Since none of the art for the latest reincarnation of StarStrikers is complete yet - I've been beavering away at the new model sheets for MONTHS now - I figured I'd post some of my favourite old stuff from over the years, as a way to fill the gap until the new material is ready. To kick things off, here's a panel from the seventy-sixth page of the old StarStrikers webcomic, which first appeared on starstrikers.com in June 2005.

If I learned one thing from doing the webcomic, it's that I shouldn't do webcomics. My perfectionism and alternating inferiority / superiority complex meant I wanted every panel to be a minature masterpiece. I'd spend hours, sometimes days on each one, and then it'd all get scaled down to a size where my hard work was rendered insignificant, and I'd immediately have to start over on the next page.

By the time I had reached StarStrikers #76, I was ready to throw in the towel, but was looking for a way to get the last few pages completed in a less time-consuming manner, and was willing to try anything - hence instead of doing the page in full cel-shaded colour (like I normally would), I decided to try digital halftones instead. The individual panels looked terrific, but again, when they were scaled down, the beauty was lost. Months passed after the comic had finished, and this image was still lying around on my laptop. I realised how sad it was that it had never been seen at a scale larger than about a hundred pixels wide at best, and lost in amongst a bunch of other panels and speech bubbles.

In this particular shot Corinne is trying to explain to her father how she managed to completely mangle her Porsche. It wasn't her fault, you understand, it was the spaceship. And corporate gangsters who pursued her with Tommy guns. Ah, such is life.

This may be my favourite panel from the webcomic - towards the end there were many, it must be said. I feel it captures C-Jo's neuroticism like nothing I've done before or since. (Sigh) I miss the webcomic a lot sometimes.

If I could do it over I'd totally get Corinne out of that double-denim outfit, though, it's entirely inappropriate for her character. Of course, it's easy to say that after you've had to draw her in it over and over again, SEVERAL HUNDRED TIMES.