Once again, the students at El Oro Way School have sent us postcards they’ve made while studying the planets of the solar system. Their teacher, Ms. Nava-Moreno, uses Ellie’s comics in their classroom. Here are the drawings they made. Thanks everybody!
I ran across a cool video the other day – a tribute to the Voyager (or V-ger) spacecraft from the 1970s. It reminded me of similar footage sent from Ellie’s approach to Planet X. It’s a little grainy, but it was shot with 1970s technology and traveled 8.6 light years to get here.
Here’s a much better shot of the planet in false color. Mostly cloud covered, but you can make out some surface features:
Lastly, here’s the video that inspired me to post this stuff:
Voyagers from Santiago Menghini on Vimeo.
A few of the robot designs that preceded Ellie. Clockwise from top right is 4NDY, 9-A (Nina), and K8 (like cat, only Cate). Remind me to tell you about the time they had to rescue Ellie and get her to her launch in time!
It’s Star Wars week! Wooooo!
Mission Control here. Ellie keeps sending us newly discovered species to gawk over, but she hasn’t assigned names to all of them yet. Here’s a group shot of some of them (not to scale)!
Mission Control gets some pretty awesome mail, but there’s not much that’s as awesome as this. The fifth grad class at El Oro Way School were studying the solar system and sent Ellie a bunch of beautiful postcards from each of the planets!
There are far too many to post them all, but here’s just a few. We’ve sent them on to Ellie, but with the speed of light and all, it’ll take eight and a half years for them to arrive. But we promise, she’ll see them!
Ellie contemplates her immediate predecessor, LE Number 9.
One thing I’ve learned over the last, what…two years? Writing a graphic novel is not at all like writing comic strips. Comic strips enjoy the ability of being completely free of plot that moves a story forward. There doesn’t have to be a purpose they’re moving toward. In fact, for this kind of strip, that’s the whole point. Ellie’s “story” can meander all over the place. And it just keeps going and going because we don’t want it to end.
So Ellie’s story in graphic novel form is a bit more complex, with motivations and character arcs and stakes and other fun stuff. And having never written anything like that before it’s a kind of a trial and error situation. So here’s where we are: several publishers have looked it over, and though they like the ideas very much, there’s some stuff lacking. This isn’t a bad thing. In fact it’s good. Because now I get to opportunity to present a plot that’s more concise. One that I’ve just finished reworking and am sending out today. Fingers crossed.
Meanwhile, Ellie continues to send us info on her discoveries. We’ll let you know when it’s something fascinating. Also, we’ve got a few Ellie related projects in the works which I’ll clue you in on when I know more. And I haven’t forgotten about the Ellie Mission Patches. I’ll let you know about those soon too.
Thank you all very much for staying tuned in!
A closer look at that monument out in front of Mission Control…
