My wide calligraphic pen doesn’t work, so I am currently drawing the frames and the black surfaces with a fat permanent marker. :o(

A propos the frames – not using a ruler for the frames is a bit of a trademark of mine. How to draw somewhat straight lines without a ruler:
Move not only your hand along the line, but your entire upper body.

By the way, Oleg’s epaulettes are actually anachronistic – it was only in WWII that the Soviet Army controversially brought back military insignia for officers. Also, judging from his uniform they are Kuban or Terek cossacks, not Orenburg or Ural cossacks (obviously only the Cossacks in the Caucasus wear the Caucasian-style “cherkesska” – the others wear short tunics) …
Oh well. I guess I’ll just keep drawing whatever looks nice to me, since this world is different from ours in many ways. :3

o-o-o-o-o

I was just thinking about how quite many of the main characters in Driftwood have dropped out of, or never been part of, their education systems.

Willie: The story starts in May, when she is in 12th grade, one year before she would graduate from Secondary school. (British kids start school disturbingly early …) She was only going on a weekend trip to see her mum, but that trip turned out to be much longer than expected – now it’s already autumn and she has missed a lot of school. Though if she goes back I suppose she could do all the tests she missed with hardly any preparation and pass them without problems, if she’s anything like me … :op

Shannon never went to any formal school at all, but Seraphine very patiently taught her to read and to write when she was already in her twenties.

Seraphine is definitely the most formally educated of them all, but had to drop out of university when Shannon robbed him away to sea.

Samona: No formal education as far as anyone knows, but someone (she herself?) has taught her to read and write well, and she knows quite a lot of scary things.

Aeron was sent off to work after finishing middle school (9th grade). Unlike Eva he did okay in school and didn’t hate it.

Eva had poor school attendance all along (she preferred to read the books she wanted to when she wanted to), and officially dropped out of 7th grade when she ran away from home.

Eva says: “YOUNG?! She’s SIXTEEN! You guys tried to marry me off at FOURTEEN!!! How young is THAT?!!”

(Pauses to think.)

Eva says: “OH WAIT. Of course they mean ‘young’ regarding the LEVEL of EXPERIENCE in … CERTAIN … AREAS!!!!!”

Willie says: “………………………”

o-o-o-o-o

Last night I reread Driftwood from the very beginning, because the time had come to return to it after yet another long period of writer’s block. When I finished reading, I found it necessary to have a self-criticism meeting with myself!

I realised one thing that’s kind of funny (or sad?). I usually feel embarrassed about the first couple of chapters. But now that I reread them all I realised that the crappiest parts of the comic are actually not the first chapters, but a couple of very uninspired pages in chapter 7!
The first chapters might be very lacking on the technical side, but I was really doing my best most of the time, and managed to channel this weird, twisted energy into it. I picked up on the technical side pretty quickly, too, and compensated for what I wasn’t too good at yet.
Whereas in the past couple of years when I’ve been working on chapter 7, I really could have done much better than pages like 14, 15 and 21. And I think I’ve been using much too thin pens for inking some parts of the last couple of pages …

All in all, Driftwood, as it is now, is a comic like nothing else out there, and I am once again proud of being the one who gets to draw it.

All this probably sounds painfully obvious to everyone else, but I just have to remind myself once in a while … V`(oo)´V

However, the English translation of the first chapters here is really very, very bad. Maybe I can redo it some time. :3

I recently came back from a short seaside vacation. So I had time and inspiration to draw some Driftwood and work on the storyline.

It wasn’t easy, though, and the first half of this page is perhaps rather uninspired (besides, I had to retouch Natasha’s eyebrows so she would stop looking like a university teacher with whom I used to have a rather complicated teacher-student relationship …).

BUT THEN … I got Bobik back into the panels, and suddenly everything went fine.

So, here is Tinet’s Comix Making Lesson on How To Make Talking Heads Interesting:
PUT A BIG FUZZY DOGGIE IN THERE.

Here you can look at my holiday photos (I haven’t uploaded all yet). We had really good weather with nicely troubled waters. :3

Also, read Ainur’s comic Goldenbird! There is a lovely Nyarlathotep side story going on right now!

P.S. Here is the first sketch I made of Bobik in panel 5 … far too evil to use in the final version.

As you can see I made this page on two A4 boards. Easier to carry around, but a bit tricky since I forgot to bring my ruler! So this page is a bit longer than all the other ones …

They are referring to their world’s equivalent of the famine of 1932-1933. Read more about it on Wikipedia and at UCLA.

Aeron left home when he was about 14-15 years old, around 1929-1930, and if Eva was born in March 1918, she ran away from home at the age of 14 in the spring of 1932. Since this is not a historically accurate story at all, and this is not the real Soviet Union of our world, let’s say that the famine happened two or three years later. (Or, we could say that the revolution and civil war happened a few years earlier, so that Eva would be born in March 1914 (year of the tiger) …)

Of course, Oleg died long before the famine, so he can’t know any more about the reasons for it than Natasha and her mother. But since he was a convinced Communist (he was among the about 20% of all cossacks who served on the red side in the civil war) and also a bit macho, he has difficulties accepting how it could happen …