Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, who would’ve thought? In this issue we’ll finally meet the captain of Murphy’s precinct for the first (second) time and get a whiff of his… special style.

In other news, to create a more social network-y repository for my “art” and make it more accessible for people who just like to browse images without my endless rants, I made one of those infamous deviantArt accounts. Do check it out here, if you fancy.

Hoo, finally arrived back from an exciting half week in Lapland, and a short trip to Tallinn before that. The latter was my first visit to one of the Baltic states, and I while I can’t speak for the rest of Estonia, Tallinn does indeed have its charms.

10 points, if you can tell me what this statue is all about!

Blue... make... happy...

Lapland, now that was a trip. From Joensuu, with a short visit to Rovaniemi and it’s famous vaguely known Santa Claus Village, which proved to be as exciting as it sounds (NOTE: If it does sound exciting to you, you’re either four years old, or there’s something wrong with your head; no offence). From there it was another longish drive over the Swedish border to Kiruna, which greeted us all in white. Yup. Knee-deep snow at the end of October. All over the roads north, too, which we proeceeded to take to Abisko national park every night to look for northern lights.

Keep on truckin'.

We finally hit Norway on our second day up and made it to the Lofoten before we lost the last bit of daylight. Have to say, seeing those majestic mountains surround the fjords was the best bit of the trip; but in the black of Norwegian night the way back up OVER these mountains (in a car that had seen better days and popped a front light that very day, through heavy snowfall) was as horrific as it was awesome. Still, don’t ever make me do that again.

Our third day in Kiruna, then, was marked by hellishly expensive, but completely amazing… dog-sledding. It was the beginning of the season so the dogs were hyped beyond anything, dragging us through the icy wastes with nothing able to stop them. Just as well, since we were not the ones to steer them anyway.

All failsaves are off...

That was about it, except for a long, long, slightly boring drive back south. Frankly, this short update doesn’t give the whole trip due. There was a lot to take in, a huge variety of landscapes and quite a bit of culture shock here and there. And it was hellishly fun. Well, the frozen-over kind of hellish.

Skipping rocks was never my strongest feat...

Forests and lakes and forests, oh my!

Take half a shot for every new lake you spot.
Take a sip of beer for every time you see the same lake again after passing some trees.
Take a shot for spotting a person walk on the road.
Take two shots for a Finnish car in front of you with an actual three-letter word on the license plate.
Drink a sixpack for spotting a moose on the road. You will need it.

Indeed, the silhouette of a moose in the evening mists blocking the road in front of you is quite awe-inspiring. For about two seconds. Then yout hit the breaks and honk like a madman, realizing only minutes later what a cool photo this would have made. Then again, not getting a photo is quite preferable to having a moose up your windshield. But enough of my near-death experiences. If you can think of any more rules, be sure to let me know!

Apart from that, the motorways are quite dull. It is much more fun to take one of the endless opportunities to get off the asphalt and onto the winding country roads that snake through the forest. Avoiding potholes, driving up steep inclines and down tremendous drops just to reach a remote cottage in the woods with a couple of screaming and shouting people in the car feels almost like a rollercoaster ride. Of course, a well-balanced jeep would feel even better in there than ruining the suspension on my golf. Oh well.

Now, it may look safe, but there's potholes the size of large marmots in there! And marmots the size of small deer!

'Sure my suspension can take that!'

So, what did I learn about Finland in these past few weeks apart from it mostly consisting of trees and lakes? Well, without stereotyping too much, for one that Finns are really laid-back people, which is not only reflected in their way of life but most of all in their language. If they decide to speak, which is not a given, talk is usually slow and thoughtful, but may end abruptly when there is no conclusion to be made. This can be quite irritating to a foreigner, awaiting some sort of logical end to the sentence. They do open up after a few drinks, magically so. Up to the point where you can’t get them off you. It is no wonder the alcohol prices are so high, in that regard… And of course there are exceptions to the rule, mostly in the younger female quadrant of Finns.

I also learned that this place will be really cold in winter. October has hardly come to an end and I’m already wearing the warmest jacket I have (one I didn’t even have in Germany, mind you), although on good days with just a T-shirt underneath. Which is a good thing, as rooms tend to be a veritable blast furnace when compared to the outside, as if the Finns wanted to have that sauna feeling everyhwere they go.

Ah yes, sauna. Gotta say, back in Germany I was never quite so much into it, but here I’ve been gladly taking part in it. It also embodies this relaxed lifestyle quite a bit, as after three rounds of hot sauna and a cool shower (or a jump into the lake) you do feel quite at peace wth yourself and the world. And hellishly tired.

And I also learned that Finns can’t play football. Sorry.

... why aren't these guys in the World Cup again?

Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, this issue coming directly from the cold North. In this episode we are stumbling into a dialogue with a mysterious stranger. Chilling.

More on my adventures in Finland coming up soonish.

Not much to say anyway except that I’ve finally arrived in Joensuu, sitting in a quaint little hostel with free WiFi. Driving down those long Finnish motorways comes close to mediation. Forests, lakes, a few fields, forests with lakes shining through, forests and lakes. There wasn’t much of a freeway, most of it was country roads with little dirt paths forking off into the woods, and sometimes, if you were lucky, a lay-by next to a lake.

Well, maybe not upwards.

Finns seem to have a very laid-back driving style, and mostly going at a mere 80-100kph down the 450km drive from Helsinki to Joensuu cannot compare to the aggressive hassle on the German Autobahn. It also saves on fuel. Whether Finns only have such a relaxed driving style due to the many, many, MANY speed traps that line the way or whether they have their tempomats set to chill, I have yet to find out.

Also, I’m growing fond to the local cuisine, namely the incredibly tasty Karelian Pierogi. Had them for breakfast pretty much each day since I had set foot onto the ferry, and both for breakfast and lunch today. My rating: Extremely nommable. Addictive even. And quite inexpensive as well! Now don’t lecture me about the calory intake of carbs with fat and more carbs. I’ve officially stopped caring. <3

Not all too expensive... depends on how much you value your immortal soul.

Mhhh. So, after watching a nice sunset over the Baltic Sea (and a nasty wind whipping up my hair), there was not much left to report about my ferry trip. The next day I was greeted by cold rain, and when I finally drove my car out of the ship’s steel belly and onto the freeway, my sound system started blasting Dropkick Murphys’ “Sunshine Highway”. Well screw you too, random iPod playlist.

In the city, I parked my car at the next convenient spot (free parking till 9am, yay) and had a first glance at Helsinki in the rain. I laid my eyes on the Finnish Parliament, the music park (under construction), and walked on the rocky roof of Temppeliaukio Church… with rabbits living in it! Egads!

Didn't get a better shot than that. Them little varmints is quick!

A quick stroll through the surrounding area later, and noticing that next to nothing is open at 7.30am on a Sunday, I parked my car near the hostel and went up the Olympia Stadium’s tower to watch the city sprawl below me. Lucky for me that by that time the rain had finally stopped. The route was settled: Finlandia Park, inner city, the port, and pretty much everywhere else my feet would lead me. Now, what struck me most while wearing down my soles was the city’s architectural style. Or lack thereof. I can imagine that architecture-savvy travellers will be quite stricken by the many different styles from many different periods, all right next to each other, and sometimes even on the same building. Just check these little shots:

Come to think of it... architecture blogging would be a cool way to get around the globe. Now all I need is some knowledge on the subject...

... I think I just outnerded myself.

Sometimes it’s modern, sometimes Victorian, sometimes industrial and sometimes you have that ugly decaying grey concrete that can only be described as… Soviet. On my aimless walk through the southeastern city, I saw quite a bit of art and sins. Take Kallio Church for instance. Beautiful from the outside, and dwarfing all surrounding buildings on its hill. The inside, however, is as bland as my hostel room. The port, on the other hand, is completely beautiful, and by the time I reached the city proper it was swaming with people to liven the place up a deal. Before, I had seen more seagulls than actual people. Hell, in this city it seems that seagulls think they are people:

Second from the left be pimpin'.

There's also the yellow super mutant variant... what?!

Johan Ludvig Runeberg, composer of the Finnish national anthem and his feathery friend Runebergull, composer of bird droppings.

When I saw those streets filled with people, that’s when I realised… they open up their shops on a Sunday! (cue valley-guy speak) And I was like, amagad, I still need a new jacket, like, for Winter and stuff. Because it’s like totally cold here in Finnorwegimark. And they open up shops like on Sundays, so I was like “I’m totally looking for a jacket now”. Even though my hair was, like, all tangly because I had no time to, like, wash it on the ferry. And I was like, amagad, what if they, like, think I’m a drifter… *cough, sputter* Ugh. That is harder to pull off than it looks. Yeh. Well, the point is that even Finns don’t sell winter jackets in August. I found one that was slightly warmer than the rest and affordable, but I doubt it would keep me from freezing to death while watching auroras in Lapland… which does sound like a euphemism for something kinky, come to I think of it.

After a very late lunch in an authentic Finnish restaurant some noodle place, I made my way back through a few shops towards the hostel, longing to send those little tidbits over the ether to you. All in all, Helsinki is, even in rain, a beautiful city by the sea that doesn’t smell like it.

PS: I’ll set up a Flickr account later, for all those pics that our server can’t won’t should not have to handle.

I’m on a ferry motherfucker, take a look at me
Straight flowin’ on a ferry on the deep blue sea
Bustin’ five knots, wind whippin’ my Burberry
You can’t stop me motherfucker, ’cause I’m on a ferry

Now that that obvious reference is out of the way, I think I owe you a little explanation. At this very moment I’m en route from Rostock to beautiful Helsinki, for a Sunday full of awe and wonder, and then on to scenic little Joensuu where I will spend my Autumn semester. Seeing as it’s the in-thing to blog about your happenings in a strange new world, I’ve started a new category going by the name of “New Horizons” where I will blog about my time abroad. I will also retroactively put that category on all my (two) travel-related posts from the past, for your convenience™.

While I’ve made some very uninteresting pics of the ferry’s interior and surrounding sea, the WiFi on board blocks all my attempts to upload them here. For the above pic I had to go some detours and have it saved to a rather unsavoury location outside the WordPress framework by our almighty webmaster. Some smart IT person on board must have blocked all features (even youtube!) that would drag down the WiFi’s performance and make it even more sluggish than it already is. But hey, I’m glad I can post at all.

So, I’ll just have to describe this bucket of bolts to you. As you can see on the pic, it’s the Superfast VIII, a ship of the Tallink-Silja fleet, that is so incredibly lighting quick that the trip from Rostock to Helsinki only takes… 28 hours. We cleared Rockstock port at 2am German time, which meant sleeping through most of the coastal view. I’m glad I shelled out an additional €40 for a shared cabin. The people staying in the deck seat area did look all but rested. And smelling some of them, I guess my sleep wouldn’t have been as tight next to someone down there… the other gents in my little 4-bed cabin, however, are pleasant enough. Two of of them actually didn’t show up last night. Kinda weird, come to think of it.

Food is okay-ish. A bit too expensive, but I guess that’s what you can pull off, if you have the on-board monopoly. The cakes we had for lunch however… mouthwatering. Let’s see what dinner has in store. Not much else to do here anyway, except maybe to stare out at sea and write; either silly blog posts or that nagging little paper that despite all my efforts did not cave in and write itself. They never do. Had a nice talk during breakfast with a German Professor, who took up teaching in Tallin. Judging from his tales, it seems I need to put Estonia on my map of “places to check out at some point” as well. Or Tallin, at least.

Well, that’s all for now. Tomorrow will be all about my sight-seeing adventures in Helsinki. Let’s hope that hostel has some free WiFi for me to pepper my post with some flavour pictures. Till then, moi moi!

The last month provided quite a bit of a hassle and procrastination for me at the same time. Apart from work and university, StarCraft II held me in its Ultralisk-like claws, giving me the guilty pleasure of wasting away in front of the screen for a few hours again. Well, wasting away in front of the screen doing something else than writing texts or fooling around with illustration software. God, that screen is shiny. And yours will shine as well, as soon as you lay your eyes upon a new (well, old remade) episode of Murphy’s Law!

Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, now available in my usual slow update cycle. In this episode, we follow Corporal Florian Pleathers as he tries to hit up Detective Debjit Murphy. Irony ensues.

Well, what can I tell you about this one? Redesigning Pleathers was something for which I needed a sketch first. Going free-hand in Illustrator is nice, but I fail quite a bit at recreating my personal style without some reference material. The mission was clear: New Pleathers should be even more loatheworthy than the original one. From Murphy’s point of view, anyway. Basically I went with a weak chin, huge bulbous forehead and one of those 90ies gel’d up short haircuts. You know the one. Further abuse testing of their social interaction will show whether that works out visually.

As for the ranks, I’ve had a few switcheroos after reading up on American Police Ranks. Not really informed any more on that topic now than I had been in the beginning, but immensely more confused, I demoted the Chief down to Captain, as I hadn’t really intended him to be in charge of anything more than the precinct. But more to that, later. I’ve also made Pleathers a Corporal, complete with two inverted chevrons on his shoulders. I just hope that’s even remotely correct…

Adding the blood proved to be a whole new challenge. Or rather, I avoided that challenge by downloading a number of blood splatter brushes for Photoshop and slapping them onto my Illustration after I had already exported it. So, what you have here is the first post-produced Murphy’s Law comic in history, ladies and gents! Well, okay, apart from those with a sepia tone slapped on. And those where I enhanced the contrast and colours a bit. The first post-produced one I did in Illustrator anyway.

I will let you bask in its gory glory until the next issue hits the digital shelves. In the meantime, I shall ponder whether “splorch” really is a good sound effect.

I actually liked the hand-drawn art style in the old one better, as it is the most dynamical version of Murphy I’ve created up to this date. However, what it has in style, it lacks in detail and reproducability. So, while I don’t consider this illustration an improvement, but more of a sidegrade, it serves to level the comic’s style quite a bit. And I now have more templates to work with in the future.

But go ahead and make up your own mind.

Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, which last time took six months to go from the teaser-trailer to page one. I guess you could call that an improvement. In this episode, we follow Detective Debjit Murphy as he puts the “tool” in “multitool”!

Initially, I wanted to give the cola a more fiery design and call it Phoenix Cola, but apparently some New Zealandian do-gooders were one step ahead of me. Herbal cola that’s not actually, ahem, “herbal” but contains Ginko, eh? That burns on a wholly different level. The worst thing? I wanna drink one of those now. Damn you people.

Oh well. Guess the reference works this way, too, if not even better. Stay cool the best you can folks, until next time. And remember to drink the Wright stuff™!

I guess you can now look upon it as the intro sequence. The prologue. The real starting point. Ladies and Gentlemen: Murphy’s Law is at hand!

Welcome to Murphy’s Law, where we follow the exploits of Indio-American all-purpose dective Debjit Murphy in the crime ridden city of Peaceful Hamlet. In this episode, we’re treated to… A TEASER TRAILER! BLAM-O!

All the work with Illustrator over the years finally made this one a breeze. Well almost. If you take the frustration out of trying to illustrate something and fill it with progressive success, it feels more like a breeze even if it takes hours. In summery heat. On a metal Mac. Oh well, at least I could do it outside in the grass. As long as the sun wouldn’t hit Steve’s patented über-reflective screen. Thanks man.

Technical difficulties aside, I retconned (link goes to TVtropes, enter at your own risk) Murphy into being of Indian (as in “from India”) descent now. I never could make up my mind what nationality he stems from, and how the name Murphy would make sense in that.
He started out as a sketch that I, at the time heavily influenced by the Ace Attorney series, based around the useless-but-amiable Detective Gumshoe. He ended up looking too much like the “grizzled detective” stereotype, so I reworked his hairdo to look a bit less conventional. That, again, looked so much better when I gave him dark skin. Following this completely arbitrary design progress, he appeared to simply be Afro-American at first. But that soon became unattractive as I did not want to invoke any Shaft-esque cop story that would border on Blaxploitation (crap, I did it again). Giving him the project name “Lavernious Murphy” didn’t help much either.
I then thought about where else he could be from, conceding with “oh what the hell, how about the Middle-East”. And there was Darius Murphy, of Iranian descent, whose parents came to the states and got a new name. Or grandparents. Or his mother married an American. As you can see, that backstory felt incredibly uncomfortable to form.
In the final design stages of the last few weeks, I shifted his skin colour a bit more towards Auburn, and bam, suddenly he had an Indio-Irish heritage… you may get a look at that scrambled up genealogy later. Soon as I have it figured out myself. All he needed now was something of a more stereotypical name. Thankfully, the internet is full of creative ways to name your baby boys, even in Hindi. He ended up with the name Debjit, which not only sounds like some sort of Irish curse and thus goes nicely with Murphy, but apparently also means “one who has conquered the gods”.

Oh, have I got plans for you, Murphy! Stay tuned for more of my Redesign Retcon Rampage.