HA! Okay, who saw this coming? Pirate Teddy Bears from Space? You may well be asking yourself: “Has Greg and Mark lost it?” Could be, or we could just be having fun with the genre’s comics, as well as movies and TV, have made use of for so long. We have so far delved into the super-hero, science fiction, romance, and adventure realms so why not some funny animals too top it all off. Well, if George Lucas can use cute little bear like aliens in Star Wars: Return of The Jedi why can’t we? Of course none of us rank on a level  with George Lucas, so maybe a little closer to home would be Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles. Actually we probably had both concepts in mind when we hashed out the plot for this story.

But wait! There’s more! Don’t be fooled by these apparently cute, cuddly, bumbling, alien bears. Mark these words and remember them well,  ” Things are not always as they appear.” You will see what we mean on the next 2 pages as our saga continues next week! We’ve just gotten started and we still have a couple more cast members to introduce before we get into some real action with this little tale. So don’t go away, folks, you never know what we’ll throw at you next!

Remember what we said Friday? “Things are  not always as they appear.” Well, that works across the board. Our alien, bear pirates are finding out first hand how true that saying is. Having missed their targeted time period of 500 years ago, now they must deal with our modern technology. A squad of fighter jets are far more threatening than a native war party chucking spears.

This page was a bit more of a challenge than the last few. There was a lot more dialog, which by the way, ace scripter, Stephen Greg Legat, did a real bang-up job on. But with more characters and more dialog means less space for word balloons. Mark Poe, our surrogate letterer,  figured it out, though it took a bit of trial and error to accomplish. The color was not as difficult as Mark anticipated. There is a lot of color but essentially the same colors used in each panel, so that helped shorten the process a little.

Hope you enjoyed today’s page and will join us again Friday for page 14. CU then!

We are just a little late updating this morning. We’ve been running  a little behind this week and this new page was a bit more complicated in the clean up and color department. But Mark kept after it and finally got it wrapped up.The lettering was not as complicated this time which was a saving grace where this page 14 is concerned.

What did we tell you about these little guys? Did you think that was really just a musket rifle? We don’t really know yet what it was he fired, probably some form of plasma or laser, but that musket rifle just took out a jetfighter!

We still have a couple characters for this story  to introduce but as you can see the action is getting underway. Don’t miss next Wednesday’s update to find out what happens next. We sure won’t!

Welcome to page 15 and welcome back to Tess, who we have not seen in a couple pages. This is one of Mark’s favorite pages of this story. He says he enjoyed the art and color work but the thing he likes the best is the dialog between Tess and the pilot. He chuckles out loud every time he reads the line “I‘m dead, aren’t I? Don’t lie to me, lady! If I’m Dead, I’ve got a  right to know!” Greg did a great job with the script!

There was a larger range of color on this one and due to the lighting more contrast. It was a bit more involved than the last page.

We had planned on another page this week but Mark’s son Alex turns 10 tomorrow and he wants to have a little more time to do something special for his youngest son, so he begged off having page 16 ready for Friday’s update. Mark had tried to get an earlier start this week but page 15 ended up taking a little longer than he had anticipated. So we’ll have page 16 next Wednesday as Theo and Nosy get back into the action. We hope you will be there too!

Page 16 is here! We have reached the halfway point of this first issue.  Nostradamus and Theo are now on the scene. It seems Nosy has seen these guys before. Remember, Nosy is actually not a dog at all, but another fourth dimensional creature somewhat like Tess. He was a “gun-runner” in his home dimension, and came to this universe to escape clients. He is capable of transporting objects as Tess does, and is able to communicate telepathically. So it’s likely Nosy has had problems with these alien Teddy Bear Pirates before or at least heard of them.

Next: Page 17 will introduce another character into the story line, one who seems to always be a thorn in our hero’s sides. Stay tuned to find out who.

Yes, we were late updating this morning. This page required some art modifications where the Auto Gyro is concerned and was a little tricky to re-letter also, so it required more time to finish. There were a lot of interuptions also, which is not unusuall at this time of year. Our workload increases do to Spring/Summer activities such as yard work and garden work, the kids are out of school and special events like Comic Convention Art Jams require more attention. All this and much more has caused us to get behind our already stressful schedule, so much so this week, that we will not be able to have a new page Friday as we had intended. We’ll try to get back on schedule next week. Please bear with us. Thanks for your patience and support!

Today’s page contains the first appearance of General Luther Bohannon, who in the  proposed series is one of Tess, Theo and Nosy’s chief adversaries. He is a member of the U.S. Army, attached to the Pentagon. He believes Tess to be a product of Soviet genetic engineering, and wants her “…taken to a government controlled facility to get the truth out of her”. Although backed by some powerful officials in Washington, who share his opinion, he is nonetheless acting as a renegade in the matter. He is a “God, guts, and get-up-and-go!” American. Age: 58. Height: 5′ 8″. Build: Stocky. Hair: black and grey, balding. Eyes: Brown. His left arm is slightly drawn due to a war injury, and partially paralyzed. Wears glasses sometimes.

Summer Schedule: Try as we might the summertime work and activities we wrote of last week seem to be taking their toll on our time this year. It appears the best solution is to just maintain the one page post  & two blog post per week method we’ve been doing the past 2 weeks for the next 2 months of Summer. That is, we will do our Monday blog and Wednesday blog with page update and just leave off the Friday blog and page updates.  We appreciate your understanding, patience and support in this matter. We will resume our normal posting schedule as soon as possible.

Check back next Monday for our regular blog and Wednesday for the blog and page 18 of our Tess story in Mega Tales #1.

At last page 18! Whew! This was a tough one because of the battle scene and so many figures moving all over the place, yelling, shooting at each other and just causing general havoc! So far it looks like the cute little Teddy Bears from space are winning. They seem to have the greater firepower at present. But maybe soon Tess will come to the rescue of the Calvary. That will be a switch, eh?!

We appreciate everyone being so understanding of the Summer Schedule. And never being ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, whatever the heck that means, we may just take a little more advantage of your gracious generosity! Don’t panic, we simply mean we may leave these Mega Tales page updates open for either Wednesday or Friday, as we did this week since our schedule is so tight right now and some of these pages are more difficult to digitally master. But never fear, we’ll always let you know on the MCG Blog Mondays or Wednesdays just like we did this week on Wednesday.

Tomorrow is the 4th of July which also happens to be America’s birthday, A.K.A Independence Day! Now everyone that reads this comic is not from America. Yeah, that’s right, we have an international audience just like most of the World Wide Web. It just amazes and thrills us that we have friends all over the planet Earth. We say all that because we realize July 4th is not a Holiday for everyone and some like Canada celebrated Canada Day on July 1st, which is their birthday. But if you are a citizen of another nation we invite you to celebrate with us, just like you would the birthday of a friend. That being said Happy Independence Day everyone! Hope you all have a great weekend.

We hope you will be here Monday for the MCG Blog posting. See you then.

Sorry, we are very late today. The page was completed this morning but circumstances beyond our control, involving helping some folks out of a jam, kept us from doing the updates early as usual.

This newest page, #20, shows General Bohannon’s day at the beach. Don’t blame Tess, she tried to reason with him, but the guy is just not open to changing his plans, but then neither is Tess. The difference is Tess has the power to back her plans. Bohannon, even though he has vast resources at his command, operates in our plain of reality while Tess utilizes forces beyond our dimension.

Page 20 was not that difficult. Placement of the words balloons were a little bit trickier, because of space limitations but other than that there was little difficulty. Only 12 more pages in this first issue. Monday and Wednesday we will have a Blog updated with some new thoughts, then be here next Friday for page 21. See ya!

And now…Page 21. The first thing you will probably notice is the lack of word balloons and text on this page. It’s just part of our Friday In-A-Hurry Summer Special !  That’s right as part of our customer service we have withheld the  script for this page until a later date when your schedule is less hectic. Of course we are just kidding.

Stephen Greg Legat in his role as both Editor and Writer of our tale discerned that this page needed no dialog. Now, keep in mind that his story was plotted, penciled, inked and scripted 22 years ago before there was a MegaComicGroup.com or any web sites for that matter. This page was designed, as was the entire comic book, to be read in one sitting, one page after the other not one or two pages a week! So to get the effect you need the perspective of the rest of the pages. This might be a good day to take advantage of our Archives to review the pages up to this point to get the flow of the story line. Click on the Archives button on the Menu Bar of the Calendar to the right.

This illustrates one of the failing points of  web comics. One which we are taking into consideration for future web comics releases. It may be more reader friendly to release all the pages of  our book on one day, just as the comic book you buy in the store comes with all the pages at the time of release and purchase. The humor strips don’t have this problem, but in an adventure story the continuity from page to page is different than a 4 panel gag strip. What do you think? Had you rather have the pages of the story weekly as we complete the production of each page or would it be better to finish all the pages and release the whole story on one day? Let us know your preference, it will help us as we consider how to proceed with publishing on the web.

Meanwhile, we will stick to the one or two page schedule for the duration. Be with us Monday and Wednesday for our Blog updates and then back here next Friday for Mega Tales #1, page 22, which has plenty of panels and text!