an actual collected volume.
So when are you lot going to bring out compendia? I would totally buy a print version of this. If it works for Girl Genius and Freak Angels (the two others I’ve purchased), why not for you?
I wish we could, but we just can’t. George Lucas created Star Wars. He’s the man. This is his world and although we’re parodying it, we are still heavily using his characters and Star Wars enormous popularity, which would be seen as us taking advantage of and exploiting his property without the license to do so. By not selling BMS as a product, we remain in the realms of fan parody. Parody has a degree of protection under copyright law, but I feel its important to respect Mr Lucas’ ownership of the property even though its probably not legally impossible to publish a printed collection. Selling it for charity purposes is an option, but that still requires time to put it together and money to print the books. At least a dollar would have to go to us to help cover the costs of printing, and I doubt that would really cover it.
It’s a bit of a dilemma. We’d love to print a collected work, but without George Lucas’ approval we would be channeling the Dark Side of the Force. I may discuss this in a future blog post to get feedback from more readers on this. We recently learned, for example, that we can potentially come to any convention in the country if you guys write to the show organizers and request that we be invited as guests. That waives our needing to pay for a table and reduces our expense in attending to travel and hotel only. So, you guys can make an impact in what we can achieve. And potentially, the more shows we do, the more exposure BMS gets, the better chances that we might actually get a tip of the hat from LucasFilm someday or even have select strips appear in official publications and really become a part of the Star Wars fan universe.
It’s obviously possible: Family Guy, Robot Chicken, Hardware Wars film (which Lucas loves). Whether he’d want a cut or not? – can’t say.
The comparisons to Family Guy and Robot Chicken are flattering, but unfair. They are backed by television networks, have a budget, and the guys involved are in the television production industry. We’re just a couple of artists with full time day jobs paying tribute (through parody) to one of the very best movies of all time. George would be entitled to a cut of anything we did, but to entertain those sorts of dreams is a little far fetched. The best we can hope for is that others are able to “get” our humor and enjoy the deviations on the established tale, and our spins of the famous lines, scenes and characters. But without readers who appreciate what we are doing, BMS is truly nothing but a time expensive hobby. The fact that some of our readers have got together to make a Wookieepedia entry about our strip is very flattering and rewarding feeling because it shows that we’re not just making this strip for our own enjoyment, but for others too. Some days we really need the boost we get from knowing that we are making something that others care about. 🙂
I know what you mean. It seems simple – before you do it. I originally intended to scan my comic – throw it online – and if anyone looked at it, great. if not, who cares?
Once you discover how much time and effort you’re putting into it – and it’s ENORMOUS – it becomes not merely a nice bonus to get feedback but actually a necessity one the days when you begin to doubt the whole point of doing it. “What the hell am I doing? Am I crazy?”
No it’s not about money. Not when it’s the most fun and fulfilling project you’ve ever worked on.
Thanks for the detailed answer. I was aware on one level that any print version would require explicit approval from George Lucas, but even your “Old George versus Young George” is ultimately respectful and in good taste. But the George Lucas of our world can be unpredictable, that I will grant.
I personally think that there are a lot of fans of your work on the Skywalker Ranch. The artwork is crisp and clean, and you do capture perfectly the mesh between modern life with tweets and such, and the original Seventies vibe that gave us Star Wars.
Thanks for the kind words. And theoretically, BMS could publish collected works, it would just run the risk of tempting LucasFilm to respond with legal threats. Since we have no desire to be a nuisance (or to pay for legal fees for that matter), we are sticking with the Light Side of the Force.
The real question here is why weren’t they in light speed ?
I think they were very near Circarpous V so they had dropped out of hyperspace and were travelling at sublight when they passed the “magentic field” of Circapous IV (Mimban).
They must have some crappy nav. computers.
As I recall, they were traveling from the hidden rebel base on the 12th planet inwards to the populated 4th planet, when they passed the 5th planet, where the mining operation messed up her navigational computer.
Remember, the early drafts of ESB had the story taking place in a single solar system. So the distant planet with the rebel base became Hoth, the Jungle Planet of the Jedi changed from Mimban to Dagobah, while the mining operation was spun off to it’s own planet, Bespin. The Coway battle was moved back to the next movie.
So, in Splinter the rebels are traveling in-system, not in hyperspace. That’s why the Falcon made it from Hoth to Bespin with a busted hyperdrive. . .
That incentive strip is hilarious.
Oh, hey… thanks! That’s the bad thing about the incentive strip… no area for comments.
You should check out this Star Wars parody : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L8b1zPE0-Y
Since the guest character has already been revealed (though I haven’t gotten that far yet), I’d like to comment that the pink Y-Wing is uber cute ;P