Blue Milk Special

Whoopi Goldberg is well known for her comedy, film and television work. For our purposes, the role of Guinan from Star Trek: The Next Generation was one we couldn’t pass up when we needed someone for Lando to commiserate with in the Cloud City bar. The result was that Guinan entered the BMS universe (which can be found here). A shared universe which also features cameos from Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Futurama and more yet to come. I’ve had it in mind for quite sometime now to include Guinan among the Emperor’s Advisors, seen in Return of the Jedi in the background of the Death Star II shuttle ramp and the Emperor’s throne room. These guys debuted in BMS back in 2010. They are insane. Their mad tea parties with the Emperor can be found below…

Guinan’s first appearance in BMS

Emperor’s Advisors – Tea Party #1
Emperor’s Advisors – Tea Party #2
Emperor’s Advisors – Tea Party #3

What’s in store for the crew of the Second Death Star? Check out the Sister Act trailer below for an idea.

I want to further elaborate on our status as a fan project since the last blog seems to have given some people the wrong idea. This is long-winded, but I hope it brings people up to speed on who we are and what we’re about.

Like I said, Blue Milk Special is not a product. The only thing we sell is the T-shirt, and it is not even the Star Wars font, we made that font ourselves. So, this isn’t about infringing. We’re not one of those fly-by-night T-shirt companies that take an IP character like Vader or Boba Fett and sell them on a T-shirt. We don’t do that and it annoys me that other people do. Some of these people I even know –it’s hard not to know people who do that when you work in a community of comic artist professionals and amateurs. However, they fly under the radar because there are so many people who do that and generally its not worth the time of the “suits” to go after them.

BMS is free and always has been. The only places we’ve accepted money have been through donations via donation platforms like GoFundMe and now Patreon. We have sold prints at shows and buttons, which is the only area I think we could be pinged on, although we are talking about maybe a couple hundred dollars at most over 5 years. This is not profit as our costs always far exceed anything we can make back. I’ve talked about the costs of comic conventions, especially big shows like New York Comic Con before. Those cost over $1000 just to attend (factor in hotel and travel). That does not include banners for promotion.

Promoting our free webcomic costs us money too. But we do it and thanks to readers have been able to continue to do it.

At shows, Leanne offers commissioned sketch art, as does almost every artist in attendance. This is what pop culture artists at shows do and is perfectly legal. It is the main way we can generate money to contribute to the costs of a table ($50-$500 dollars). For the most part, attending a show, or manufacturing a promotional banner or table throw comes out of our bank account fed from our day jobs outside of comics.

Our upcoming trip to Germany was something we had been planning to do last year with Celebration Europe II, not just for the Star Wars event, but for an escape from a number of stresses (health and work) in our lives. We’ve only had one true vacation since our honeymoon in 2004, and that was our first and only time returning to New Zealand to visit family in 2010. Financially, we couldn’t make Celebration Europe II last year, however with everything happening in our lives, making sure we found a way to get that much needed “escape” in–before things got even more complicated–became a priority this year. So Jedi-Con has given us a great event to build a vacation around, bringing many friends together in one place, and it’s something very important to Leanne and I.

We have some enormous challenges coming up in the next year that I’m not ready to talk about on the blog yet. So, enjoying life now is extremely important to us and I hope that new readers will understand our non profit ethics as well as our human recharge needs. Not being able to sleep without painkillers and prescription sleep aids is one thing. Being in constant pain and dropping things because your hands stop working is another. The stress and frustrations build up.

Blue Milk Special genuinely gives me a focus and makes me laugh. Yes, I laugh at most of the strips I make with Leanne. Sometimes I feel almost proud of myself. I actually am proud of Sithter Act because I know that no other Star Wars parody is crazy enough to have ever done that before. And those Advisers to the Emperor have been around since 1983!