The Astonishing Excursions of Helen Narbon &Co., Chapter Twelve.

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.

5 thoughts on “The Astonishing Excursions of Helen Narbon &Co., Chapter Twelve.

  1. 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.

  2. 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….)

  3. 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!

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