Yay, happy International Workers Day! I’m posting this page a bit early for this very lovely occasion.

Everyone can guess now that Willie lives in the Chandless estate in Gateshead …
The glass works (Elder’s Walker/Pilkington’s) were torn down in the early 2000’s. Some historical photos of them: 1, 2, 3
The city has proposed to demolish the Chandless estate now, too … :o(

Here is the cover for my zine Tunguska #9, which will feature chapter 8 in print, along with a couple of other comics (all in Swedish), and will be for sale at SPX11 in Stockholm next weekend!

For the last few days (and for the next couple of days), I’ve been working my ass off to finish this issue. Somehow magically I drew the last three pages of Driftwood chapter 8 in one single day, but I still have to translate all the comics into Swedish (since I’m writing the scripts in English nowadays) and letter them. Whyyyy did I put so much dialogue in this chapter … Vx(oo)XV

Maybe it’s a bit of a spoiler, but “Мёртвые не лгут” means “the dead don’t lie”. In Czech the same phrase would be “Mrtví nelžou”, with exactly the same stress and intonation (unless Google Translate is lying), so perhaps Willie will figure out what it means. Why he was thinking that might be harder to figure out, though, since he didn’t tell her about that part of the conversation he had with his dead family members …

By the way, watching the first episodes of the new Deadliest Catch season got me thinking a lot about crew dynamics. I wonder if Aeron feels that he has to work ten times harder than everybody else in order to prove himself in this workplace where he is clearly in the gender minority, and lacks Seraphine’s privileged position as the boss’s fiancé … :3

Hmm, “beard hickeys” should actually be called “stubble hickeys”, because once stubble has grown long enough, it doesn’t scratch up your partner’s chin anymore.  It can depend a bit on technique and intensity, too … :3

After a little hiatus, I am now in shturmovschina mode! I’ll have to finish this chapter until the end of the month. (Seriously, I never thought it would be this long!) Hopefully the undisrupted flow will compensate for the rushed inking that this short time frame will surely require … In any case, you can look forward to timely updates for several weeks to come.  V`(oo)´V

But that is not the only good news today! I received this wonderful fanart from Li Österberg, one of my very favourite Swedish comics artists.

It’s so nice how the way Li draws Samona makes it even more obvious how much Samona looks like Ainur than the way I myself usually draw her. :o)

When my family moved back to Sweden in the late 1990’s, “badly drawn” autobiographical comics were in full vogue there (they still are, but the scene has diversified a lot since then, thank goodness). One artist whose autobiographical comics nevertheless stuck out from the rest was Li Österberg, perhaps because on one hand they weren’t badly drawn, and on the other hand I could relate more to Österberg’s comics about alienation, autism and growing up with (too?) many siblings, compared to, for example, Mats Jonsson’s “sexual angst in Stockholm” comics.

Over the years, Li Österberg has also been drawing many fictional comics. One of the most recent is A god apart from gods, where the main character is the Greek god Hades. It’s hard for me to write anything coherent about this comic, since I have a bit of a crush on Hades :3, but you can read it yourself at Li’s deviantArt!

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Oh, and Ainur’s comic Goldenbird is online again, at long last! Now I can get my Mochi fix again even when I don’t have the printed Goldenbird zines anywhere near me. Phew!

Update notice, April 20th: As you can see there hasn’t been much updating in a little while now, but guess what? Stockholm SPX is May 5th-8th, and I need to finish this chapter until then. And that means that it’s SHTURMOVSCHINA TIME!!!!
But first I just need to move … (-_-;)

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Yees … I could finally connect to the internets here in Helsinki. V`(oo)´V

(What is a Butur? Maybe I should compile a glossary about all the magic and shamanism stuff in this comic.)

I had wild debates inside my brain about whether Willie should be saying “I can tell you aren’t” or “I can tell you’re not”. Inside my head she said “aren’t”, but to me it sounded a bit strange. Then again, my English has been destroyed by the fact that I hang out too much with American English speakers. According to Google, “aren’t” does have a higher incidence in the UK than in the US, so I followed the voice in my head, after all. Any Brits reading this are welcome to correct me …

Update notice, April 4th: Damnation, I have to go do something tonight so I can’t ink the next page until tomorrow. ;__; And then I’m going to Finland (of all places), so I’m not sure if there will be any new pages until April 18th. V`(oo)´V
April 6th: Even further postponed, until I have a moment of peace and can edit and letter the next page, which I actually, miraculously, managed to ink and scan just now. Maybe I can do that on the flight to Helsinki …? V`(oo)´;V

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Uuh, I inked this page in an all-nighter this Monday morning. I actually sketched the sail in panel 2, but then I forgot all about it when I inked. WTF. Seriously. V`(oo)´V
I’ll redraw it later …

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There is a Russian proverb: “Первый блин комом” – the first pancake comes out a blob. That very much applies to when I draw comics, because I need to “warm up” before my drawing skills flow properly. Either I can doodle around for a few minutes before I start sketching, or I can gamble and start sketching the first panel without warming up. With the latter method, I sometimes have to go back and redraw the first panel. Sometimes it comes out okay, and looks decent after I’ve inked it. In this page I had to redraw it.

Most of the warmup sketches obviously look like crap (that’s their purpose, after all – to be the blob, so the drawings in the actual comics page will only come out as perfect pancakes). These two are kind of fun, though: