Comments on: p.259 (Chapter Nine)

By: Owen Smith

Owen Smith — Wed, 09 May 2012 23:46:03 +0000

The Miesti speech is pretty simple to read, far easier than original Shakespeare or King James bible ie. not a modern printing. Reading F as S is pretty straightforward and is required for a lot of older English. Read it phonetically and speak it out loud and even if the text as written looks like gibberish you will find that what you are saying is understandable. This trick works as far back as Chaucer or even earlier a lot of the time. It tends to fail with Anglo Saxon due to larger differences in vocabulary.

By: Corbin

Corbin — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:59:56 +0000

So, just a general comment from a rather-long-time follower of the story here. It would be Difficult to Overstate how amazing and impressive the past few pages have been. Yes, I know that the comic appears one page a week and this has a strange time-dilation impact on the story, but it seems like our crew has been bickering with refugees in the bleak subway ruins For Just About Frickin Ever and so now the transition to a state of affairs where Things are Really Happening, where Seriously Freaky Life Threatening Dangers including remarkably novel and strangely dangerous aliens are suddenly facing several of the crew, how our “viewpoint” has expanded to include a whole new group of players, well, how there are urgent and strange things happening in many places at the same time, well it’s like the sun breaking through the clouds. I especially enjoy the Aria sequence with the completely novel artwork techniques: the almost subliminal conversation (I think of the buzzing sounds in STTOS Wink of an Eye), the warped perspectives, the swirly eyes and overlapping internal dialogue, and especially the beautiful framing techniques with Aria’s hair — what a perfect idea, brilliant! Altogether, these things completely convey the semi-psychedelic experience that Aria is undergoing without in any way impeding the reader’s appreciation for the reality of the situation. And it does so using a set of techniques that could never be used in any other medium. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know how much fun things for me at at this point, I realize you have been building up to these scenes for a very long time. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

By: Stewart

Stewart — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:53:49 +0000

The long Ses have a long history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

(Which makes *me* read the Miesti as though they’re a bunch of Milton fanboys. Or fan…butterflies?)

By: Fred

Fred — Wed, 09 May 2012 08:43:42 +0000

Some of those swirly words are worrying: “…don’t want to have to watch this but … don’t want to .. miss it just in case…”

By: Jules

Jules — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:39:35 +0000

Man, we are elbows deep in some freaky-deaky territory. The font is readable enough. I would scale down the “s” if it were me, but again, that’s just me.

You hand letter this and I have a lot of respect for that. I’m probably not equipped to tell you how to do your job.

By: cookie

cookie — Tue, 08 May 2012 22:48:31 +0000

Aaaw Geez Andrew. Daffy Duck had not occured to me. Now I can’t get that voice-over out of my head.

Pretty.
Evil.

By: Seth

Seth — Tue, 08 May 2012 21:48:43 +0000

I, too, misread them as ‘f’s initially. Now, of course, I see them for the integration symbols they are.

By: Morgan Walter Champion

Morgan Walter Champion — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:16:38 +0000

Yes Aria- PRETTY EVIL!!!!

By: Andrew Crisp

Andrew Crisp — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:08:14 +0000

No problems reading the Miesti font/speech. That said, I mistook the s’s for f’s on the first pass, and now the Miesti sound like Daffy Duck in my mind.

So now we have enslaving butterflies with a spheech imphedimenth!

By: corvideye

corvideye — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:07:50 +0000

I had not problem reading the dialogue. I like the not-quite-legible text… to me it evokes voices whispering just at the bare edge of audibility, subliminal messages.

I think what you’re doing with the layouts in this sequence is incredible. It so perfectly conveys her confusion and the lack of rigid, linear consciousness that standard square panels would convey!