If you are a new reader, or an old reader who is confused by current events (and thank you to commenters for alerting me to this need!), here’s something to get you quickly up to speed:
- Read this page in which Carl describes (somewhat vaguely) the attacks on the Hiawatha’s crew
- And then the four pages, starting here, in which the Orehu leader Vanguarthe explains the Miesti from his point of view
- And then this page and the next one, wherein Patty’s strange affliction is revealed
- And finally, the last time we saw Aria before all this weirdness happened– this page and then this one.
- Oh, and I guess if you need to you can read the current chapter from the beginning.
There! I hope that will straighten it all out with a minimum of archive-diving. Of course, if you feel the inclination to do so, a complete read-through from the beginning still is the best method for full story immersion. (And if the concept of 259 clicks (plus extras) doesn’t thrill you, I encourage you to check out the books and e-books!)
Although you don’t need to be able to decipher much of the very-italic swirly words on this page and previous pages, you do need to be able to read the Miesti (yes, those are Miesti) dialogue. And after realizing that the “swirly words” are even less decipherable than I’d planned for them to be, now I’m paranoid that some of you will have difficulty making out what the Miesti are saying in their weird font. Or else, it will be so annoying to try to read that most people will just give up and click away. So, if it’s a problem, here or on any future page, please let me know in the comments and I will fix it!
…And so we come to it at last.
I love the banter between the Miesti!
I thought the constantly-swirling-around-the-page stuff was supposed to represent background noise, since it looked like a jagged line on an EKG or something. Illegible. In the past couple of pages I looked closely and it seemed about as illegible, but like maybe it was supposed to be speech Aria just couldn’t understand.
The Miesti dialog is mostly legible, but are you saying the other stuff is supposed to be readable?!?!?! What the heck does it say? Now I feel like I’m missing out on some stuff….
The Miesti font is pretty and is easy to read. For the very-italic-swirly words, would it be worth scanning a higher resolution version of the pages so that we can read them. XKCD does this on a few of its pages, where there is too much detail to read at normal size (see, e.g., http://www.xkcd.com/1040/).
@Cassie: Thanks!
@Kendall: The original idea was for the swirly-words to be only barely decipherable, such that you could pick out a word or phrase if you tried hard. What I didn’t realize was that the end result would be not-decipherable-at-all. So while you’re not really missing anything important to the story, I am left wondering if I ought to do something about it or not.
@Fred: That’s a good idea. It might be interesting to learn if it gets legible enough to make out words, and if anyone really wants to go to the bother of trying.
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!
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!
I, too, misread them as ‘f’s initially. Now, of course, I see them for the integration symbols they are.
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?)
Cannot. Unhear. It. XD
Yes Aria- PRETTY EVIL!!!!
Aaaw Geez Andrew. Daffy Duck had not occured to me. Now I can’t get that voice-over out of my head.
Pretty.
Evil.
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.
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…”
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.
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.