I mention on my bio page that I sometimes make video games with my old friend/ former blog- and room-mate Paul, and that we start a lot of projects but never really finish them. We work in fits and starts, thanks to the fact that we both have jobs and girlfriends and other hobbies, and frequently enough time will elapse between brainstorming sessions that we completely lose the thread, or rethink what we want to accomplish or something – it’s very sad, I know.

Anyway, it happened again not too long ago. Boarding Party, the game that we’d been noodling along on for more than a year and a half, died a quiet death. This time, though, I’d created a lot more art and story than usual and though it is comforting to know that I’ll never need to make a message board avatar again if I don't want to, I reckon that I might as well put them up here as store them in a series of hard drives until I accidentally delete them in a fit of misplaced spring cleaning.

Here's the setting, as pitched to the friends that I like to run ideas by to make sure that they're not completely stupid: "It's the far, far future. Like, way far. Humanity has spread across the stars in a mass, unified diaspora, contacting aliens and terraforming and settling and so forth. And then maybe there was a war or a plague or a lapse into decadence, but whatever Empire or Republic or what have you was keeping everything together fell apart and all of the human worlds were mostly on their own. Some reverted to barbarism and some kept on in pretty much the same fashion but most ended up somewhere in between.

The game takes place some time later - solar systems are now akin to island nations trading with each other across the void of space. There are coalitions and warlords and colonies and the beginning of a spaceborne version of the British Empire sending ships back and forth and so of course there are privateers and pirates preying upon them. Technology is drawn from a multitude of worlds and is jury-rigged and kept up with spit and luck and kind of evens out into a high-tech steampunk kind of aesthetic."

The players each would have controlled a pirate captain and their crew in a turn-based battle, drawing units from a wide variety of worlds with an enormous diversity of cultures. And here they are!

I'm going to just put up the images - no sense in making this vanity post too long. Hover your mouse over the little guys if you want to learn more about what I consider to be fascinating backstory.

FLAMBEAUX

THE SCOUT

KNIFEMURDERER

FATBOY and BOXHEADS

VACUUMBOY

BEASTMASTER

... AND FRIENDS

BOARDING PARTIER

CAPTAIN FAT

ENGINEER

COMBAT BLOB

CAPTAIN DEVASTATION

AUTOMANTID

MOUSTACHE SOLDIER

And that is that. I guess that I should mention that all of this is (c) Johnathan Munroe, 2010, in the unlikely event that we get around to using it somewhere, someday. Because it is!

Thanks for validating me!

It's Living Between Wednesdays' Third Anniversary!!! To celebrate we are looking back at our favourite LBW posts of all time.

AND...we are also having a contest! All you have to do to enter is leave a comment at the end of this post with a link to your favourite comic blog post(s). It can be your own blog, it can be someone else's blog! We are celebrating the comic blog community here! The winner will get a SIGNED copy of Dawyn Cooke's new book, Parker: The Hunter, and a SIGNED copy of Faith Erin Hicks' awesome book, The War At Ellsmere! Probably some other goodies too!

Big thanks to everyone for reading this blog, and leaving comments, and thanks to all the comic creators who have allowed us to interview them. Extra big thanks to Paul Pettipas for building and maintaining this site for us for zero dollars, and to Matt for designing the logo. And a special shout-out to the guys at The Dollar Bin for being so supportive, the Newsarama bloggers for linking to us pretty regularly, Chris Sims' at the Invincible Super Blog for sending a lot of traffic our way, and especially Calum Johnston at Strange Adventures comic shop for being awesome all the time.

So here we go with our favourite posts. I have "remastered" some of the older ones to include alt-text on the images! Enjoy!

FROM RACHELLE:

HOT Action Comics

This stands as the most viewed post in LBW history. It got linked on a lot of sites, including a lot of sex and erotica sites, and still gets lots of hits every week (mostly on the old site). It also gets a lot of traffic from people searching for "superman porn."

Can We Talk About Something Else?

This was one of the first big deal posts that I did, in that it got linked from a lot of places and it brought a lot of traffic to my site. For that reason, I will always be fond of it.

Rating The Super Hunks: Daredevil and Rating The Super Hunks: Namor

The Rating The Super Hunks feature is one of my favourite things to write, but these posts also take me a really long time (mostly because of all the image hunting). These two are my favourites. And the Daredevil one took me hours and hours and hours because I was obsessed with having a perfect cross-section of images from different eras.

The Prop Comedy Stylings of Superman

World's Grossest Detective

Superman Plays British

The DC Showcase Presents books are obviously very inspiring to the humour-based comic book blogger. Of all the posts I did that used panels from the Showcase books, these are probably my favourites.

Superman and Batman Quit Earth, Not Each Other

Gigantic Fun With the Super Sons!

I really can't say enough about how awesome Bob Haney is or how thankful I am that he wrote comics and that I can blog about them. Bob Haney makes my job easy. I've done a lot of posts about Bob Haney comics, but these two are my favourites.

Superman Gives Batman His Heart

The Bride of Batman

World's Finest #71: Teaming Up to Confuse Lois

I would be pretty content just writing a blog about Superman/Batman team-ups. I have done a ton of posts about the World's Finest duo, so it took awhile to find my favourites, but I would say these three stand out.

Who Needs an MBA?

This post did not seem to get a lot of attention or views, but I really like it. I wrote it from the computer lab at school.

Captain America #33 in 30 Seconds

This was an entry I did for Chris Sims' annual contest in 2008. I am especially proud of it because it earned comments from both Steve Epting AND Ed Brubaker!

The Supergirl From Krypton Meets Her Asshole Cousin

I am surprised that it took me so long to do a post about this comic because it is one of my favourite all-time stories (to make fun of).

Thunder=Stolen

I want to acknowledge this one because Dave did such an awesome job on the fake Marvel variant covers. Unfortunately, we ended up posting this the same week that Chris Sims posted his own version of Marvel Hobos. Because he spies on me.

I also want to acknowledge my favourite Johnathan posts (which is really hard because they are all so good. I think these three certainly merit special mention:

The Hair Continuum

Thinking Hypothetically: The JSA (Part 1)

Thinking Hypothetically: The JSA (Part 2)

And Tiina's recent post on Heart Throbs #119 was definitely great:

Fun With Romance Comics: Two Awful Girls for Every Dumbass Boy!

FROM DAVE (VIA RACHELLE):

YOU THINK YOU GOT WHAT IT TAKES?!

Dave told me that this is his favourite LBW post because it's about the greatest thing that ever happened to him (he may not have said exactly that). I still love this commercial, though, and a brush with a local celebrity is always exciting.

FROM TIINA:

Happy three year anniversary, Living Between Wednesdays! Our blog is a toddler! Although in blog years, it's probably in its early 30s, makes a comfortable salary at its graphic design job, just bought a house, but still parties pretty hard on the weekends.

Since the early days of LBW, I've always loved Rachelle's Archie posts. Archie Sunday: Rockin' With Dilton has everything you'd expect in an Archie comic: the Riverdale kids being sociopaths, tired cliches and totally unbelievable plot lines, and Dilton being rad.

My favourite thing I've posted since I joined the LBW team is the post about the New Kids on the Block and Richie Rich team-up. Because it's as awesome as it is nonsensical.

FROM JOHNATHAN:

Sheesh, three years? I've been flailing around on the Internet for that long? Makes a guy feel... venerable. And speaking of flailing, here are some posts that I especially liked that I found while haphazardly trawling through the archives:

Review of Future Current Events - Mostly I like how the graphic on this one turned out - narcissism! Geoff Johns' Legion of Super-Rejects under a microscope!

The Forbidden Loves of Superman - It's only shame that keeps him in check, so heap it on.

Review of Something Very Perplexing - Old ads make for many questions.

A Look at the Nineteen-Nineties - See how Captain Atom chairs a budget meeting! All the thrills of the 90s, today!

Review of Burial Customs - What do you do with a dead Legionnaire? Shoot them into space, of course.

Review of the Legion of Super Heroes - Epically long, so I have to make sure that it gets read.

Future Zoo: Review of the Parakat - Superboy used to run into a lot of variations on the tiger, for some reason. Here's one from the super-fun first appearance of Star Boy.

Review of Juvenile Humour - I can't always be highb

Review of Some Robots - Part three in a series that asks, "how much can Johnathan talk about robots that appear in a single panel each?"

Make Dragons History (Ed. - Hey, that's one of my posts! Thanks Johnathan!) No problem! I liked it!

Review of the (Best Ever)s - They really were.

Super Human Detritus of the Thirtieth Century: Alaktor and his Marvel Belt - I like Alaktor because he's not even very good at being a villain.

Most of these, you'll notice, are mine, from back in the "Paul and John Review" days of yore. This is mostly because I am disorganized and had to go with what I remembered. Rachelle has some damn fine posts out there that I just didn't get to go through in time to single out, while Tiina and Dave have been delivering solid stuff from day one. I think that Dave has basically managed to sell me something with every other post, in fact. Go team!

And of course our greatest adventure was when we unmasked the Phantom that was haunting Old Man Johnston's Comic Shoppe.