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In my most recent post, Frozen In Space - The Return Home - Original Fiction and Space Art, I accomplished many things. First, I wrote a short story that got the most votes I've ever received, (164 as of this writing). Second, I cleared the 100.00 mark for the first time, (actually 99.47 as of this post - it fell under $100 just before 24 HR payout :( Third, that post's reward put me over 1000 SP. Fourth, it Frozen In Space made the Advanced Steem Metrics Report for 23rd October 2016 by @ontofractal for Top 25 Posts by Payout Ranking for 23rd October 2016. Also, it made the Trending Page for the tags I used, Art, Story, Fiction, etc.

I'm not here to toot my own horn though, I just wanted to say thank you to anyone and everyone who played any part in all that, it means a lot to me.

Frozen In Space - Follow Up

Meanwhile, back in space... I thoroughly enjoyed writing Frozen In Space and creating the images for it. The pictures were created using stock images from WikiMedia Commons and their excellent work with The International Space Station and Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. In all honesty, it was the images that gave me the idea for the story and concept. I thought about the idea for three days and put it together using Adobe Photoshop and Stackedit.

The images were rendered using an architect's action and some watercolor techniques. I think they just work perfectly for the look I was going for though. I wanted them to look like fairly old video images displayed in the future...from the past, if that makes sense. They added drama where needed.

In todays post, I wanted to do something different with the story, as well as tackle something I wanted to since joining Steemit: create comics. The graphics for Frozen In Space were really meant to be comic-esque and actually pull it off quite a bit. I might work them into something like I have below, but in all honesty, I made them the wrong sizes and would have to change them a lot to make it work. i suppose I might have to break that mold.

What's below is a two page, eight panel comic book that captures the final moments of a heroic, teen-age progeny with a Phd that sacrifices her own life for the slight chance to resurrect the human race after it's been wiped out by rampant plague. Writing and creating that part honestly made me tear up a bit, as I really got into writing what was a short story and image creation. I had typical comic speech bubbles planned, but when I got to this point, and was about to add them, it just didn't seem right to go that route. I opted to simply depict her final moments in silence, the way she did it. I'm proud of how I did it and how it turned out. You might want to read the first part of Frozen In Space. Or here's an excerpt that will set the scene:

Dr. Shanaya Gupta remained in the module alone for four months. In constant communication with her International Space Station and Space Camp colleagues, she spent her remaining days rejoicing over her life, as well as human existence. She tirelessly assisted in the development of the embryos into lab born infants and considered them all to be her own children. Despite being sick and slowly dying, Dr. Gupta narrated five novels in her last days, all of which are cherished by Humans on Mars to this day.

When the time was right and near death, Dr. Gupta donned a space suit. She opened all the hatches on the module and floated out into space to pass away: a proud Mother and Scientist.

All images in the comic originated from Pixabay.

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I plan to do a lot more comics as well as help anyone else that wants to do also. Comics and graphic novels are the primary reason I fell in love with working on Steemit and I hope I can help further their publishing here as much as possible.

Thanks to everyone :)

James