I’d planned to start the next scene in the second half of this page. But then I reminded myself that this is my comic, and there is no deadline (apart from my death, I guess) and I can drag it on as much as I want … And actually I should drag it on for the sake of better storytelling. Maybe I’m still a bit stuck in the mode from the end of Driftwood where I was racing against time and had to cram as much as possible into each page.

Anyways, it always hurts to erase sketches, so I take crappy photos of them every time I have to do it, so I can remind myself later that it really was worse before. Here’s the first version of the end of this scene, all crammed into less than the space of panel 2 above:

To my defense I might point out that I drew it when the only table I had here was a couch table that was too low for a normal chair and too high for sitting on the floor …

Yet another reason for the lack of updates this past month is that I’m hostage to the weather. I’m supposed to be living in my trailer in the countryside right now, but I’d have to be extremely badass to do that now. And while I am indeed quite badass, I’m also lazy. So now I’m staying in the city, waiting for the summer (because spring is probably #§$%ed at this point already …). And only yesterday I finally got a proper table here so I can draw!

She is of course thinking about stuff that happened (or didn’t really happen) in Driftwood chapter 7. :3

The other day I watched Life of Pi! It’s rare that I can see a film without being irritated by something in it, but with this film I actually got lost in the story. (I’ve never read the book – and I usually assume that film adaptations are entirely different beasts from the books.)

It has some obvious thematic parallels to the beginning of Driftwood. I reread it and came to the conclusion that Willie was ‘only’ adrift for eight days, apparently. Maybe that’s kind of lame compared to badasses like Steven Callahan (76 days) or Poon Lim (133 days), but it certainly explains why she’s still in relatively good shape when they find her … heh.
But it also seems that either there were no food supplies on her life raft, or she lost them somehow very early on, since she had to resort to collecting rainwater and trying to catch fish, and was going a bit crazy from hunger and loneliness already.

* * *

Edit, March 24th: I conducted some field studies and now the sound of his heart is a bit more realistic … X_x

Listening to Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood while I ink, compulsively mildly curious if any special reason for it having a male main character will be revealed.

Maybe it’s not so visible here in the web version, but Willie has cut open a bit of the inside seam of her jeans, like we all used to do in the 90′s … :op (Do other people still do it today, or am I the only one?!)

It’s mostly the mothers with younger children who appreciate the free, all-you-can-eat results of Willie’s nutrition experiments. :3
She probably had no problem ditching her Czech and British food traditions as she studied local cooking and nutritional theory …

There are two stoves like that in this communal kitchen. Cookers in the rooms are forbidden because of the fire hazard. Many residents don’t cook at home at all, but rather eat cooked food at the factory canteen and food stalls in the town, and just snacks at home.

… Which reminds me (again) of my time at Moscow State University, which had numerous canteens with fantastic and cheap food, and communal kitchens in the dorms. The canteen food and the variety of pirozhki at the markets was so great and so cheap that I never cooked. When my (Russian) boyfriend came to visit for the first time, he saw the kitchen and said with a meaningful and almost accusatory look: “There is a kitchen here.” It was bizarre to him that I wasn’t cooking at home when I was a woman and there actually was a kitchen. :3

O hai, looks like a new page.

So a month has passed since Willie arrived … In the meantime she has turned 17. It’s early February now.

In the notes to page 6 I wrote earlier that Gbegluza-Hwewi was still under colonial rule. But then I thought that was kind of boring, so now it’s actually a newly independent country with a Socialist government that is supported by Ban La-Ilanam.

The Solidarity Committee is funded by the government (that’s why Ju-Tsang and Hai-Long wear the “government employee” red epaulettes when they work for the committee – but the other members are volunteers). Its activities are directed from above: they have friendship projects for “mutual benefit” as part of large-scale and long-term plans for making strategic allies in trade and politics.

In the case of Gbegluza-Hwewi, the Sha-Guo Marine Workers’ Solidarity Committee is doing its own little part in helping the country to industrialize itself, so it can become more economically independent. And nobody would send Willie there to help build the new production line even if she actually knew anything about it, because they already know how to do it on their own, as it’s an important policy of Ban La-Ilanam’s aid program to train local experts for all the new technology. (It’s all inspired by the seemingly “strictly mutual benefit” aid programs of China in our world.) The committee does make “cultural exchange” trips sometimes, though, and their comrades abroad come to visit Sha-Guo, too.

In Gbegluza-Hwewi more pessimistic people might still view this as a “lesser evil”. We’ll find out later why they rejected it on Dog Island …

Update notice, November 9th 2012:
Sorry about the dodgy updates. I don’t have writer’s block anymore, but I’m having a hard time focusing on drawing. :( I was at the Zinefest Berlin last weekend, and this weekend I’m going to AltCom Comics festival in Malmö. So weekends are out, and it’s hard to set aside drawing time during the week now, since I have some hectic dayjob projects at the moment, while also (finally) putting together the English Driftwood book and a book collecting short stories and other stuff related to Driftwood. Things were certainly much simpler back when I was in school and lived in the middle of a forest, and there just wasn’t anything else to do than draw comics … V`(oo)´;V

* * *

Yay, I got over my writer’s block! V^(oo)^V

I happened to come across a note of how this kind of “trophies” were used as a means of propaganda for improving efficiency and neatness (and morale?!?) in workplaces in the Stalinist Soviet Union, in the coffee table book Sovjet i bild (“The Soviet Union in pictures”, Tidens förlag, Stockholm 1946).

In the book there’s a photo from 1931 of a piggy made of cloth, meant to shame the workers at a tractor factory in Kharkov to make a better effort to keep their workplace clean … (As clean as a piggy would, one might assume, but unfortunately it’s based on the speciesist stereotype of piggies as “dirty”, which of course is only due to the squalid conditions in which humans keep them … V`(oo)´V)

The front inscription says: “I myself am a pig, I have seen innumerable other pigs, but for the first time in my life I see such a pigginess as here at your place.”

(Click to enlarge!)

Update notice, October 27th:

Ahahahahaa … No, I’m not so sure about the script after all. I’ll be back when I’ve figured it out …

Update notice, October 21st:

Urgh … First I had some writer’s block, and although that has passed, today I’ve been so stressed out by the fact that on Tuesday I have to move south, just like the swans that kept flying across the sky forming big arrows pointing where we all must go, that I couldn’t sit still and focus enough to draw. VX(oo)xV So I’ll post the next page at some point after next Tuesday …

* * *

Of course Malcolm X would have a seme sparkle. :3

The Bakunin quote is from “Man, Society and Freedom“, in the manuscripts that God and State was based on. As I looked it up it appears that it was actually written (or edited together) by Bakunin’s close comrades Carlo Cafiero and Élisée Reclus, who put together the book from Bakunin’s fragmentary texts.

I can’t find any source for the Malcolm X quote, but it seems he said it 10th of June 1964, some time after his Hajj.

I personally have a bit of an aversion to “inspirational quotes” (they are all out of context, anyway), but Willie is young and nobody is perfect. V^(oo)^;V

(Also, a nice picture to show off to your friends and enemies …)

Sorry about the repetitions of things, but I have this crazy idea that maybe it should be possible to read Dog Island without having read Driftwood first.
V`(oo)´;V

Ideals of beauty are of course relative (and often racist :( …), and Aeron would certainly be less popular among people for whose tastes he would be too swarthy and too Asian. :3

There are some existing fish species called horsefish, but the one Hai-Long is referring to is one that I made up.

While (almost) all the cool kids were at the Book fair in Gothenburg, I worked my ass off (Wed-Sat) and drew this (today).

Best page ever to letter, one of the most aggravating pages ever to draw … V`(oo)´;V I thought I’d had enough of mail sorting cabinets in Postman Blues, but I guess not …
And maybe I should make more of an effort to draw more obvious images, because the guy in the last panel is the local postman, not just some random dude.

I don’t think I’d ever drawn a train or any kind of plane before. Thanks to Hayao Miyazaki’s Zassou Nouto, at least the plane wasn’t too hard. V^(oo)^V

Whee, glory to all postal workers and transport workers across the world. :3

Oh, by the way, in case somebody didn’t notice – Willie has removed the red epaulettes and things from her jacket, so people won’t mistake her for an actual postal worker.