Shaenon: When not drawing Skin Horse, I’ve been hard at work on a Narbonic story for the upcomming Couscous Collective anthology BEARDS, coming this spring. All the stories will be about beards. Because that’s the way we do things in the Collective. Check out this sample page!
Meanwhile, the previous Couscous anthologies SPACE and OCEAN are still available at the Couscous store. The first anthology, FOREST, is all sold out. Such is life.
Channing: It’s really chilling to see Dave in full flower, isn’t it?
Love the shout-out to “What’s Opera, Doc” in the first panel! Although Dave already did, “Wightning fwash! Stwike the winguist!”
*squee* The return of Dave!
(TUNE: “Call Me, Beep Me” (Kim Possible theme song), Christina Milian)
Oh, nooo …
He’s a scientist that’s mad,
And he’s doing stuff that’s bad!
He’s a genius, and he’s
Dave Dav-en-port!
He can do amazing stuff
(If paid enough),
He’ll help you vanquish all your fo-o-oes!
Villian, spy, or despot,
This guy is the best at
All your evil science needs!
Dave Davenport!
“Duck Tales” ring tone, wife is on the cell phone!
Pardon me, I gotta take this call …
Hey, Helen, I’m in a meeting ….
“Duck Tales” ring tone, wife is on the cell phone!
That’s her
Ring tone!
Helen’s on the cell phone!
Typhoons, earthquakes, smog,
Or a hurrica-ane …
Mind-controlling fog
Or some acid ra-ain …
For death and destruction,
Mad science production,
Just suck up your gumption and call
Dave Davenport!
“Just a sec, folks …”
“Duck Tales” ring tone, wife is on the cell phone!
Applause. That was awesome!
Wait, how do you know Helen’s calls are identified with the Ducktales theme song?
What Jennifer said, in triplicate! *squee* *squee* *squee*
Yay Narbonic! – I take the wife is Helen yes? Have read Narbonic – Just can’t remember the ending!
The second Couscous collection, SPACE, also has a Dave-and-Helen story, although it’s shorter than this one. This will be a 15-page whopper.
Aha! A challenge! Starting an earthquake with a ray… hmmm… I’m assuming we want to create an earthquake anywhere, and not just by a tectonic plate boundary or a handy magma chamber or fault line. That kind of rules out a simple tractor/pressor beam unless you want to really amp up the power. Maybe if you played games with a gravitic lens down at the mantle boundary, causing the crust above to sink and pop up — but how to get the frequency up into the single- or double-digit hertz range? Maybe if we used a pair of satellites to put the tractor beams at a good tangent to the target — but that means going to the trouble of stealthing the satellites, teleporting them into the right orbital plane (and the necessary kinetic energy needed to hang them orbit has to come from somewhere, just ask Larry Niven), long-range optical tracking and targeting systems, etc. I think I see what Dave’s getting at; it’s not that you can’t cause an earthquake with a ray, it’s just if you could, why bother?
Since the ray can already cause a tornado, you can use it to cause an earthquake. In the real, non-mad-science world, tornado clusters located over fault zones do trigger earthquakes. As I understand it, the sudden lessening of air pressure below the center of the tornado can cause the ground underneath to rise. When this happens over a fault line, it can lift one plate so it moves against the other. Voilà, earthquake. I think the real mad-science question is how the ray causes the twister.
You leave me unsure whether I should be congratulating you on your cross-application of technology abuse, attempting to prevent you ever putting it into practice, or just sidling away quietly without risking drawing your wrath (and resolving never to buy land on the California coast).
Nah, not much of a challenge.
All he needs is a harmonic nucleus destabilizer. The energy that would normally leak out as simple radioactive decay gets dumped all at once.
The problem is that this naturally creates a volcanic hot spot at the site and the hollow-earth dwellers get very upset when it breaks out on their side.
… which is why no-one’s succeeded in doing it yet. We have our agents on The Outside.
Rob: this has been done already, by David “Daedalus” Jones, always a good go-to source for your mad science ideas. In fact he’s even proposed an *inverse*: a means of gently creating subduction zones without creating earthquakes by means of a heat-trapping ‘Earth cosy’. Of course the plan was to use this for subterranean garbage disposal. He carefully did not state whether DREADCO had tested this, nor how long it would take for the Earth-cosy to take effect: a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests three hundred million years, minimum. So not a *fast* superweapon.
(More effective would be his superconducting orbital girdle, which though he does not mention it could efficiently magnetically couple to the Earth’s outer core and in only thousands to low millions of years cause devastating volcanic eruptions or even change the Earth’s period of rotation.)
Gosh, it’s ages since I thought about the old Daedalus column in New Scientist. My favourite DREADCO invention was the anti-grafitti paint, although I regret I can no longer remember how it worked.
Well, some good news: Google Books appears to have a lot of issues of New Scientist indexed, so pre-1989 Daedalus schemes are all, or mostly, on the web. Here’s some pro-graffiti paint, for instance, from 1975. (I hope this forum allows URLs, or this is going to make the most abominable mess.)
Thanks for that!
Like others, loving both the return of Dave, and the “What’s Opera, Doc” ref.
Hollow Earth dwellers? So… perhaps… when 6 year old Dave claimed that his onions were irradiated by Mole Men from the 25th Century – that might have been the truth?
Its good to see Dave comfortable with his insanity – even if only for a peaceful picosecond.
Steve, Mole-Men are canonical to “Li’l Mell and Sergio” and can thus be safely presumed to be canonical to the Narbonic universe as well, I think.
I just really like mole men.
Who doesn’t?
The Mole Man’s ex-wives don’t tend to like him very much…
Ain’t no mole-man gonna irradiate MY onions, I don’t care HOW MANY picoseconds apeace he wants to.
mnem
He said “I want to get a motorcycle.”
She heard “I’m in the mood for a really big fight.”
Yes, it’s chilling
I about swooned upon seeing this. I’m currently rereading Narbonic for the 4th or 5th time, so…
Yay! Dave!
(That’s all I have to say, really.)
wait, what’s the couscous collective? I’ve bought the complete Narbonic collection, is this similar?
Click on “store” at the top and you’ll find out!
Chilling? Chilling? No, it’s AWESOME!!! I know some teenaged mad scientists who probably view Dave Davenoprt as a *role* *model*.
Is it even remotely possible for Dave to get (at least) a cameo in skin horse?
And will there ever be a (narbonic or other) comic or something including Dave?
Can’t start earthquakes with a ray? Man, Dave, Dr. Ben Prester and his geodynamic ray had better not find out that you laughed… LaUgHeD! at them.
(Or, y’know, Nikola Tesla, who really came up with the idea in real life.)
Also, if you’re a Narbonic fan, and you haven’t read A Miracle Of Science… you really ought to.