Grrl Power #760 – Necessity is the mother of space travel
I hate when I think of jokes that require me to draw weird stuff I have no idea how to draw. Well, I've never drawn an alien space station before Grrl Power, or an alien food court, or the inside or outside of a spaceship" Or" buildings or cars or guns or parking lots"
Okay, maybe that's not a valid thing to complain about if I'm trying to make a living as a comic artists, but I'm still allowed to complain that crabs are hard to draw. I guess I could have put Garthim warriors in those two panels, but I've never drawn them either, so that wouldn't have helped.
Basically before I did this comic, 99% of my art was superheroine pinups and" other art mostly involving the female form. *cough*
The thing about Dabbler's hypothesis is, I kind of hate this argument because it validates all the lazy alien designs in Star Trek and basically every other space show that I have complained about here and elsewhere. Really it's my own fault for being lazy when it comes to drawing aliens. I could have made all the aliens on Fracture Station really bizarre, but it's kind of not really in my wheelhouse to design stuff like that. Plus then I would have had a harder time justifying Dabbler's looking like a sexy human woman with some cosmetic add-ons if everything Sydney encountered in space looked like something from the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
Maybe the next alien they encounter will look like a spider with jellyfish for legs.
But to sum up her postulate; the humanoid form is successful because it lets us do a lot with a little. A little less (one eye, one leg, etc) and we'd be fucked, too much (twenty arms) and we'd be fucked the first time a famine rolls around, and if we were too good (acid spit and regeneration and natural armor) and we'd be lazy, both physically and intellectually.
It's kind of a big swing, but I was trying to come up with a reason so many aliens look" 85% similar without resorting to precursors/progenitors/ancients seeding the galaxy with life, while at the same time leaving myself wiggle room for basically anything I want to include.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!