Back to reality

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Back to ‘reality’, so the colouring returns to normal.

Scritch Scritch

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Bullet time

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Recreating a few of Keanu Reeves’ iconic freeze-frame poses from the Matrix. Every movie for the next few years sped up and slowed down their action scenes at random in a me-too fashion, mainly because digital editing software had just become available and every editor in Hollywood was using it for no other reason than because it was there.

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Agent Smith

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There was an Agent Smith in the movies, played by Hugo Weaving. It’s OK, I can reveal he’s a virus. It’s not like it’s a spoiler – the films are 18 years old now! And besides, after the first one they became incomprehensibly muddled anyway. If I remember correctly, in the last movie they saved the universe by switching it off and switching it back on again.

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Number nine

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Number nine? It’s 1001 in binary.

This strip was inspired by this couple of buildings in Manchester.

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In my day job I put together a magazine and website called New Steel Construction, and in our June edition we did a feature on the buildings, which were part of a redevelopment called The Embankment (click here to read more about it if steel-framed buildings are things that really float your boat).  I liked the numbers that had been put on the top of them, and the fact that they looked like the binary I and 0 that appear on on/off switches. So, as well as being read as 100 and 101 they could be read as 4 and 5. The fact that strip 1000 showed Jones being aware that she is in a comic strip melded with the binary, and we ended up with a series of strips where Jones thought she was in the Matrix.

The colour scheme changes after the last panel of this strip, to reflect the eerie green grading that was used in the Matrix movies. The grainy green background remains until Jones snaps out of it five strips later.

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