A page I struggled with – fortunately, a lot of the issues I had with the line art are all but erased at webscale. Not many deviations from the script here – just a couple of compositional adjustments, and a slight change in wording here and there. Panel three was changed to a profile shot in order to save the inevitable craziness of reflection work for the next page.
While I’m not much of a language snob – I have enough trouble with english, thank you – I always found the idea of noun genders to be… irritating. I’m sure if the concept is part of your native language it’s all well and good but to me they’ve always felt like the linguistic equivalent of an appendix. A noun “gender” that denotes position, however… that’s the kind of sciencey nerdy thing that that would piss off translators something fierce.* Especially if the difference between physical and temporal position is, say… the difference between I before E or E before I. Or possibly an umlaut.
The gibberish Lang is unloading is likely an ancient combination of the equivalent of Perl Golf, spaghetti chemistry, intentionally obfuscated c, and other equally obtuse expressions of complex disciplines. If there’s man pages for any of it, he obviously hasn’t gotten that far. The indecipherability could be intentional, or it could be incompetence. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which.
This is it for the immediate future – while a couple of panels of the next page use this environment, I’ll have to do some more spot modeling to get things moving. That’s on tentative hold for the immediate future – if the paperwork clears in a timely fashion I’ve got a lot of work to do over the next couple of weeks, as well as a couple of illustration commissions. I also need to put in some time on the other comic I’ve committed to – for all I know Ben may think I’m dead, and I’d like to have something to show him the next time I’m likely to see him.
The next three pages are likely to be minimal “just in time” CG, along the lines of the last few pages of DCR.2. I may be able to get those done this month, though April June seems more likely at this point. Plenty of time to scare up some ink for the printer and see to other purchasing matters, as funds permit.
* If there's a precedent I'm not aware of it. I haven't looked for one, either - the story doesn't hinge on this little snippet; the concept serves to reinforce the notion that the language barrier is a real bitch.
