The Astonishing Excursions of Helen Narbon &Co., Chapter Twelve.
March 22, 2009 ~ 5 Comments
This is probably the best title I came up with for the Victorian chapters.
Panel one: “Come with us, now!”
Everybody in the Victorian storyline is sort of vaguely British. I didn’t think too hard about any of this.
The Italian in panel four is about what Dave says it is: “Come with us and we won’t hurt you yet!” All the Italian in these comics is very, very bad; I had Andrew translate it for me, usually late at night. I’m sorry, Italian people!
I liked the idea of Dave being inexplicably fluent in Italian, though.
I also love my ornate Victorian effects fonts.
Mrs. Legomenon is, of course, based on Cthulhu. My Lovecraft-loving friend Jason Thompson was a great inspiration here.
Panel one: “Help me! Help me!”
I’m still very pleased with the conversation between Dave and Madblood here. Those two were always great together, Victorian versions or otherwise. Also, I started getting into drawing the Hapax Legomenon’s truly startling collection of teeth. He has two rows here, like a shark.
Aaand the setup for the next chapter. Again, I pretty much wrote the Victorian storyline as I went, so I had no grand plan for any of this. Whatever I thought might be entertaining went into the story, regardless of whether it would make a whole lot of sense down the line.
Suddenly splitting the cast between two entire planets surely must have seemed, even at the time, to be a slightly overconfident move. Split casts have a strange narrative tendency of resisting the natural forces of gravity that ought to bring them back together!
That’s the end of Madblood’s hat, it seems.
Mars!
And tropewatching: New in this episode, we’ve got “…that’s my wife”, and an instant-tranquilizer dart, (PS to Madblood!Victorian: Those Congolese blowgunners don’t use tranks….)
So, the monsters are from Venus, and the women from Mars, huh? Nice reversal of the trope.
I used to snicker at the bad (VERY bad) Italian in these strips, but the fact it’s quasi-Italian words put together in a sort of fake uppity 19th-century language actually makes it Martian enough, in a Jules Verne steampunkish way. I guess reading Shakespeare when one usually speaks modern English ought to be a similar experience.
For the record, the real Italian should read:
Page 1, panel 1: – Venite con noi, subito!
Page 2, panel 4: – Seguiteci e non vi faremo del male, per ora.
Page 3, panel 1: – Aiutatemi! Aiutatemi!