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:3

* * *

You don’t have to be a butur to have telepathic powers, but not everybody seems to have the disposition for it. With one of my previous boyfriends I had a very clear telepathic connection: we could hear each other’s thoughts like quiet speaking. Not all thoughts, though — usually just the worst things … V`(oo)´;V
Then again, he was Romanian with Cuman and/or Pecheneg ancestry, and my Tatar great-grandpa was called “devil-worshipper” by his relatives, so who knows, maybe there was a little bit of shamanic wizardry involved, after all.

Besides humans, in my experience horses have particularly strong telepathic powers.

// Edit: //

And of course piggies!!!

One funny incident happened when I was recording an audio message that I was going to email to my boyfriend in Russia. This was in 2002, before the age of Skype. It was summer and I had the window open. At some point I could hear my piggy Sergei walking by outside the window, uffing peacefully to himself like he often did. When he heard my voice, he stopped and listened intently for a moment. I continued recording the message. At some point Sergei started uffing loudly, sounding a bit upset, and walked quickly away from the window.
Maybe half an hour later, when I had already finished recording the message long ago, my mum, who had been in her studio in the adjacent building, came in and asked if I’d recorded an audio message for my boyfriend. She said Sergei had come to her, all upset, and told her all about it.
Now, although my mum probably knew that I had recorded messages like that before, there was no way she could have known that I was doing it in that very moment. But Sergei told her. V°(oo)°V

Sergei lurking


Driftwood 8 32

I’ve been talking a lot about Russian names, but what about Czech names?

Willie’s name is Wilma Čapeková.
Actually the normal Czech way of spelling her first name would be Vilma, but her parents anglicized it. (No, they didn’t get it from the Flintstones … Willie’s parents would never watch such capitalist propaganda.)
“-ová” is the feminine suffix that is added to surnames. The Czech have the funny (and maybe kind of sexist) habit of czechicizing foreign women writers’ last names by adding an “-ová” to their names. For example, Astrid Lindgren is Astrid Lindgrenová in the Czech translations of her books.

I wish I knew Czech. Then I could entertain myself endlessly by letting Willie, Aeron and Eva talk Czech and Russian, have funny misunderstandings and make fun of each other. (As if they aren’t already entertaining me endlessly in English …)


Driftwood 8 31

For many years I had been under the delusion that Willie is mostly based on myself.

Last week I was rewatching all the Alien films (such a nice Christmasy thing to do). I had pretty much forgotten all about some of them – the third because it was so bad, and the fourth, Alien: Resurrection, because it was such a long time since I last saw it (it must have been in 1997 when it came out). I had totally forgotten what happened in it and what other characters there were besides Ripley and the aliens, but I did remember that I really loved the film. Now that I was going to watch it again I was a bit worried that I would be disappointed.

But instead, I not only loved it all over again (even if some of the dialogue is a bit stupid), but I also found myself thinking over and over, “OH, so THAT’s where that came from!!” I was really astonished by how it’d had such a fundamental influence on the comics I’ve been making. But how could I have forgotten it? It’s like Alien: Resurrection abandoned the conscious part of my brain and instead totally invaded the subconscious part.

The most obvious and most bizarrely forgotten influence is Call, on whom I must have subconsciously based a big part of Willie.

It was a truly surreal experience to watch this film and have the distinct feeling that I knew this character very well, and not just from seeing the film once before, thirteen years ago.  O_o

And it’s a big relief that Willie really isn’t as much of a Mary Sue as I’d been dreading.


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Tinet’s comics making school, lesson #563:
YES, if you can’t be bothered with proper perspective, do a weird-ass fish-eye effect that looks totally wrong in every possible way!!!

Her eyes are huge and disturbing.

Babiloui, the kitty I’m taking care of for a friend over the holidays, puked on my carpet this morning. Awww.


Driftwood 8 29

A bit late, and what else is new. V`(oo)´V

I’ve received a reader’s complaint that Aeron looks a lot like Eva’s boyfriend Ting Yay (in her solo stories). Now, I don’t think Eva really has a brother complex, because inside my head they look totally different. I should say they also look very different on paper?! Or not?

(^ Ting Yay and Eva, after just another long day.)

Maybe it’s more a question of superficial likeness, like their fringes (Ting Yay has no special excuse, but a fringe is a must for any Russian man), black clothes (for Ting Yay it’s just his postman’s uniform), and (partly, in Aeron’s case) Asiatic features … Combined with my fetish for dark hair and eyes, which requires all my ‘main men’ to have those features.

Their personalities are in any case extremely different, so they rarely have similar facial expressions or body language. Though on page 20, panel 4, Aeron had a bit of a Ting Yay moment :3, and I was also briefly confused about drawing him with Eva draped over him, so in that panel I can agree that they look quite alike …