#tropical cyclone
JUST A HEAT ENGINE-PART 4
The next page of the comic where the avatar of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 sings about how awesome being a hurricane is. (And to the tune of “Comet” from Steven Universe…because for some reason when I heard that song my mind was immediately like “this would be even cooler if it was about a category 5 hurricane bragging about himself.”)
Labor Day definitely thinks his life is a very entertaining and wild ride, but the exhausted sooty terns on the bottom panel probably disagree after having been thrown around his eyewall.
Seabirds becoming trapped inside hurricanes is a real phenomenon, and sometimes they end up being blown hundreds of miles inland. There are photographs of ships in the eye of a storm being mobbed by hordes of tired birds looking for a place to rest their wings.
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JUST A HEAT ENGINE -Part 3
Another part of the “Just a Heat Engine” series of comics…that also took way too long to get around to making.
Been overwhelmed with research, learning to use machine learning to do more research, and dealing with the fallout of the big winter storm (”Where’d the mold and water damage come from? A flood?” “No, from a busted pipe -_-”)
But anyways, here’s the next part of the comic, in which I took the song “Comet” from Steven Universe and turned it into a song about the 1935 Labor Day hurricane singing about himself because…
…reasons.
I should note that the white hurricane is still Labor Day, just his “full size” form. The natural disaster characters have a dog-sized form they use to interact one-on-one with people and animals, and a regular-size form they use when just doing disastery stuff.
The “Storms of the Century” sidebar is a reference to an old Weather Channel special from 1999 where they had a bunch of their weather people rank what they thought were the biggest, baddest storms to hit the U.S. in the 20th century. The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane won, which given it was the strongest hurricane at landfall to hit the U.S.*, is pretty reasonable.
*His air pressure and wind speed is shown in the digital display display from his…smartwatch? Yes the hurricane wears a watch…so it’s a…(wait for it)…hurricane watch.
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MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM INSIDE THE EVENT HORIZON
The weather outside is frightful
but the latent heat is delightful
*fwoosh*
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JUST A HEAT ENGINE–TWO
Here’s the second page of the comic involving the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 strumming on a guitarfish. I imagine he has a hobby of writing and performing rock ballads, which is not at all the sort of hobby you would expect from a Category 5 hurricane with a mindset that weather is warfare.
The song is basically a rip-off parody of “Comet” from Steven Universe but I imagine Labor Day’s singing voice to be closer to Billy Joel. Either way, it’s very much nicer than his usual voice, which is basically a cross between drill-sergeant yelling and a freight train.
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JUST A HEAT ENGINE—1
Labor Day might be a very ferocious hurricane, with the ability to scour islands of their sand and then kill people with it, but he also shreds a mean guitarfish.
…this is the first page of a multi-page comic I am working on. I will add the rest over time (as my thesis allows).
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Once again, Houston got a really close call.
It is well known at this point that if a Category 4+ hurricane were to hit Houston head on, the results would be absolutely devastating. The buildings are not built to resist hurricane winds at all. The city is prone to freshwater flooding from rainfall. And worst of all, refineries, stores of toxic substances, and petrochemical plants lie along Galveston Bay and the Houston Ship Channel, unguarded against high storm surges. Some have argued if a direct hit were to happen, the resulting release of poison would rival Chernobyl.
Clearly something must be done to prepare for this. But people have limits, and in a new era where rapidly intensifying hurricanes will be more frequent than before, will Houston remain relevant? Will any part of the Gulf Coast remain a desirable place to live in a world of frequent floods, hotter summers, and stronger storms?
I don’t have the answer to these questions.
Storms have been used as a metaphor for the will of the divine since time immemorial. The word hurricane itself is derived from the name of a storm deity that was worshipped in the Caribbean and Mexico. In western culture, storms have been used a lot in Christian literature and music, in ways both tasteful and obnoxious. Once I picked up a historical fiction novel that took place during the 1900 Galveston hurricane, only to find in the last chapter it was a religious book trying to make a statement about how Jesus was the eye of storm (”he is the calm center when everything is swirling around you”…not even remotely subtle).
But after Hurricane Laura, I see why this is the case. Storms remind us that no matter how advanced our civilization, no matter how great our knowledge, there will always be things orders of magnitude beyond our control, forces always just out of reach of our full understanding. It is a physical impossibility to predict the weather indefinitely into the future, even with perfect knowledge of the initial conditions, because the equations that govern the atmosphere have no exact solutions. Uncertainty will always be present in the calculations, and compounded over time.
Sometimes you simply can’t know for sure what’ll come next. You’re basically in God’s hands at that point.
And in this, we find the meaning of grace. For the fact that Houston was saved had nothing to do with its being deserving of saving. It just…was. And for that we have to be grateful.
We look towards the battered coast of Louisiana and say…
“There but for the grace of God, go I.”
My high school creative writing teacher always got furious at the dissonance between my art and writing. But I couldn’t just leave it uncolored, you know?
Some notes on the drawing:
- The hands are green because they’re supposed to be the storm god Hurakan (the ones hurricanes are named after), and Hurakan was painted as having blue-green skin in Mayan murals.
-The ‘Now Kiss’ is referring to the Fujiwhara interaction, which some people thought would happen to Marco and Laura early on. The two storms would spiral around each other and possibly merge if this happened…which it didn’t.
-Marco is nervous because in the scenario where a weaker storm merges with a stronger one, it’s not so much a merger so much as the weaker storm gets ripped to shreds and swallowed up by the stronger storm. So…a Category One going up against a high end Category Four? Yeah Marco better be scared.
This didn’t age well with the dissipation of Marco but here you go:
I don’t know if I will get a chance to color it. I was fortunate during Harvey to be in Los Angeles (instead of with my family in Houston) and so able to do tons of posts. I’m…not quite that fortunate this time around.
Here’s what those little characters for the hurricane, fire, and coronavirus were used for…they were put on water bottles given to graduating residents at UTMB in Galveston.
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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.
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Post by Mrs. Becerra - sharing the wisdom.
“Ok, I know this is a serious situation on Samoa and I can already see the “Let’s do something” calls by those of us abroad.
Wonderful thought but before you clear out your cupboard of old blankets and dash off to the warehouse to buy a pack of bottled water, sit down and read this:
Wait. Think. Before you do something.
Do NOT send goods. Do NOT send canned anything. Do not send anything unless it’s money, or something that is specifically requested and you can ensure it reaches the requestor without them paying the price fir it.
Do not hop on the plane to go help unless it’s your family.
Wait for the Samoan Government who will assess and establish what help is needed.
We see enough Good Samaritan who land at disaster zones who end up being a burden.
Stay home. Let Samoa help themselves or ask fir help first.
Your genuine willingness to help by giving goods ends up being the burden for others, or your goods end up rotting at the wharf or worse, more rubbish they didn’t need in the first place.
So,
- check out what Red Cross are doing. Help them so they can help those in need. You can also transfer direct to Red Cross.
- Be wary of politicians /community leaders - they have agendas, if you want to help a family back home, send direct to them.”
