Stubby the Rocket is Tor.com’s logo and mascot and he is dear to our hearts. Stubbs has become the metaphorical shell that keeps our crew together, and like any good colleague he has a history and a penchant for joining us in our reindeer games. This is a post dedicated to collecting all the Stubbys fit to fly.
The creation of Tor.com logo. Here you can see the intitial sketches on through to the final design.
Desktop wallpaper Stubbs for your downloading pleasure.
How Stubby, the Tor.com rocket, became the H.M.S. Stubbington: To help celebrate steampunk theme weeks, we created the H.M.S. Stubbington! This is the evolution (devolution?) of that process.
Because we were a little obsessed with Steam Stubbs, we drove up to visit letterpress artist Ross MacDonald and created a steampunk announcment the 19th century way. Video below, the article and still photos here.
…and, you can be steam-stylish with our desktop wallpapers of the the H.M.S. Stubbington.
Build you own Stubbs with these paper model plans. It’s fun! And not (too) difficult. You can even make him fly. Or just get all revved up!
Tor.com turned two in 2010 and Idiots’ Books showed us the terrible twos in humans and rockets. “How Tor.com Is Like (and not like) a Two Year-Old”
Garrr! The slimy masthead for our “December Belongs to Cthulhu” theme month.
When SciFi Channel decided to change their name to SyFy Channel, we were not to be outdone! We changed our name from Tor.com to Tör.Cöm.
A Stubby the Rocket sealing wax stamp for urgent pigeon messages.
Perhaps the most important Stubby of them all? Sergeant Stubby, the most decorated war dog of World War I.
2012
The year flew by. Suddenly Stubby is four and here’s some of the fun we’ve had with our interstellar mascot…
A year ago we had our Third Birthday Meet-up. This was the super cute Stubby cake posing with some of our super cute crew — Adam Carlson, Ryan Britt, Chris Lough, and Emmet Asher-Perrin.
In January, Stubby took full hold of our “and related subjects” motto at the top of the site and celebrated Bowie Week. Artist Scott Brundage morphed our rocket into the many glam iterations of David Bowie:
We created our first print edition of Tor.com, as a promotional item to bring to conventions. Here’s Walter Mosley checking us out.
Author Kelly Lagor makes a life-long commitment to our rocket…
RockLove Jewelry created brass keychains and silver necklaces.
And starting today, the first Annual Rocket Story, in which we will publish a story about a rocket each year on Moonlanding Day, AKA July 20, our launch day. To start us off, here is Greg Manchess’, the orginator of the Stubby logo, painting for Charlie Stross’ “A Tall Tail.”
Stubby celebrated The Hobbit movie release with the One Ring.
Mark Summers, scratchboard artist of all those amazing B&N/Kindle portraits, takes his blade to Stubby:
In 2013, Justin Landon gave Stubby a voice with his weekly Rocket Talk podcast.
And now we are six:
