Archive for ‘Comics’

114 results.
May09

The Union of Federation Redshirts

by Mark on May 9, 2013 at 9:58 pm
Posted In: Comics, French, Translations
The Union of Federation Redshirts

This strip marks the start of the fifth year of The Greys as a webcomic. Quite honestly we’re surprised to have made it through four years, and even more surprised that we’ve succeeded in keeping to our original schedule of fortnightly strips (we’ve long since given up on the dream of producing weekly comics).

The past four years has seen The Greys appear in print in our local Town Council’s magazine, leading to a newspaper gig for our Monsters, Inked comic, which in turn is now available as a printed collection. We’ve seen visitors to the site grow from single digit figures to thousands each month – with a corresponding increase in our hosting charges (and unfortunately a few cases of the site being shut down when we exceeded our bandwidth). We’ve created over 100 comics, and found new friends from around the world who have been kind enough to translate some of them for us (or in the case of Sam, our French translator, has been incredibly generous enough to have translated all of them!).

So what will Season 5 bring? Much of the same, really. We’ll still be endeavouring to bring you a new Greys strip every fortnight, and Monsters, Inked strips as and when we finish them. We’ll still be parodying all the old sci-fi and cult TV standards that we’ve poked fun at in the past, but we’re always trying to introduce more. And the first half of Season 5 will see a few more Doctor Who parodies as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this British sci-fi institution.

Despite those grandiose ideas, however, we thought we’d just start the season with a good old-fashioned Star Trek joke to coincide with the release of Star Trek Into Darkness.

Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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Apr25

How 99 Got Smart

by Mark on April 25, 2013 at 10:37 pm
Posted In: Comics, French, Translations
How 99 Got Smart

This is the last strip of Season 4. Every year so far we’ve changed the header image for the Greys site, and for the past year the top of our site has been based on the titles from the classic spy series, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

As we approached the end of the season, however, we realised that we have never actually created a comic which uses the characters from the programme – or even one that references them indirectly. It was a situation that was just begging to be rectified, preferably before the switch to Season 5 brings a new header.

While thinking about iconic features of the U.N.C.L.E. series and movies it was immediately obvious that we really had to use Robert Vaughn’s character, Napoleon Solo, and David McCallum’s character, Illya Kuryakin, so work began to create Grey versions of each of them. The pen-communicator also seemed like a great addition, but that in turn led to discussions about the shoe-phone used in Get Smart, Mel Brooks’ wonderful parody of the spy genre.

It’s a genre that is ripe for humour: for every Bond there’s a Flint, for every Napoleon Solo there’s a Maxwell Smart. Not to mention Austin Powers and Inspector Gadget! Our comic is just a small addition to this rich culture of spy parodies, but we think it makes for a worthy end to the season.

The question now is what should we use for our Season 5 header…?

Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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Apr11

I Think Therefore I Was

by Mark on April 11, 2013 at 8:33 am
Posted In: Comics, French, Translations
I Think Therefore I Was

Zombies have seen something of a resurgence recently. Driven by the sympathetic treatment that vampires now receive, a niche has opened for a classic remorseless vessel of evil and death, and zombies fill that void quite nicely.

But we’re fully of the opinion that zombies don’t run. A recent trend for more action oriented horror movies has resulted in several films (most famously 28 Days Later) in which the zombies, far from being barely animated corpses, are able to run, jump and climb with surprising agility. With such fine motor control, it’s surprising they’re not more talkative, too.

The problem with an athletic zombie is that it misses the point about what actually makes zombies scary. The threat from a fast zombie is really no different to that from a vampire or werewolf. But the threat from slow, shuffling zombies is not in their individual potency, but in the sheer numbers. Every zombie story worth mentioning pits just a few survivors against an outbreak that has infected the whole of society. Ten zombies are easy to deal with; ten thousand are not.

It’s that inexorable onslaught which is the real threat from zombies. The heroes can slay the undead time after time after time, but still more will arrive. And at some point the heroes have got to sleep…

It turns out that one of my favourite books is a zombie story – I just didn’t realise it until recently. John Wyndham’s classic 1951 novel, The Day of the Triffids, actually hits the survivors with a double-whammy of shuffling creatures. The immediate threat is that of a world population blinded by a meteor shower. Awkwardly making their way through the streets in search of food, many of them are keen to capture and enslave anyone who can still see. Subsequently the perambulating, poisonous, carnivorous plants of the title appear on the scene. They are a much bigger threat in the long-term. Whilst the blind will mostly starve or become triffid food, the triffids themselves will continue to multiply and attack in never ending numbers into the future.

The irony is that this zombie-less zombie book of slow moving, shuffling threats was actually the inspiration for 28 Days Later — although I don’t remember any of the triffids learning how to run…

Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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Mar29

Number 6

by Mark on March 29, 2013 at 6:27 pm
Posted In: Comics, French, Translations
Number 6

I should probably be ashamed to mention that, despite being a British sci-fi fan, I have never watched The Prisoner. By which I mean that I’ve never sat down to watch all 17 episodes from start to finish, although I have seen the occasional individual episode and numerous clips over the years.

Recently I decided to correct this anomaly, and tried to watch it. I found that it was listed for streaming on Lovefilm (a UK video streaming and DVD rental company, owned by Amazon). As I have an active Lovefilm subscription and both a TV and Blu-ray player that have Lovefilm applications I looked forward to being able to watch it on a television in the comfort of my living room.

Except I couldn’t find it (The Prisoner, not my living room).

I double-checked their website and, sure enough, it was listed as available to watch on “Lovefilm Instant” – their streaming service. So I checked the TV and blu-ray again, manually wading through all the likely categories after the search options failed me. Still no sign of it.

I emailed their support department, only to be told that their license for The Prisoner only allowed them to stream it via a web browser. Unfortunately their web interface required Microsoft Silverlight, so is not available on my Linux box. So despite paying for a Lovefilm subscription, and owning two Lovefilm Instant capable players, I couldn’t watch a 1967 programme due to some ridiculous licensing deal which means they can send a stream of bits to Windows and MacOS computers, but not to a Linux machine, nor even to hardware running their own streaming apps.

No wonder people resort to piracy.

Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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Mar14

The Mechanics Of Time Travel

by Mark on March 14, 2013 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Comics, French, Translations
The Mechanics Of Time Travel

This is the second of our strips to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. A recent throw-away line that made me chuckle (and apparently annoyed a lot of the more hardcore fans of the series) was this explanation of why the TARDIS makes its classic noise:

Given the ongoing problem with the broken Chameleon Circuit, it struck me that perhaps both “issues” have the same underlying cause…

Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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Feb28

The Grey Star

by Mark on February 28, 2013 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Comics, French, Translations
The Grey Star

This strip dates back to 1996 and our first attempts to launch The Greys as a comic strip. The joke came to me as soon as the White Star was revealed at the start of Season 3 of Babylon 5, and was originally planned as a single panel showing the ship exploding, with this caption:

The Grey Star could have been a wonderful hybrid of different cultures’ technologies — if it wasn’t for the fact that the Minbari used metric threads while the Vorlons used Imperial!

The original scrawled out idea, from 1996

At the time, however, we had no idea how prescient this joke would prove to be.

Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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Feb14

Assembling an Army

by Mark on February 14, 2013 at 11:58 pm
Posted In: Comics, French, Translations
Assembling an Army

I have fond memories of building Airfix kits with my father and brother during the 1970s and 80s. Although we built a variety of boats, cars and tanks, it’s the aeroplanes – particularly the large scale Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire – that stick in my mind most. How fondly I recall the arguments over whether to build them with the undercarriage up or down and how best to paint them. And of course I’ll never forget the joy of floating small transfers in water, sliding them off their paper backing, and then finding they would rather stick to me, to themselves or, in fact, to absolutely anything in preference to the model.

Whilst Airfix and other model kits were just a fun hobby for me, Vince took them far more seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he became a professional model maker for a number of years, including a period working for the Tussauds Group (mainly doing exhibition and design models, though, not wax celebrities).

Even before then he was creating wonderful models, including a life-size reproduction of the death mask of Tutankhamun.

Unfortunately for Vince, he was unable to find a good reference for the inscriptions on the rear of the death mask, so although his reproduction looks great from the front, it’s a little too plain when viewed from behind. It also means his staff of Ra was too long, so he never did find the Ark of the Covenant. Or perhaps I’m confusing him with someone else.

Although my last Airfix kit was many years ago, Vince is still making models (and available for commissions). Perhaps you’ll recognise his current work in progress…

Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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Jan31

A New Job for an Old Soldier

by Mark on January 31, 2013 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics, French, Translations
A New Job for an Old Soldier

Way back in November of 1963, before either of us was even born, the first episode of Doctor Who aired on the BBC. We both grew up with the programme as a staple of Saturday night television here in the UK, and it probably marks our first forays into the world of sci-fi.

Admittedly, at that young age, we didn’t really understand what science fiction was. The TARDIS would materialise out of thin air, but it wasn’t really a space ship. Not like the ones on Space 1999. And although we knew the Doctor was an alien, he just looked like a human with a quirky taste in clothes. Without the zapping lasers and dogfights of Star Wars, and stories that usually relied on suspense and drama more than special effects and expensive props, our naive young minds didn’t really put it in the same category as more obvious science fiction.

But science fiction it was – and is. And although its rebirth in recent years has seen more of a move towards spaceships and lasers, it can still occasionally muster those darker, more dramatic plots that taught our younger selves that sci-fi can be just as good – if not better – when the lasers and spaceships give way to drama and tension.

The programme has had such an impact on us – and on the British public as a whole – that we can’t let this 50th anniversary year go uncelebrated. We’re lining up quite a few Doctor Who themed Greys strips for the months ahead, with something particularly special planned for November. There will be more Daleks, more Cybermen, and more TARDIS than ever before. Like this strip, some of them will just feature a character or two from the series, whereas others will be pure Doctor Who, through and through.

As much as we enjoy the Doctor, in all his regenerations, we don’t want to go over the top on a single subject, so we’ll still have plenty of other strips poking fun at other franchises and stories. But don’t be surprised if even those have a police box in the background, or a Dalek eye-stalk poking out through the curtains. The Greys in 2013 will be unashamedly Doctor Who heavy – it’s the least we can do for this 50 year old institution that has shaped our lives so much.

Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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Jan17

Filmnesia Part V

by Mark on January 17, 2013 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Comics, French, Translations
Filmnesia Part V

With this strip we’ve reached the end of our Filmnesia series. We’ve seen the main character go from a temporary mind-wipe so he could see a film for the first time, through a more permanent amnesia in order to wipe out the memory of a dreadful film, to the logical conclusion of wiping out everything and starting again… only to find out that starting again isn’t as fun as it sounds.

This has been the longest series of Greys strips we’ve done. We’ll probably do another multi-strip series again in future (we’ve got some great ideas, and just need to find the time to draw them), but for now it’s back to individual stand-alone strips for a while. Having said that, there will be a bit of a theme running through several of our stand-alone strips this year: being English sci-fi fans we will, of course, be trying to squeeze a few Doctor Who characters and references in during this 50th anniversary year. Make sure you check out our next strip for the first of them.

Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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3 Comments
Jan03

Filmnesia Part IV

by Mark on January 3, 2013 at 7:53 pm
Posted In: Comics, French, Translations
Filmnesia Part IV

This strip was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend of mine, several years ago. She’d just seen her first ever pornographic film, and commented that “it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected”. I then had to explain to her that she’d got lucky, and just happened to see something that fell within her notion of acceptability. She could just as easily have been exposed to something that would have been far worse than she’d expected.

The odd thing about pornography, though, is just how quickly arousal can turn into horror – as I’m sure many drunken tourists to Bangkok can testify! There’s only a very small step from “I’m enjoying this”, through “I’m not sure, but I’ll give it a try” and into “URGH!”. Or to put it in graph form…

Of course that’s a gross oversimplification. For a start there’s no single measure for “Intensity of porn” that can be used on the x-axis — one man’s fetish is another man’s perversion. And the “OMG” crossing point tends to move to the right with time and experience (or, in the case of this comic’s Grey, gets reset back to the left). But everyone has their limit, and whilst it can be fun to push the boundaries of your sexual tastes, just be careful not to push them too far: mind bleach doesn’t really exist.

Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic

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