Coiled Comics

Recommended Graphic Novels: reMind

By Peter

There’s a beautifully drawn Webcomic called reMind by Jason Brubaker that has a couple of things in common with Coiled. A new page is published once a week, and Jason is working on collecting the first group of pages into a book.

The plot: A young woman lives by the sea in a place famous for sightings of a giant man-like lizard. Her cat disappears, and then reappears later, now able to talk. The cat tells the story of an undersea society of lizards, and that he was one of them, until he was banished and turned up in the form of a cat. It’s imaginative and engaging.

Bakka, Part 2

By Peter

A quick story about the real student named Bakka. One time I taught a class at Yesler where we created an electronic music-making machine using Augmented Reality technology. I got a famous museum in Seattle called the Experience Music Project to allow us to show it off. They gave us a small room, and I dragged museum-goers into the room to try it out, while three of my students (including Bakka) talked to them about how they did the project. You can read more about it here. (Scroll down to: “Are you experienced? Yesler is.”)

Afterwards, the kids were hungry and asked if I could take them to the McDonald’s next door. We walked over there, and as I watched them order their food, it started to become clear to me how much food teenage boys can eat. While the food workers were assembling this rather large order, I suddenly realized that Bakka was chatting with the cashier, explaining to him in detail about how I had adopted all three of them from Africa and raised them in America. The cashier looked at me with considerable respect. I shrugged my shoulders and paid, my words completely failing me.

Accents

By Peter

Part of the story of Coiled involves people speaking English with an Ethiopian accent. I thought pretty hard about how to get this across in a graphic novel. I could write things out spelled incorrectly (instead of “big assignment”, I could write “beeg assaiynment”, or something like that), but frankly, that makes the people with accents look stupid. That’s how Stephen Pastis gets across the stupidity of his crocodile characters in Pearls Before Swine.

So, instead, I decided to ask Amanda to write in a font that is reminiscent of the Amharic alphabet, which is the main written language of Ethiopia. You know how Chinese restaurants sometimes have their names spelled out in a font that seems vaguely Chinese? I wanted to do something like that for Amharic. (This technique has been used offensively in the past, unfortunately. The yellow stars that Jews had to wear under Nazi rule had “Jude” written in a font that looked vaguely Hebrew. I’m hoping no one will take offense.)

The Amharic alphabet is pretty interesting. There is a style of letter for each consonant, and then each consonant has variations for each of the seven vowels that can follow it. That’s 33 consonants times 7 vowels, or 231 letters that Ethiopian students have to learn. It’s almost as bad as having to learn how to spell in English!