JUST A HEAT ENGINE-PART 5The final page of the comic series where the avatar of the Labor Day Hurric

JUST A HEAT ENGINE-PART 5

The final page of the comic series where the avatar of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 sings a parody of “Comet” from Steven Universe.

People are probably not in the mood for silly hurricane comics after Ida, but I was working on finishing this one from before the storm happened. And after I completely blanked out on the whole “the San Andreas Fault runs for president” story arc after page 18, I really wanted to have at least one comic series colored and finished.

In these two pages, Labor Day is singing about how hurricanes are essentially Carnot heat engines, entities that draw their power from the difference in temperature between the ocean and the upper atmosphere. Hurricanes are immense heat-transport machines, and are thought to play an important role in the transfer of heat and water in the Earth’s atmosphere and hydrosphere. 

But of course, this mechanism of power, so dependent on high evaporation rates at the ocean’s surface, means that hurricanes, in spite of their power, are rather delicate things. Once they hit land, they rapidly die like a giant beached fish. It is only in the most particular of environments that they are able to maintain the overwhelming force they are known for.

For this reason, the life of a hurricane is short. A rapid rise, a brief moment of category 5 glory, and then a cataclysmic fall. I was trying to capture that in this series…though more from the hurricane’s perspective than from the human perspective.