1 {scene: inside an elevator looking out at the stars}
1 Spanners: The Space Elevator! A cable stretching from the satellite in stationary orbit to the ground.
2 {scene: large orbital station above a planet}
2 Spanners: You simply ride an elevator car into orbit! The trip takes 48 hours.
3 {scene: inside elevator}
3 Spanners: It's a marvel of modern engineering!
4 {music: The Girl from Ipanema}
4 Iki Piki: Be more of a marvel if we didn't have to listen to elevator muzak for two straight days.

I always thought there had to be some disadvantage to space elevators...

The very sharp-eyed music lovers amongst you will recognise the score as the opening bars of that classic muzak composition, The Girl From Ipanema.

I hope it's clear enough that the muzak is coming from the grey speaker-grille at the top of panel 4.

Panel 2 is the first time I've used a raytraced image in a comic. It was created using the POV-Ray freeware raytracing software.

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2011-12-19 Rerun commentary: At the time I made this strip, I was heavily into ray-tracing using the aforementioned POV-Ray software. I hoped to use it more to make scenery for the comic, but it takes even longer to do that than to build sets out of LEGO bricks.

Regarding the other piece of scenery in this strip, I was experimenting here with showing a starfield outside of a window. The technique used here was to actually hold a book with photos of starfields behind the LEGO bay window. Looking back now, it actually works okay, but it was so fiddly to do it and get the lighting right (without throwing shadows on to the starfield!) that I fairly quickly moved on to other methods. Which will be discussed when they appear in later strips.

And since I didn't supply a link at the time: space elevator.