Grrl Power #762 – This presser is about to get a lot more exciting
I forgot to put the brackets around the all the dialog, except panel 6, but everyone is speaking in some alien language or another. Okay, bear with me, I know I talk about Universal Translators a lot, but I’m not sure what else to comment about on this page, so here we go.
On Earth, there are a few major languages that are worth your time to learn. English, obviously, since we export so much entertainment, and a lot of international business is conducted in English. Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, German, Hindi, or Arabic. Basically any language where there’s ~100+ million speakers is reasonably worth your time to learn. Depending heavily on your interests and geography, obviously.
BUT. If you lived in a galactic mixing pot with a chance to encounter any of ten thousand viable languages on a given day, and everyone has access to near perfect automatic translators that even somehow create holograms over people’s mouths so they’re lip synced correctly… honestly, would anyone learn more than one language? You’d only need to learn one language that the translators knew to get your foot in the door, and then you’d be set. Even if you’re a Snarglax, and you move into Little Blogsville, would you bother learning Blorgian? Just pop your translator in your ear (and in this case, your translator is also your wallet and your smartphone with the holographic interface projected into your eye and you’d never leave home without it anyway) and you’re set. Ok, maybe you’d learn the Bolrgian for “I got mugged and someone stole my translator.” but that’s it.
Learning a language is not a minor undertaking. Unless you’re learning a second language when you’re young, side by side with your primary language, it’s a lot of work. I’ve tried several times to learn Japanese, and I started getting decent with it for a while, but at some point I realized I wasn’t really going to internalize it unless I moved to Japan for a few years and immersed myself in it. Eventually I was like, well, I could do that, or I could put more time into this webcomic idea that has been rolling around in my head for a while.
So I tried something different with coloring Cora’s face in that last panel. I think it looks pretty good, except that it’s a little blown out. Also it lacks a certain stylized charm, but hey, I learned a little from doing it, so hopefully that helps build my pool of art skillz.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
For chinese they speak of mandarin chinese speakers .
In some isolated parts of china old generation don’t speak mandarin chinese.
And for added layer of complication Popular Republic of China use simplified characters , and Taiwan use traditional characters.
In France second an third generationof Portuguese descent continue speaking Portuguese for two reasons , langage proximity (cedilla), and geographic proximity (Paris-Lisbonne 1 735,4 km by road about 1078,33 mi )
Statistics from China must be taken with a grain of salt , they are not strictly false but biased to promote a good image of the Country.
About the coloring experiment: I don’t know what you did, but it clashes with the softer lines of her hair. It looks very sharp and makes the hair look much muddier by comparison, so her eyelashes look like badly smeared mascara and her hair looks like pudding. If you preserve anything about the sharpness of this technique, you may want to consider changing it in concert with other parts of your style to avoid that contrast.
The Face on the change of style is beautiful, you’ve really done well but if you do that you need to add more depth to the irises and hair. It looks out of place.
While a Universal Translator sounds like a spiffing idea, if it’s not going to autocorrect people who say “try and” when they mean “try to” then I want nothing to do with it. It’s hard enough listening to Earth-born people say that wrongly over and over again. Importing people from other solar systems to make the same grammatical error is an annoyance best avoided.
The problem is with your training, not with their grammar.
The smallest words in the language are not really “words”, per se, in the sense of a unique sound combination that represents a specific concept. They are arbitrary connective tissue.
I grew up in the US, then went to Scotland, where I found that many everyday prepositions are scrambled in usage. We might go “TO THE hospital”, whereas they go “IN hospital”. Neither is incorrect, they are mere conventions.
I found these arbitrary differences throughout their idiomatic usage. By the end of a week there, random words would pop out, and I was saying things that made sense in neither country.
“Try and” is not even particularly bad.
Take “Try to find”, for example. “Try” is an auxiliary verb there, “to find” is an adverbial infinitive, specifying details about the act of trying. In that case, trying is all that happens.
Remember Yoda – “There is only do, or not do, there is no try.”
“Try and find”, on the other hand, is a parallel structure with two coequal verbs. not only is the person going to “try”, but they also express an equal intention to “find”. In essence, the verb “try” has been demoted two steps: first, by not being superior to “find”, no longer having “find” as its object; second, it pales due to the assumption of success implicit in a full strength “find”.
On the other hand, don’t get me started on “should of”. That’s just wrong.
That last panel really stands out.
I like it very much! It has an almost eerily realistic quality.
Galactic lawsuit incoming! Get the lawyer squad ready.
Who what in the what now? I’m here.
Good, who are you going to defend? The space-thief in possession of stolen item(s), or the legitimate owners of said items?
If the item was stolen, the people after them wouldn’t be fleeing the space cops and trying to obtain the item by force.
If someone (who shouldn’t have ) sold the item then fleeing the space cops while trying to catch up with the item does make sense.
Plenty of action for lawyers when the space cops catch up to the item.
Plus, if the item were say…a libido and fertility enhancing field of some kind which revived a race that had reached negative growth (Unspeakable foreplay anyone?) then this could be really entertaining should all the involved parties be induced to become…involved parties.
Or, the Space Piggies are chasing them because they are headed to a prohibited planet, aka Dirt
If the item were stolen, they could just have the space police go to dirt and catch the thieves red handed with the stolen item on a somewhat restricted planet.
That’s the point.
Or, the Fel don’t like the Xevonarchy (or what ever the Space Piggies call themselves)
Heck, the Space Piggies didn’t do anything to save the Alari
Plus, the thief is friendly with the Piggies: who do you think the Piggies will believe?
Maybe Fel is short for felons.
Felon Artifact…
no, I don’t think so.
I agree,
reading between the lines,
Cora is a freelancer the Xevoarchy employ,
the Fel had an artifact she stole, and she had a run in with them, and now what we assume is a galactic patrol of the Xevoarchy is chasing down and talking about shooting at the Fel, and this is even before the whole *its changing course to a pre-FTL marked planet* part.
So it stands to reason the Fel aren’t part of the Xevoarchy, and neither were the Alari going by Dabblers statements, the Alari were just above the post FTL line and were imperialistic; to civilizations just below and equal to themselves which stands to reason the Xevoarchy is more a protectorate/Mafia protection scam type of joined forces *a portion of your military power, you obey these basic commerce and contact laws, and we help each other…if not we WON’T help you against your neighbors or even our own members if you are advanced close enough to THEM* sort of situation.
While the Alari felt more on the low end, their own hubris set them apart to refuse to join and pick fights with everyone they met.
The Fel are having that (we predate the Xevoarchy alliance/we are powerful enough to tell most their member races to go screw themselves and keep to ourselves unless provoked).
So under this set up the Xevoarchy would help Cora as her and her crew are members of the Xevoarchy protection alliance, and she personally is a freelancer. Hell for all we know she was hired by a member government to get their hands on Fel magic/tech (artifact can be either);
Cora – really hot, in that last frame.
She looks thirteen or fourteen though.
She looks younger, but also a tad bit more realistic as a face. Not sure if its in line with the rest of the comic.
DaveB used a real photo for that panel (which isn’t a bad thing)
It does sort of look that way, especially neck and ear (IMO). We saw a traced & goldenized version of Max in a vote incentive a little while back, so it’s plausible and I wouldn’t be completely shocked, but I do wonder if you have an authoritative source for saying that.
Even if he did though, he did a good job getting it past the uncanny valley and making it feel consistent with other artwork in the comic.
One has to wonder, though… in a society that has had GENERATIONS of Universal Translator use from a young age due to multi-species cosmopolitan society… what would they even be saying WITH OUT the translator?
I’d wonder if, over time, the cultures would eventually accidentally just get trained in some sort of mish-mash of languages that effectively because “Galactic Standard”?
That’s.. plausible
Space English :D
I actually really adore how Cora looks!! I’m not sure why, but she looks so much younger to me- in that she looks 20 rather than 35. Not that there’s anything wrong with being 35, I’m just saying I’m digging the way it makes her look
The final panel looks really pretty.
I don’t get it, Cora’s rendering here is competent, almost proficient, yet that green guy on the very same page looks like he was outsourced to a first year art institute student, and not a good one. How is that even possible?