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
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.
It’s always nice to “give” back! Nitros booster seems like a nice ride
Who needs a nitrous boost on their Schwin??
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.
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*
*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!”
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!
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.
Cars with bench seats, those were the days!
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…
:);
You did research on the NOS to make sure it was realistic?
You understand how funny that is, don’t you?