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No. 46: Send Him Home!

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Send Him Home!

First | Previous | 2015-12-09 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/pomh/?comic=46

Strip by: Ian Boreham

caption: Mark Watney's post-NASA career was varied and interesting, but his stint as a gardening show host was short-lived.

{Mark Watney is talking to the camera on the set of a gardening show. A sign in the background reads "Green Space: The *real science* behind gardening". Watney is wearing a T-shirt that reads "Watney on botney".}

Watney: The writers can go [CENSORED]emselves. I'm gonna be talking about potatoes again today.

{Watney points at some sealed foil packets on the table, labelled "Watney".}

Watney: I've brought in some of my favourite fertilizer...

The author writes:

I really enjoyed The Martian. It was the first movie I went to see at the cinema in a while. A movie has to be special to drag me there. I think the last time I went to the cinema was for The Battle of the Five Hours, which I really only went to see for the sake of completeness. But I'd heard good things about both the book and the movie of The Martian, and the movie certainly lived up to my expectations. I've bought the book, and will get stuck into it as soon as I get through the book I'm reading now.

I wonder if there will be a sequel called The Venusian, in which a female astronaut is trapped on Venus...

My other idea for a sequel goes down the Dan Brown path. Mark is a Roman name that means "consecrated to the god Mars". Mark Watney is descended from the bloodline of Marc Antony (I think you have to have something like that in this sort of book), but had secretly been raised to be taken to the planet Mars and abandoned, as a sacrifice to the god Mars, because that makes sense. After his rescue, a secret society of Mars-worshipping climate-change deniers tries to kidnap him and return him to Mars, but he joins forces with a Professor of Physicsology and a sassy female reporter, and together they science the fertiliser out of the secret society. I want the leader of the secret society to be played by Arnie in the movie adaptation, so he can say "Get his ass to Mars!"

Actually, I agonised over the spelling of "Fertilizer" in this strip. The -ise spelling is standard in Australia, rather than -ize, and I like to stick to it; but I decided that Watney would use the US spelling, even when speaking.

On a personal note, I'd also like to mention that I approve wholeheartedly of a webcomic-creating software engineer becoming a best-selling author whose work is adapted into a blockbuster movie. If anyone reading this is involved in the book publishing or movie business, just remember: software engineer + webcomic = you can't go wrong.

Drawn in Krita and Inkscape. Yay for styluses! And styli!