Alien Romance, the daily comic strip

[gs_silva]

Commentary, woo!

Jon is on the floor with a band around one of his legs, exercising. I apologize for my hack job of the human figure here. My friend helped me look for reference photos of people doing resistance band exercises on the floor, but none of them were of paraplegics, and the photos of paraplegics all involved the wheelchair or at least an assistant. Jon is alone down there. Cathy is on the couch, reading a magazine. Maybe a copy of France-Amérique, to ease the headache of having to learn English by immersion all the time.

Ella and Maurice are coming out of Ella's bedroom. "Are you talking about me in there?" Jon asks, looking up from the floor.

"Of course! Whatever else in the world is there to talk about?" replies Ella, as Jon hmphs at her. Then she notices what he's doing. "HEY! Are those my pantyhose?"

"They have the right amount of give," Jon says.

And Maurice, leaning against the wall in the hall, says as an aside, "And take, apparently."

Maurice used to work for Jon as Jon's home health aide. He was the target of Jon's alpha tendencies day after day for a year. Now he's free and not obligated to bite his tongue every time he has something snarky to say to Jon, but they're actually close friends now and have worked out the power imbalance between them... sort of. They still have some work to do. It's a whole process.

***

I'm going back to doing long commentaries, plus narration. Is this annoying to people who have been with me awhile? I know I can just tell new readers to go read all my archives, but I tend to assume they won't bother to.

I can start putting it under a cut if people prefer. Let me know. I'm feeling my way through this whole presentation process.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>"They have the right amount of give," Jon says.<<

LOL yes, that was a popular choice before commercial bands became widely available. Some folks bought wide-band elastic from the fabric store and sewed the ends together.

>>I'm going back to doing long commentaries, plus narration. Is this annoying to people who have been with me awhile?<<

It's fun for me.

>>I can start putting it under a cut if people prefer. Let me know. I'm feeling my way through this whole presentation process.<<

A cut after the picture and first paragraph might be prudent on a long post. There are a few of mine that I don't cut, but most I do. While the Latest Things has an autocut function, the Reading Page does not and some people get cranky about long posts -- although they're more likely to complain about lots of photos than lots of texts. Other folks rarely bother clicking through to see below a cut. Explore and see what works best for your content.

Re: Thoughts

[gs_silva]

Great! Thanks for your input! I now have two potential readers who use or have used screen readers, and so I figure that this is the perfect time to make my comic screen reader friendly, especially because the time is coming when I'll rely on screen readers myself! I'm racing against my own deteriorating eyesight to make this comic, and who knows which one will win. So I'm doing this for me, too.

It's fun thinking of ways Jon would utilize his world to his own benefit. He won't use everything that might be available in 1990. He's still mostly figuring it out for himself, but he's actually supposed to have at least some contact with a local group of athletes with disabilities. It's on my growing to-do list of story arcs. I need to deal with Ren first.

This is all so slow! Especially compared to your poetry. You can get a lot down in a single, very long poem.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>I now have two potential readers who use or have used screen readers <<

Some of mine do too.

>> I'm racing against my own deteriorating eyesight to make this comic, <<

Yikes.

Ever try making art with raised lines? It's worth a thought. I've seen several artists who drew their art with glue or another raised material, then filled in the colors from memory. Some of the results are quite striking, like stained glass windows.

>>It's fun thinking of ways Jon would utilize his world to his own benefit. He won't use everything that might be available in 1990. <<

Not everyone will hear of everything, and of what they try, not everything will feel worthwhile.

>>This is all so slow! Especially compared to your poetry. You can get a lot down in a single, very long poem.<<

I can often do a sub-epic in a few minutes. The longer the poem, the more research it typically takes, and that's what runs up my time. Some I've spent a week or more on. Also, the speed comes after several decades of practice. I know one person who can write lyrics faster than me and set it to music at the same time. And I've seen some artists who could work really fast. It depends on skills, style, practice, a lot of things.

[dandylover1]

I don't find it annoying at all! But I am curious. Are these characters that you created? If so, are they only incomics or do you write about them in stories as well?

[gs_silva]

A loaded question! Oh, goodness. I'll try to give you the abridged response.

I invented Cathy and Maurice in 1987, while I was sitting, bored, in French class. I was getting perfect grades, so I amused myself by imagining a romance between a young French woman (who was lifted out of one of our recurring practice exercises) and the American tourist who has come to research his novel.

Within a few months, I was giving them backstories and supporting casts. Cathy's family isn't wealthy, but her parents work in the fine arts industry and she wants to be an artist. But everything in her life trajectory goes wrong, and she can't even find a job in retail.

Maurice is the son of two immigrants, one Russian and the other Vietnamese. They own a tiny grocery store in rural midwestern USA, and he and his best friend Ren, who look nothing alike but call themselves brothers, now share a flat in a college town. Ren is on a pre-med track, but Maurice, who is 2 years older, fell victim to the rural kid college curse and flunked out in his first year.

Maurice went to Lyon at one point, had a whirlwind romance with Cathy, and then they parted forever. Until Cathy decided her life in France was going nowhere and showed up on his doorstep. Now they're married.

Ella and Jon Sievers are their close friends. We lost Christine - she moved to Boston to pursue a medical degree. But we gained Heather, Jon's ex-girlfriend, now girlfriend again. There's a graphic novel, which concludes the morning after the wedding. (French wedding receptions go till morning.) But this is my daily comic, a chaotic hodge-podge of stray storylines and random ideas that more or less follows a linear timeline, and/or whatever I'm in the mood to draw each day. That's why I'm trying to include commentary. Most of my readers here will need it!

[gs_silva]

And I forgot to answer the last part of your question. I'm not confident in my prose-writing skills, so I've written a few scenes in response to prompts, but I'm not serious about it at all, and I'm more comfortable drawing.