Nitrous Oxide was used in World War II as a boost for fighter planes apparently, and what a blast that must have been… except for all the shooting and stuff… I loved drawing the second panel but it took forever and it’s always risky trying high angles like that.
Anyway, Part Two TOMORROW as I sneak an extra comic in on a Tuesday. The “Road Trip” series will be more of an on-going story as opposed to the “joke-of-the-day” comics I normally write. Bear with me, hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I am. I’ve been writing this part all damn year, so it better be good or truly I would suck.
Deep Purple’s “Machine Head” was a smash of an album for them and nearly all the tracks were played on FM stations all across the country. One of my favorite tracks is “Highway Star” as it opens with these lyrics:
“Nobody gonna take my car,
I’m gonna race it to the ground
Nobody gonna beat my car
It’s gonna break the speed of sound…”
I think Bud is about to break wind, not the speed of sound, if you ask me.
**************
“domated?!”
HAHAA OH ROBYN , i loe you
‘
byron i shouod lnot be comenting im drunk
donated! hahaha oh man i gotta wak up soon
for woke
Well, in my day, I did on occasion show up to work just after closing the bars with a final “last call” beer. I worked the Midnight shift for the Post Office back in the 70s and would frequently hit the bars, then go to work. Not something I’d recommend today.
Hopefully you woke up in time! 🙂
i always wake up early no matter how much i drink, dont know why, just do. i made it to work with time to spare!!
i cant seem to get into the subscribers area anymore, am i dumb? because i sure as hell am not drunk (yet!)
ah hell, i need to read ALL THE WAY through the emails. thanks byron!
Lol ‘donated’ Yeaaa I bet ‘services were rendered’, but guys from a bike shop? motorcycle ya? .. puts in a nitros boost wouldn’t be for bicycle shop you wouldn’t think. .. wonder how many charges that nitros booster has back then.
You know, I was trying to research just that very fact as I wanted to make sure I didn’t “over state” what the Nitrous would do, but since NOS was used in WWII, I figured I was fairly safe.
Since the Chevy is already at highway speeds… say about 80MPH in my day… then the kick would be significant best I could tell from my research. I have never used NOS, but would love to do it someday.
My wish is to buy a 1969 Dodge Charger someday and rebuild it with a few “toys” in it.
🙂
It’s always nice to “give” back! Nitros booster seems like a nice ride
Yes, the ladies are good at getting what they need… Actually, in a round about way, I’m trying to show that both Lorraine and Robyn use sex as a way of getting what they want in life, but you notice they don’t have to do that with Bud and Jeff.
I have dropped several subtle hints along the way… Lorraine got her expensive Polaroid from a boyfriend and mentions “Men buy me things…”, then when they’re auditioning for Rocky Lorraine mentions she’d like to get through one audition with her clothes on, and both she and Robyn commented when the first introduce Rocky that they had found an agent where they don’t have to take off their clothes.
I like dropping bread crumbs like that and not hit you readers up side the head with those facts. I find it more interesting myself. But now the cat’s out of the bag…
😛
Who needs a nitrous boost on their Schwin??
Heh, yeah, most Schwins really don’t need Nitrous, now do they?
This is another one of those times where my own “slang” may confuse people as I refer to motorcycles as “bikes”. I never call a bicycle a “bike”, not sure why, but I just always call them by the full name of bicycle.
Nice art on this one.
I asked for machine heads in a well-known guitar store in NYC back in the 80s and no-one knew what I was talking about. Seems the term isn’t in general use in these parts (for the uninitiated, they are the worm-gear tuning pegs fitted to steel strung guitars as opposed to rollers or tuning pegs used for just about everything else involved with stretching a string so that “music” can be coerced from it).
Gotta watch that nitrous oxide. Pop the head right offa your engine in a Nuyawk minnit. Can also blow your carb’s front-end to shrapnel if it backfires, though that happens more on conventionally supercharged engines, which is why you need to modify the carb with a blow-back valve. Real funny to see it happen. One minute you have a flattened chrome trumpet with multiple butterflies opening and closing as the engine screams it’s challenge to all-comers, next minute there’s a flash, a bang and you’re looking at a bunch of twisted shiny metal (and hopefully not digging it out of yourself too).
I get all wobbly inside every time I watch Mad Max and they do that shot from the front of the Interceptor when Max engages the supercharger.
Thanks for the compliment!
I’m trying to make this storyline as visually interesting as possible, as sometimes it’s gonna be just dialog with little else happening, so I gotta come up with creative ways to show the characters. I’m also a sucker for high angle shots.
😛
It’s always better to ask what a button is for before pressing it. I learned that after my first Jack-In-The-Box. 🙂
I love the last panel,*woooooosh*
Yes, I like that one too. It’s really so easy to do to in Photoshop. A simple motion blur and your image looks like it’s movin’ along! I’d like to take credit for hours and hours of work on that frame, but alas, it was two clicks of the mouse and viola!
🙂
*laughter*
Concert memory from around 1982 or so. A stoner friend of mine worked on cars for a hobby. Him, me, his brother, a friend of theirs and my buddy Hans were on our way to see Black Sabbath at the Capitol Center, later the location of the documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot. My friend (I wish I could recall his name…) had just souped up his brother’s shitty car. Sad thing is, certain things were unfinished the night we took it to the concert… like the muffler and seat belts, which had not yet been re-installed.
So here we were, hanging on for dear life on our way to see Sabbath, ripping up I-95 from Alexandria, VA, in a beat-up roaring junker, and we’re getting our pre-concert thunderbuzz on. Hans was in the back seat, I was up front with the brother – who, thankfully, was not fucked up – bracing myself against the dashboard, and my mechanic friend was going, “Hit the Nitrous, man, hit the Nitrous” – which his brother did.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Yeah, nothing beats a carfull of screaming teenage metalheads doing God-only-knows-what-per-hour and getting blasted in a mufflerless car on their way to see Black Sabbath! Divinity was kind to us, though, and we were neither arrested nor destroyed. Score one for teenage immortality!
Sad to say, Sabbath blew screaming chunks at the moon that night. This was the late leg of the Mob Rules tour, and from what I’ve since read, Ronnie James Dio and the rest of the band were pretty much on the outs. The sound mix sounded like ass, and Sabbath’s energy left a lot to be desired. The opening act, by some bizarre act of booking, was blues guitarist Alvin Lee, formerly of Ten Years After. That poor dude was in the wrong place at the wrong time opening for the wrong band. Lee was booed offstage, and the crowd was restless by the time Sabbath plodded onstage, snoozing and stumbling their way through what remains one of the worst name-artist concerts I have ever seen. At one point, my mechanic friend looked up from his pot-heavy haze, elbowed me and asked, “Man, when’s Sabbath coming on?”
“That IS Sabbath,” I replied.
“Oh man,” he answered, lapsing back into his thick buzz, “Sabbath sucks!”
One, terrific story! I need to collect all of these great stories and assemble a movie script from them. We’d sell maybe, two or three tickets I bet!
🙂
Anyway, nothing worse then a big name band coming on all pissed off. I saw Boston in like 1997. The weather had been a real bitch and traffic was a mess. To top it off, Boston’s bus broke down not far from the show, and literally the band hitched a ride with some fans (who oddly enough were in the front row… who’d a thunk…). Anyway, Tom Scholz was in a mood, you could tell. He sounded fine, but every 30 seconds or so, he’d walk over to his wall of amps and twiddle something. Of course, he’d stop playing and leave a HUGE hole in their sound. Finally at one point he just went “fuck it”, grabbed some small looking amp off the rack and dashed off stage… right in the middle of “Don’t Look Back” I was amazed the band even continued, but they did. Then came the big ending when the accoustic riff is finally done in the big Boston overdrive guitar sound and there’s SILENCE. The band stood there for the proper count and then continued on as if Scholz was standing there. No riff, no solo. It was awful.
A HUGE WTF went over the crowd, but given the situation, most did not complain too loudly. The band played some blues riff thing (in the dark, so it may have been recorded) and finally the lights came back on and Scholz was back. He managed to finish the concert, but he was not up to his usual self and the show suffered for it.
So, I’m with you… “Boston sucks…” was the word many were saying as we walked out that night.
🙂
Hehhehheh. I had a friend went to see Hawkwind in Coventry, around 1980 or so.
During “Masters of the Universe”, a somewhat repetitive ten-minute long track, Lemmy walks forward to deliver his vocals, grabs the mike, gets electrocuted, hurls the mike, stand and all, into the orchestra pit and they do the entire thing, all ten minutes, all three chords, sans vocals. Suck you say?
That faulty ground problem was the reason so many musicians raced to adopt wireless tech as soon as it became do-able, of course.
I’ll offer one from the “couldn’t suck no matter how bad things got” side of the table: I saw Kevin Ayers and The Whole World on their “Yes, We Have No Mañanas” tour in ’75. The scenery included two huge palm trees duct-taped to two concrete columns. Halfway through the concert, one came unstuck and fell into the audience. The band left the stage so the roadies could fix things. Wait, not the whole band. The bass player stood playing soh-doh, soh-doh, soh-doh as they worked. Ayers wandered back, picked up his guitar and began picking out “Whistle while you Work” and the bass-player was in the groove. The crowd went wild. “You liked that?” Ayers said, a bit bewildered. “We’ve got dozens of *those*” he added, and began to play the intro to “Teddy Bear’s Picnic”. He had only played three bars and the drummer ran back and began adding the snare. The bass and drums picked it up as the verse began and the whole thing launched into a heavy metal affair, culminating with the lead-rhythm guitarist, Ollie Haslam, sliding onstage on his knees from the wings to add Pete Townsend style power thrash chords to the last line of the verse. The crowd went even wilder, and it took a good two minutes to notice that the roadies had finished quite a while ago.
Now *that* was a working band.
*laughs* “STONEHENGE!!!” Supposedly, that bit was riffed from a Black Sabbath tour, too, with the dwarf dancing around the tiny model being a slam on height-challenged Ronnie James Dio. Ah, well – if I could be a Metal icon at 60-whatever-the-hell-age he is, I’d die happy, so more power to him. (As for Lemmie, I’m supposed to be catching him in a Motorhead/ Rev. Horton Heat/ Nashville Pussy show here next month, so I hope he keeps his badass self in fighting shape until at least then!)
The very worst name-band shows I’ve seen were The Cult in 1989 or ’90, and Christian Death in 1996 or so. Ian Ashbury was pounded during the Cult show, and without their 48 million guitar overdubs they sounded like a poor cover band version of themselves. At one point, the guitar system blew, and the bass player and drummer were left running through the same riff over and over while Ashbury kicked feebly at the stage with his cowboy boot mumbling, “Is this a rock-n-roll city? Is this a rock-n-roll city? This is a rock-n-roll city…” etc. etc. etc. If they hadn’t sucked so badly up until then, I’d have felt sorry for them. Worse was in store, too: they were opening for Metallica, on the …And Justice for All tour, which was like watching angry gods descend to eath and smite a willing multitude. In contrast to their hapless opening band, Metallica laid down one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, which just made The Cult look even worse by comparison.
As for Christian Death, that show was like watching one of those “classic bands” that retain none of their original members but tour around doing a “greatest hits” show. Band leader Rozz Williams had ducked out a few years earlier, leaving his egomaniacal replacement/ arch-enemy Valor in charge. It was pathetic. The songs were monotonous, the energy non-existent, and the shabby attempts at theatricality were sheer amatuer-hour. At one point, Valor pulled out two flashlights and waved them under his face in an attempt to look spoooooooooooky. It was over at that point for me and the cute friend I’d gone with. We laughed, walked out, and went downstairs to dance like Gothic hothouse fiends in the “Hell” portion of Atlanta’s three-story landmark The Masquerade. Occasionally, we’d take a break and drift back upstairs to watch the carnage. By the time Christian Death wrapped up their punishing set, there were maybe five people milling in front of the stage, the lights were up, and the “applause” consisted of one drunk guy yelling “Woooo!” Again, I felt kinda bad for the folks on stage – that had to have been agony for them. Still, they brought it on themselves. When the lights went down, they’d had an eager audience of decent capacity. They lost if by being wildly off whatever their game was supposed to be. Now, Goth bands really aren’t known for great concerts (Faith and the Muse and the amazing Cruxshadows notwithstanding), but that show was in a special hellhole of Suck.
“…a special hellhole of Suck.” Is now my new motto around here. Maybe I’ll call the printed version of Volume Two that… now that would be cool…
Thanks!
🙂
*laughs* No problem. Any time! And thank you, too, for the great comic. It’s become one of my favorites. 🙂
PS: After writing that account of the Dio Sabbath show, I checked out his bio on a whim. Holy crap! That dude has been rocking since around the time rock was invented!
He started his first band in his teens, in the mid 1950s (he was born in ’42 which made him almost 40 when he first joined Black Sabbath in 1980), and released his first single in 1958 – before the Beatles existed. He turned down a music scholarship to Juilard (which, to be fair, you’d never know from his music), and plays a variety of instruments… originally picking up the French horn as a kid. He’s been married to his current wife since the ’80s, has two grandchildren, manages a charity for runaway teens, and although he’s only 5’4″ could probably kick Mick Jagger’s ass (though not Lemmie Kilmeister’s). Damn! I wanna age like that! I’ve always considered Dio kind of a joke, but I have a whole new level of respect for him now!
those “special” camera angles always get me too. It’s hard to draw my characters from above. But I dig the outcome, so effort was not wasted!
Well, I started out a lot more “cartoony” style with the characters back in Jan. of 2008 so that I could keep it simple, but as time has progressed, I’ve gotten to where I draw them more and more realistic… except I still try to draw their hair cartoon style (their hair looks the same from the left or the right). Visualizing a cartoon hair style from the high angle is a real bitch… just from the “what is it suppose to look like?” perspective. This is why you never saw Fred Flintstone from a high or low angle. It’s a bitch to make it look right.
🙂
Wow! Look how much space! There’s room for 4 people in each seat!
I think NOS is still used in racing planes today…but it does not provide the same level of boost as it does in a car, and it also damages the engine a good deal, as far as I know.
This girl is golden, man!
I had forgot the car was out of service since the lake accident. And she worked for free! Did you actually met any mechanic girls back then? I never saw a woman doing this kind of job.
The old cars of the 60s, especially the bigger cars, would EASILY seat 6 full grown adults in the car with no problem. I had that Chevy loaded with as many as 8 people once… who needs seat belts? My standing joke was the car slept 6 comfortably… 2 in each seat, and two in the trunk!
Well, Robyn not only worked for free, but managed some “free” parts too. I never met an “official” woman mechanic until later in life, but I’ve known a few women who tinkered under the hood. More so today. My era didn’t let girls take auto shop! No girls in auto class?! Imagine that today! Man…
😛
Cars with bench seats, those were the days!
Absolutely! Made having sex in a car a lot easier. Having an arm rest or stick shift in the middle of your back makes for some crazy angles…
🙂
Absolutely! Made having sex in a car a lot sasier. Having an arm rest or stick shift in ths middle of your back makes for some crazy angles…
:);
Hmmm, I think I’ve heard that before… 🙂
You did research on the NOS to make sure it was realistic?
You understand how funny that is, don’t you?
Yeah, but I’m not that big of a gear head so I just wanted to make sure I was doing it right. Even if I wasn’t, it was still going in as, yes, it is funny!
🙂