I’ve found an artist for my new comic The Adventurous Scarlet Carolus and the Machine of Eternal Summer! Please welcome Elli Puukangas! It’s now probably only a matter of weeks until we’ll post the first pages of Scarlet.

Elli is originally from Finland. That means she’s used to long and cold winters like those on Lavarel. We all know how the unforgiving climate has shaped the character of the Finns. “An introverted Finn looks at his shoes when talking to you, an extroverted Finn looks at your shoes.” as VisitFinland.com summarizes it.

This demeanor is of course also reflected in Elli’s artwork. Her strict lines and sparse coloring are precisely what is needed to capture Lavarel’s somber character. You’ll see what I mean when looking at the following panel from one of her old comics:

…. Okay, scratch that. 😉

As you can see from just this one panel, Elli’s characters are full of life. You can look forward to dynamic character poses, expressive facial expressions, detailed backgrounds, and a lovely coloration. All in all, her unique semi-realistic style is a perfect fit for Scarlet!

Before I posted my job offer in various art forums, I had looked at several thousand accounts of comic/manga artists available for hire at ArtStation and other websites. And Elli was my top pick right from the moment when I saw her portfolio!

Here are some other comic pages and illustrations she has drawn:

I’ve been working hard on my new comic The Adventurous Scarlet Carolus and the Machine of Eternal Summer. I have now written the dialog for almost 200 pages and will soon be ready to hire an artist to draw the comic. However, I will need the rest of October to understand better how many pages exactly the comic will have in the end. At the moment, I project around 500 pages, so a little over half of Gaia.

If you’re interested, you can find more info about the setting of Scarlet on the linked page. Of course everything there is still subject to change.

I used the fantastic new image generation tool Dall-E 3 to generate a lot of concept art for Scarlet. Some things I can’t show yet of course, but none of the following pieces of artwork can be considered spoilers so I want to show you some of the cool artwork I generated:

The main character Scarlet Carolus

Logos featuring Scarlet Carolus

The second main character Tibor Frey

The Machine of Eternal Summer

An illustration of the machine will be shown in the second page of the comic, so it’s not a spoiler to show it here.

A mysterious yellow megastructure

The Master Crystal

The Master Crystal is located in the center of the Twin Cities (Capella and Callisto), the political and cultural center of Lavarel.

Some landscape impressions

My commentary for the comic pages from Gaia: sic mundus creatus est is now hidden by default. New readers no longer may inadvertently encounter story SPOILERs this way.

For those who haven’t noticed yet: I have published a new Sandra and Woo comic about UFOs. Here’s the whole article below the comic:

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I tried my best to create a new comic without an artist, re-using art from older comics.

UFO footage feat. a Boeing 777, presumably from a General Atomics MQ-1C Grey Eagle drone (Video on Archive.org):

UFO footage feat. a Boeing 777, presumably from a NROL-22 spy satellite (Video on Archive.org):

20 reasons why these videos are remarkable, despite the outrageous content:

1. The coordinates in the satellite video are close to the point where MH370 was last seen on 8 March 2014.
2. The airplane is clearly a Boeing 777. No other airplane of that type has been reported as missing. The video was posted ca. two months after the disappearance of MH370. So there’s a very high probability that the footage is supposed to show MH370.
3. After MH370 diverted from its original flight path, it’s more than reasonable to assume that the US military observed it with its spy satellites, drones and fighter jets in the vicinity.
4. Above all, both videos show a remarkable amount of realism and attention to detail:
   1. Flight path
   2. Contrail
   3. Camera movement
   4. Mouse movement
   5. Spherical movements of the UFOs
5. The two videos are in sync.
6. The drone video has a higher framerate than the satellite video, as expected.
7. The drone video shows details like the hot pitot tube of the drone.
8. The satellite video comes in stereoscopic 3D.
9. The clouds in the satellite video move in a realistic manner.
10. The clouds in the satellite video are realistically illuminated after the explosion.
11. The coordinates in the satellite video are updated quickly during mouse drags.
12. Creating these videos with this remarkable attention to detail with hardware and software available in 2014 within two months would have required considerable expertise, time and dedication.
13. An animator with several years of experience attempted a recreation of the drone video and noted that it would be “nearly impossible” to recreate such a realistic version.
14. Creating these videos based on pre-existing footage of an airplane may have been easier. But no such footage has been found so far. The two versions of the satellite video also make this considerably harder.
15. It’s possible that the videos were created by an US agency such as the CIA, who would have had easy access to classified footage and expert animators. But what would have been the purpose of such a psy-op? The videos were posted on a minor YouTube channel in 2014 and then quickly forgotten.
16. It’s possible that the satellite video was actually leaked much earlier, only four days after the disappearance of MH370, as indicated by the comment of the video uploader RegicideAnon: “Received: 12 March 2014”. This would make the creation of the video an extremely challenging task.
17. [Update: 13 August 2023] A third video that contains scenes from both videos was uploaded to Vimeo on August 2014 by a different user and is still available there. Interestingly, the satellite footage occupies a bit more screen space in it. We therefore know that the YouTube video was cropped for some reason and isn’t the original video either. This also means that the dates on Archive.org are correct.
18. [Update: 13 August 2023] A disinformation campaign seems to be in full swing on Reddit’s UFO boards and 4chan’s /x/ board. A high number of posts try to discredit the remarkable footage with easily disprovable arguments. While trolls can never be ruled out, these could also be state actors from an US agency.
    1. [Update: 21 August 2023] The disinformation campaign on Reddit has reached unprecedented levels. While I was skeptical before, I now believe that the footage, except maybe for the portal effect at the end, is real!
19. [Update: 18 August 2023] A Reddit user claims that the calculation of MH370’s location based on satellite data was flawed. However, these new calculations haven’t been confirmed yet.
20. [Update: 20 August 2023] The drone shakes a little as it enters the airplane’s air turbulence. Another detail that the creator would have needed to think of doing.

12 reasons why we currently can’t rule out a fake either:

1. The videos have no provenance!
2. If an experienced animator had access to such classified footage, adding the fantastical elements (UFOs, portal, disappeared airplane) within two months seems to be well in the realm of possibility.
3. Some experts remarked that the airplane’s thermal coloration in the drone video doesn’t look as expected.
   1. Refutation: Examples from other airplanes show that the thermal coloration isn’t out of the ordinary.
4. Other experts pointed out potential issues with other minor elements of the drone video. However, nobody has so far been able to point out a major mistake.
5. Debris of MH370 was found.
   1. Refutation: The validity of the debris has been disputed by some experts. The debris could also have been planted as a cover-up. The airplane could also have been returned after some time and then crashed for real.
6. The portal in the drone video looks fake, like a bad CGI effect. If a (near-)perfect match could be found in some (old) CGI library, it would immediately discredit the footage as fake.
   1. Refutation: We have no example how such an effect may look like.
7. The original leaker, irrespective if it was RegicideAnon or someone else, did the bare minimum to present this unprecedented footage to the world. This certainly seems odd.
8. We don’t know how such classified military data may actually look like. A member of the US air force working with such systems on a daily basis may be able point out obvious flaws.
9. [Update: 13 August 2023] A scene from the Taken TV show from 2002 shows remarkable similarity with the MH370 footage and could have been taken as inspiration by the hoaxer.
10. [Update: 18 August 2023] A Reddit user claims that the sub-pixel placement of the mouse pointer in the satellite video looks artificial.
    1. Refutation: This could for example have been caused by the usage of the remote viewing tool Citrix by the operator.
11. [Update: 18 August 2023] A Reddit user claims that the airplane’s contrail shakes more than the airplane after stabilizing the video.
    1. Refutation: This would be something to get right relatively easily for a 3D artist. Other users have also questioned if the argument is actually true at all.
12. [Update: 18 August 2023] A Reddit user claims that the airplane was downsampled from 30 frames-per-second to 24 fps, while the UFOs move at 24 fps natively.
    1. Refutation: Many other Reddit users and I personally don’t see the claimed “jumps” of the airplane at all. This seems to be part of the mentioned disinformation campaign!
13. [Update: 19 August 2023] A near match for the portal effect in the drone video has just been found in an old VFX library. The effect is called Shockwave Fire Burst – Expl001 Hd and was originally included in the Pyromania! CD ROM from 1998. The effect was e.g. used in the game Bionicle from 2003.
    1. [Update: 20 August 2023] Refutation: Further analysis revealed that the match isn’t as good as originally claimed and only accounts for one frame. While the shapes do have some notable similarities, it would have required several distortions to arrive at the shown result.

In any case, these videos are either real or the best UFO fake of all time. (UFO footage that’s impossible to debunk because it’s so blurry/featureless doesn’t count.)

More info:

• Reddit post with an in-depth analysis of the videos
• Reddit post with many links containing additional information

The re-run of the remastered Gaia pages has started today. A new page will be published every day over the course of the next two and a half years.

The pages will feature my commentary from the making-of book Gaia: sic mundus creatus est. Roughly every third page will have such a comment. I will also occasionally post other content from the making-of book, whenever there’s a longer stretch of pages without commentary.

You will also be able to find new Gaia pages every day on the following webcomic websites:

• Gaia at ComicFury
• Gaia at Tapas Comics
• Gaia at The Duck
• Gaia at Webtoon

You will also be able to find new Gaia pages every day on the following general websites:

• Gaia at DeviantArt
• Gaia at Facebook
• Gaia at Instagram
• Gaia at Tumblr
• Gaia at Twitter