Maybe this spanking new cover for Tunguska #8 (my photocopied comics zine in Swedish) can be here as an intermission picture until I start chapter 8.

Yes, they have electricity. Because …

Communism = Soviet power + electrification!

(Lenin and electrification. Shass – Kobelev, 1925.)

I based their house a bit on the one in this lovely photo.

I’ll be at Stockholm SPX10 the extended weekend of April 22nd to 25th, selling my zines and also my book. As usual I will sign my book bad-assedly with ink and red acrylic paint. On the 22nd I will also take part in an “8 hour comic” event. Whee!

Page 2 of 2!

Maybe I should clarify something about the transcription …

The hyphen – ‘ – is a commonly used transcription symbol that indicates that the preceding consonant is “soft”. “Soft” consonants in Russian are pronounced with the tongue close to the roof of the mouth, a bit like when you would pronounce the vowel “eee”.
“Hard” consonants are pronounced with as much empty space between the tongue and the roof of the mouth as possible, kind of like when you say the vowel “oh”.
Whether a consonant is hard or soft is indicated by the vowel character that follows it, or by a special character if there is no following vowel. Я, е, ё, и, ю and the special character ь indicate soft consonants, and а, э, о, ы, у and the special character ъ indicate hard consonants. It can be confusing that this is indicated by the vowel characters, even though the difference is in the consonants.

* * *

My shoulder is as good as new after I hung a bit from the door frame last night, and it made a loud popping noise. I guess I dislocated it. But now it’s back in place again!!!
If it had happened while doing something productive, or if it had at least been in actual combat, no problem. But that was seriously one of the most idiotic things I have ever done in my life.

While I work on in shame, you should instead read the story of how the wonderful late Captain Phil Harris broke his back in two places. (I wish I’d had men like him around me when I grew up.)

Page 1 of 2.

I sketched this page many years ago and inked it only yesterday.

I seriously messed up my right shoulder this morning when I punched stuff in aggravation with a lot of force and no warming up at all.

I always just draw on a regular horizontal table, but now that gave me pain. So in order to sketch the next page of this comic, I put together a makeshift drawing board at a more upright angle (a piece of masonite and an empty sketchblock taped to my old computer’s  monitor):

I fastened the paper with a little double-sided tape on the back, moving it up as I progressed further down on the page, and rested my elbow on my plush piggy Severiina.

I don’t know if it will work so well for the more precise task of inking, but the pain should go away again soon, with enough tiger balm …

And that’s the end of chapter 7. (Next up is a short story and some intermission stuff — if you can’t bear the suspension, jump straight to chapter 8!)

Considering that I started working on this chapter in 2003, I think it was about time I finished it …

In a funny coincidence, I also ran out of pages in my script notebook. This August it will be 14 years (!!!!!!!!!) since I started to draw Driftwood, and so far I’ve filled four notebooks with scripts and notes about the story:

On one side I write the scripts for the comic, and on the flipside I write notes and drafts for future storylines. I have a different notebook for “thumbnail” page layout sketches.
In the last book, the notes and drafts take up much more space than the script section, either because I’ve started to actually think about the story, or because I’m getting old and my memory is not what it used to be.

Here is the cute new notebook I got today:

It had some stupid logotypes on it, so I covered them up with Japanese piggy stickers.

Anyway, it might be a little while before I pick up chapter 8, because I have to draw some other comics to fill out a paper zine I’m making for Stockholm Small Press Expo, and I also have to work a bit. But maybe there will be a Driftwood-related short story among those other comics.

There are lots of Mongolian curses and impolite phrases here, with audio files!

Maybe this is somehow overly pedagogical, but I don’t want to finish this chapter … ;_;