Tech Nuggets with the Technology

I've never made any secret about my love for (and occasional frustration with) Frontier Development's space combat/trading/exploration sandbox game Elite: Dangerous. In my 2015 review I called it "the best damn spaceship game I've ever played," and four years later, it's an opinion I still hold. Although it's taken literally years for the developers to flesh out some of the game's mechanics, there's always been something special about Elite, even going all the way back to the beta when it was barely a game at all.

I love it so much, in fact, that a few years ago I started up an Elite: Dangerous Web comic called Fangs (many of the ships in Elite are named after snakes, so the title seemed appropriate). I can't actually, you know, draw anything, but a couple of posts on the official subreddit gave me a neat idea: instead of illustrating panels, I could simply take screenshots directly from within the game and run them through a threshold filter to achieve a very distinctive film noir-esque feeling. Couple that with some clever framing and some snappy dialog, and I was in business.

Fangs originally started out as a series of short self-contained vignettes about various aspects of the Elite universe—I did a comic on exploration, on ship names, on smuggling, and a bunch of others.

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