From StarStrikers webcomic page #059, originally posted April 13th 2004.

After Corinne encounters Lowenstein's spaceship and rescues him from Kitty Belle, he recounts how he orbited Earth for several decades, undetected by man, picking up TV and radio transmissions.

While working on the latest rewrite of StarStrikers: First Strike! I was looking for an old CD-ROM. It contained some music that reminded me of when I wrote the initial draft all those years ago. I never did find that disc, but while looking for it I stumbled across another one that contained the source files for some of the better panels from the old webcomic. None of this art has ever been seen in its original resolution, unobscured by speech bubbles, which is a shame since so much work when into it. So I thought I'd post some of it here on DA.

I have vivid memories of working on this particular panel on Easter Monday 2004 for hours, and hours, and hours... the detail on this one needed to be over the top. At the time going to such trouble seemed like a waste, but at least now I can look back on it and appreciate that in many ways this was some of the best material I've done.

There are some nice touches in here, although a few of them leave me scratching my head. Let's start with the screens receiving television signals from Earth. From left to right, bottom to top, they are:

1) Ident for Galaxy, the general entertainment channel on British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), the very short-lived and largely forgotten state-backed satellite broadcaster. This would suggest that this particular shot of Lowenstein in stasis is from some point in 1990.

2) Optimus Prime from Transformers. Duh.

3) Ident for Sky One - Galaxy's rival channel - from roughly the same time period. Late in 1990 BSB "merged" (read: was taken over) by Sky, and the two companies became British Sky Broadcasting or BSkyB. Some of Galaxy's content was incorporated into Sky One, which is still around to this day.

4) Some World Wrestling Federation footage - specifically, that's Randy "Macho Man" Savage, and I think he's being interviewed by Craig DeGeorge? If the webcomic had continued this would have created something of a discrepancy in the storyline later, since Sylvia and Darryl are both wrestling fans whereas Lo and Corinne are perplexed by why anyone would watch such stuff.

5) Telebugs. It's an old cartoon from the eighties with these three robots, see, and... heck, just YouTube it.

6) Is a generic test card.

7) Is Dogtanian, from the 80s anime Dogtanian And The Three Muskehounds. Again, YouTube it if you have no clue what I'm talking about, this show was awesome.

8) Is static.

There's also something on-board the ship which looks suspiciously like HAL from 2001, and a cross key panel that almost looks like a famous game controller. By the way, 0100110001101111 is binary for "LO", Lowenstein's name on his own planet.