I figured it was about time for another round of these...I present the #160s!

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This was an exciting comic to make, but I grant I would probably do it a little differently today. Now I thought it moved the story along pretty well and some of the backgrounds are excellent - I worked hard to get the angles right, and it shows (although those angles where they're on top of the monorail are off - it looks like they're thousands of feet in the air, which would be rather unlikely). I think this is really where my backgrounds started to shine.

I'm a geek about mass transit, so I tried to replicate the experience of a real urban transit system as best I could. The "42S" mentioned in the eighth panel is based on the real-life (but now decommissioned) 42S line in Pittsburgh, where my family was living at the time (I was living on my own in Albuquerque at this point) - if you're familiar with Pittsburgh, you might recognize those neighborhood names - Beechview is where my family was living.

My one regret with this comic is that I think I made it way too preachy at the end there, with UM's little speech. In my mind I wanted to establish the difference between UM (noble, righteous, moralistic) and Larry & Tarry (slightly less so - more pragmatic and maybe a little cynical) but looking back on it now this makes me cringe. There were much more subtle ways of getting this point across.

This was a fun one, if just for the duplicated image at the bottom. Though it occurs to me I should have also flipped the bottom image horizontally, so that it really would have looked the same from UM's perspective.

I thought about doing other "Lessons in Comic Making" strips, but I never seemed to have any good ideas for what topic to do next. Oh well.

Oh yeah, this was awesome. B) After coming up with the occasional acronym, I decided I had to go all out and just deliver a whole slew of them. I think N.E.R.D.S. is my favorite, but B.U.R.P. and O.O.P.S. are good too. The others are okay, but those three are my favorites. They all took a surprisingly long time to come up with (well, I think B.U.M. was a quick one).

I think this comic holds the distinction of being the only comic without any of my characters in it. If not, it's the only one without any of my or any Bionicle characters. Of course, that was made up by the fact that Jon Stewart (whose sprite needs a little work, I admit), Stephen Colbert, and Barack Obama are in it.

If there's one thing I'd change about this comic, it'd have to be that last panel. Don't get me wrong - I'm not ashamed of putting Obama in my comic (on the contrary, I'm immensely proud of my portrayal of him), but the dialogue is off. If you read it, it sounds like he's talking about bringing change, then proposing an action which would keep things just the way they are. You could read a serious political statement into that, which was not my intention. So please, don't read anything into that. It's just sloppy writing.

What's funny is that when I made this comic, I hadn't seen The Room yet, but if you're familiar with Tommy Wiseau's accent, then that is exactly what I was going for with Kyeti there. Your tearing me apart, Me-lee-sa! Oh hai Larry!

I'm pretty sure that line in the second-to-last panel is ripped off from an early Calvin and Hobbes strip.

This is way more true than I care to admit.

Oh man, I was on a raging roll with this one. Political cartoons so frequently disappoint me. I enjoy political humor (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are idols of mine) but editorial comics are so frequently bland and just plain awful. Everything Larry & Tarry say here is totally me - I hate it when cartoonists feel the need to label everything in sight (yeah, throw subtlety out the door why don't you?) and they always have the worst metaphors and puns imaginable. And some of them are just impossible to understand. Politics could be so much more interesting to the casual bystander if cartoonists could be original and entertaining. [/rant] Okay, I'm better now.

In case you weren't around BZPower for this, the forums were shut down for weeks (I can't remember why, some kind of hack or glitch or something) and when they finally came back, all the posts made in the last six or so months had to be deleted. It was so weird to finally come back only to find a past version of BZPower waiting for you. Hence the time travel idea.

I am immensely proud of my 2001: A Space Odyssey tribute (by which I mean rip-off) here. Once it occurred to me that I could expand the dark brown areas of my mask to make it look like wrinkles, I could do an "aging" process pretty easily. There's that one point where I added some white hair and softened the eyes, but mainly I focused on the amount of dark brown. I don't think I've seen aging sprites in a BZP comic - if you have, let me know where I can see it. I'm curious to see how others did it.

Not a whole lot to say about this one. Learning my lesson from the last Birth of UM comic, I toned down the preachy in this one. Here it's just the mystery and the escape from the police. Though I grant by this point in the series I felt like I might be dragging the story a bit, hence the attempt to really focus it starting with the next part.