Damn this was hard to draw. V`(oo)´V

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For all the fangirls and fanboys who have always been wondering what the characters in Driftwood would look like if they were real people:

I’ll exclude Seraphine, because, uh, yeah …

As mentioned, Samona looks kind of like my sister.

I guess Shannon looks a bit like me, but with an Irish jawline, more badass facial scars and a less obscene mouth …

Those who have been following the Swedish language Eva blog (about her solo adventures) know that Eva looks like a redheaded, slightly curvier and a bit less tall Olga Kurylenko.

I haven’t really found anyone who would look much like Willie. Gabriela Hrabinova (also Czech) at least has the right colour combination and hair type, but some significant differences in facial features, not to mention body structure …

As for Aeron, I actually have met somebody who both looked and acted very much like him (which was quite disturbing). It was this Uighur guy who worked at a restaurant in Ulan Bator making shashlyk, dressed all in black and being very cool, friendly and efficient and not minding the immense heat at all. Damn, I should have asked him if I could take a portrait of him, or at the very least taken a paparazzi photo from afar … V`(oo)´;V
Since I don’t have any photo of that guy, here are some people who, if you mix them all toghether, could end up looking more or less like Aeron …
This Siberian dude:

ilhan Mansız for the Tatar influence:

Eric Burdon, mostly the eyes and eyebrows (and he kind of looks like an old friend of mine from the Northern Caucasus who also looks a bit like Aeron, but of whom I don’t have any decent photo):

Finally, add a pinch each of Jake Harris and Ran Danker for that big nosed stubble faced handsomeness …

Okay, this post looks like a list of all the most beautiful people I could think of (except that my mum is missing from it), but I guess it was inevitable … V^(oo)^V

“Radamsa” is a reference to the Moomin book Moominland Midwinter. After Moomin wakes up from hibernation, he finds an indeterminable little creature under the sink who just keeps saying “radamsa” angrily …

A two page update, as promised! (Go back one page to read all of today’s update!)

The update is one day late, though … I was lending my apartment, with my scanner inside it, to some friends, and one of them stayed one day longer than expected. While they were here, I stayed at my “weekend place”, a construction trailer on a little plot of land outside the city. With a solar cell that’s too small to power my computer, there is nothing to do but work in the garden and on the trailer and draw comics in sunlight and candlelight. I wish I could live there permanently, if I’d just install some kind of shower.

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Tinet the Great Relationship Expert, almost 30 years old, ‘not bitter, only disappointed’, says: “Actually, in my experience it hardly phazes women to learn that a guy they are interested in has a girlfriend. Men, on the other hand, will indeed leave a woman alone if they find out she has someone already. Maybe because women on average respect other women – and themselves – much less than men respect other men – and themselves. But maybe the ladies of the Sha-Guo Marine Workers’ Solidarity Committee have a greater sense for honour than the average 21st century hipster slut …?”
[Addendum, August 29th, after I broke up with my boyfriend: "... Or maybe women just know whether a man is a slut or not." :op]

The idea for this little sequence was born from a comment by Ainur about how at least Samona’s specialty is cooking lobscouse and not a supposedly stereotypical Roma dish like hedgehogs baked in clay … Because actually it would really be just like Samona to bake hedgehogs in clay. Not because she is (trying to be?) Roma, but because her cooking is rather unorthodox in general.

The notion that hedgehogs baked in clay would be a Roma stereotype comes from a short story that probably our entire generation read in school in Germany in the 1990’s, about a German boy who makes friends with a (as I remember it) rather stereotypical Roma boy. I don’t remember who wrote it, but in any case, in one scene they ate hedgehogs baked in clay.

* UPDATE NOTICE, August 15th*
No new page this Monday, because I am staying at a place with dodgy computer, Internet and scanner access. But to compensate (for once), there will be two pages next Monday (August 23rd)!

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Shannon’s type is short, bald guys with snub noses. V^(oo)^V

Whee, it’s hardly past Monday … getting better every week.

My brain keeps receiving gushes of future storylines while I’m trying to concentrate on drawing. If the ideas are any good, I need to write them down immediately, or I will end up remembering only the punchlines … (really!)
I suppose that’s one reason why more professional comic artists finish writing the script before they start drawing. T_T

Whee, this is the closest I have gotten to the proper update schedule in weeks … T_T

I would perhaps have finished it on time yesterday if I had not totally lost track of time while researching the possible cargo capacity of the Eagle Ray. I couldn’t find any reliable numbers for actual xebecs, so I looked at trading schooners and brigantines of similar size, and rounded down to be safe. After all, the Eagle Ray has very generous accomodations for the crew … :3 (though it’s weighed up a bit by the fact that the crew is very small).

The Eagle Ray used to have oars like a proper xebec, but it has been refitted to sail-only. With oars, it would need a ginormous crew – in one of my earliest drafts for the story it actually had oars, and the rowers were the restless ghosts of galley slaves.
Also, it doesn’t carry any guns. Unless Shannon has hidden away one or two for emergencies …

Since Major Suthidamrongsawadi’s intervention in chapter 2, they are officially under the flag of URSA (though I wonder what URSA authorities would say about that).
Speaking of URSA, check out the “Places” page I just made, with brief overviews of the places where this story is set!

If I started drawing this comic today, I would give them a much smaller ship, and it would be a schooner, since a gaff rig is easier to handle with just a 4–6 man crew than a lateen rig. (Perhaps something like the topsail schooner La Recouvrance, which you can visit virtually on its official website - which makes me really really excited!!!)
But maybe a smaller ship wouldn’t be as much fun. :3

Some ship websites with virtual tours and/or nice galleries (most of them are passenger ships):

La Recouvrance
Argo and Ocean Star
Isaac H. Evans
Lynx
Pacific Swift, Pacific Grace, St. Roch and Bluenose II
The Spirit of South Carolina

I could only dream of reference material like this when I first started drawing this comic. Though I did once randomly visit Lady Ellen with my mum back then. Her home port used to be across the quay from a hotel where mum used to work. We went on board on a whim. The crew was hung over and said we could clean if we wanted to. :o)

Finally … Last week the heat was brutal, and things have been a bit tumultous in general.

Mackerel (especially the smoked variety) is one of the most delicious things there is. It’s one of my guilty pleasures as a mostly vegetarian, in which I indulge maybe once or twice a year. Too bad other people can’t restrain themselves as much, so that the mackerel population has been “somewhat depleted in the waters around Europe”. ;_; It’s not (yet) critically endangered, though.

Read more about Atlantic Mackerel at the Blue Ocean Institute.

Sorry about the delay … ;_;

The reasons are that I have some kind of “live drawing” performance coming up on Friday that I’ve been required to rehearse for, besides the fact that it’s infernally hot. I have never before tried to draw comics in heat like this. Today, as I was inking, it was somewhat bearable for a change (just 25 degrees centigrade or so), but I still had to correct a quite extreme amount of things in this page, and it’s overall really sloppy and crappy …

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Anyway, over to hand tool pr0n: The little saw in panel 5 is a kugihiki nokogiri, a Japanese saw made especially for sawing off trunnels neatly.  It’s not really suitable for anything else, but for that one purpose they say it’s most excellent. *drool*

I recently found that I needed a saw (I’m building a small light table for a hand lettering job), so I  got a kataba, as they are small, lightweight and supposedly far superior to Western hand saws in the same price class. I totally underestimated how the blade of the kataba I got is specially designed for either sawing across or along the grain, so I got a cross-grain kataba, which proved to be truly amazing when sawing across the grain, and a total pain in the arse when sawing along the grain. :o) Most of the sawing I did was across the grain, anyway. And since the blades are interchangeable, it’s no problem to at some point get an extra blade for sawing along the grain …

Update July 5th: Maybe no new page this week, because I am VERY FRUSTRATED by other stupid things. V`(oo)´V

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Samona’s looks are based a bit on my sister Ainur, but with an even bigger nose and wavy black hair. (Of course, my drawings are so stylized that she could look like anyone … oh well.)

According to a Kazakh friend, Ainur looks like “a true Tatar girl” in this photo. :o)

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When using trunnels with wedges, you must place the pressure along the grain – i.e. the wedge across the grain – or else it could split the wood. Yes, I learned that from the Internet (though it’s kind of obvious).

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… Is it a sign that you have created a good Mary-Sue/Gary Stu (an overly idealized character that is way too obviously a fantasy-fulfilling insertion of yourself, common in amateurish fiction, or screenplays by Andrei Tarkovsky) when it makes your mum cry reading about the character? My mum claims she cries when she reads Driftwood, because Willie reminds her so much of me. O_o

A weekend full of business and drama delayed this page a bit … Besides, I had to redraw the last two panels like twenty times, even though they are so simple. Gah.

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Willie: A doont speek liek that, really. Bot A do speek liek this.
Aeron: I aktyuelly khev e werry strrongh Rrashn dyialict … Heh, no, I don’t …

Newcastle (Geordie) dialect is so nice. Though Willie’s accent is not very broad, I sometimes feel tempted to ’show’ it more in the dialogue. But then, I would be obliged to do the same for all the other characters. And while that would be really awesome on some level, I would probably just get caught up in the joys of researching various accents ad infinitum.

So what I do now is try to use expressions that they, with their respective accents, would use, but write them out in standard English. Then those who know what such accents sound like can imagine it in their heads, and the rest can avoid feeling alienated …
The English translation of the first few chapters here is, of course, really bad, and some day I will go over it. (Probably when this prequel is done and I make a printed book …?)

I’ve linked to the International Dialects of English before, and here is a collection of Durham dialect word lists.

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By the way, where is Aeron’s Russian Male Pride? Shouldn’t he insist on doing the drilling? But since he grew up in the 20’s, maybe he thinks that would be uncomradely behaviour towards women. As in: “We must carry out serious work among the Komsomol masses with a view to educating them to have a comradely attitude towards girls. We need to struggle decisively against every type of contemptuous and indecent behaviour towards girls: ‘a mare is not a horse, a baba is not a person’. We must declare a decisive struggle with all kinds of obscene language, with hooliganism, with bawdy stories in the presence of girls, with all seemingly ‘comradely’ behaviour towards a girl that is designed only to ‘catch’ her. All such behaviour forces girls to flee from the union.”