The First Narbonic Summer T-Shirt Contest
February 3, 2008 ~ 2 Comments
The Narbonic Summer T-Shirt Contest!
Well, the contest is over, and picking the three lucky winners gave me much trouble and many sleepless nights. First of all, I’ve decided to ditch the three categories I announced at the beginning of the summer, since nearly every entry fits into the Most Exotic Locale or Most Interesting Picture categories. (Okay, nobody found any celebrities while wearing a Narbonic shirt.) So I’ve just selected the three pictures I found most spectacular, plus one very honorable mention. Each of the three winners will receive the original art for a daily strip.
First, Susan Wildey provides us with a classic Narbonic wet T-shirt, from her trip to Bora Bora. She gets extra points for being underwater.
The next photo was taken by Nif during her trip to London. She gets extra points for being in sepiatone, and for claiming in her email to own a Tardis.
Kellie Hultgren sent this photo of herself participating in a Society for Creative Anachronism’s annual Pensic War. She gets extra points for being medieval.
And last but certainly not least, here is Kisha Delain at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard, attacking another aspiring scientist with a death ray. Instead of traipsing around the globe all summer long, she has devoted her time to building death rays, endangering lives, and carefully staging reenactments of my comic strip. Let her be an example to us all. I will be sending Ms. Delian a piece of original art.
But by no means is this the end! I will be posting all the contest entries over the next few Sundays, including some really wonderful photos and a picture of Young Evil Shaenon. Really.
That’s right, just like Max & Erma’s! Hey, I’m from the Midwest. I think it was James Rice who initially suggested this contest, as well as the later Gerbil Photo Contest. I originally announced it on the Narbonic mailing list, hence the lack of a previous Sunday feature explaining what the hell is going on here.
Eventually, I stopped selling T-shirts because I was kind of bad at designing them and I didn’t sell enough through CafePress to make any money, so the T-Shirt Contest was no more. I really should make some good, high-quality Evil T-Shirts, but making and selling really nice T-shirts is kind of a pain. I’m sorry…I’m not really very good at this webcomic stuff…
This is another installment that’s been missing from the archives, so I should apologize to all the winners for being MIA for so long. These are some really awesome photos. I would later get to know Kellie Hultgren very well as the organizer of the much-missed annual Narbonicon.
And speaking of gerbil photos, I’ve got another Director’s Cut bonus. Chris Ellmann, of tiny text fame, has sent me photos of his gerbil at Burning Man! Kismet! These are from Burning Man 2006. All notes below are by Chris.
I offer no appologies for the blurry-out of focus-camera-shakingness of some of these, it’s mighty hard taking a picture in near-darkness at partial zoom with no tripod, a relatively cheap camera, and the levels of intoxication I was often dealing with. The spirit of the thing comes across decently, though.
Bad Andy was a campmate who ended up spending a night and a day in the medics tent getting multiple liters of IV fluids after a heroic day involving a bottle of jamesons, 36 beers, and 2 bottles of champagne. A glorious and crazy addition to any party, as long as you don’t try to keep up with him.
The guacamole was provided by strangers down the street–they came running along shouting, “Guac party! 30 minutes! come come come!” Being well-organized nutjobs, they’d brought four cases of avocados. It was mighty tasty.
The man is framed by Dr Megavolt’s tesla coils. After a few dozen attempts to get a non blurry picture that also included lightning bolts, I gave up.
The robotmaster statue was welded iron and massive. Also, very cool. There was another by the same guy with huge rusty chains for hair that looked amazing, but was nowhere near as nifty to pose a gerbil with.
The burned out guy was the ultimate stereotype possible.
The conch was this insane deep bass trumpet thing that made your spleen vibrate with sound. Its bearded owner declared gleefully/confusedly “I’ve never conched a gerbil before.”
Thanks, Chris! I’m so happy!
Photos 1 and 2 in particular are just fabulous. I feel nominally miffed at being deprived of them for so long.
And what kind of original art did Ms. Delian receive?
I feel it is important here to fill in a bit of the dramatic and continuing saga of the two deranged rivals who were so vividly captured at a crucial moment in their infamous careers by the honorable mention picture. It is already noted above that the victor in that battle was Kisha Delain; unmentioned in the text is the name of her friend and mortal enemy captured on film crouching in terror before her, Beth Biller.
As often happens, when they met at the Center for Astrophysics, the two at first found that their mutual interest in the foul and unspeakable applications of Mad Science formed a close bond between them. Together they plumbed the secrets of the darkest and most horrible corners of the known and unknown universe, and soon the pair ruthlessly held the city of Boston under their absolute control by means of their awesome orbital X-beam death device, as all who somehow survived that era are no doubt already aware. It is believed that Kisha even introduced Beth to Narbonic, which perhaps makes the ultimate betrayal of her erstwhile comrade, immortalized forever here in a photograph, all the more bittersweet.
Beth survived the attack, however, and the resulting battle between them left their empire in ruins (along with, frankly, most of the Eastern seaboard.) Beth decamped first to an isolated base in the Sonoran desert to lick her wounds and plot her revenge, and then more recently to an elaborate mid-Pacific island compound in a hollowed volcano once her funding was secure. Kisha relocated to the frigid wasteland of Minnesota. Hey, I find Minnesota terrifying! It has scary, um, groundhogs! And it has the 6th highest per capita state taxes in the US! Stuff like that. Anyway, um …
Many years have passed, and who knows what plans the two will soon unleash? Has Beth succeeded in her scheme to gain allies on planets unknown to human ken? Did Kisha, setting her ambitions even higher, manage to contact another galaxy, with who knows what fell result for the earth? And what of the rumors that Kisha is presently engaged in some kind of biological experiment as well? Has she, in a tip of the beaker to Helen Narbon, added that most terrifying science to her repertoire?
I fear that, all too soon, time will tell. Indeed, I fear for us all …