New Greyfriar’s Isle comic up, plus some changes that I needed to make

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There’s a new Greyfriar’s Isle comic (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) up on Planet Nude. Paid patrons and DeviantArt supporters can also access it through my Patreon (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and my DeviantArt Supporter Gallery (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) respectively.

The metal band Festering Suppuration are having a last-minute argument over the clandestine nude video shoot that they’re doing.

I’m doing 30 Days of Characters (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) again this year! Because I’m very busy, I’m trying to keep each contribution under 30 minutes’ worth of work. It’s a fun, fast-moving collective channel where participants, of any skill level, try to come up with 30 ‘characters’ during April. The definition of ‘characters’ has got broader over time and now includes backgrounds, objects, brands and so on. Anything that can be used to flesh out a comic world.

Earlier: some necessary moves

This is a lightly edited version of a thread I posted on Mastodon back in March.

I’ve been setting up a proper sole-proprietorship for all my work including my comics and the time has come to Euro-ize (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) my commissions even though most of my art commission and comics clients are in the US; I also wonder if I shouldn’t once again look into moving away from English as the main language I do all my writing in.

The latter consideration is painful to me personally as I have a degree in English, have written original work (comics, songs) in English for 35 years and speak English at home with my USian wife. But the international geopolitical climate has pushed me to rethink who I buy from, and who I sell to.

In 2023 and 2024, I spent a lot of my time getting some of my comics out in Canadian French, Danish and Dutch, because these were the languages that were available to me from people in my readership who had offered to translate, or that I could write myself. At that time, this was just for fun.

But at the moment, most translated work is stopped except that my friend in Quebec, Cor van de Sande, is still making French-Canadian versions of every new comic of mine that he can get his hands on and lettering them himself for his French-speaking friends. It would not be a huge task to replace his lettering on recent Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan with my own, but going directly to the current storyline from where his work on translations left off (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) would leave a big gap in the archives that I'd have to fill later.

Here's Cor’s translation of Tess Durban:

https://tessdurban-qu.cfw.me (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

There is a Danish translation of Tess Durban as well:

Both of these are up to date with the English publication, which is paused. But the Danish translation of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, Røverne fra Clwyd-Rhan, is stuck at the conclusion of a very primitive-looking storyline from 1994:

It would be easy to resume, though and I’ve been talking to L.P. Hogan, the translator, about that.

Dutch ‘translations’ (actually the original dialog with minor changes as the first decade of the comic was written in Dutch) are stalled at an even earlier point, near the end of the very first storyline of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, which I finished in 1992. I am very slowly creating new pages for it, based on the original dialog with only minor updates and modernizations, but since there are limits to how appealing I can make art that I drew when I was barely out of my teens, I often find it hard to keep going.

At least this one will be easy to get started again as I have the original version already. But doing the whole series will still be a gargantuan task.

Pivoting away from a US focus

And that brings me to the key question: why offer different language versions of my comics at all if doing that is so much effort and doesn't add any money to the enterprise?

Part of it is an inner need to keep my internal translator/editor/internationalization worker happy and skilled. Even in the face of difficulty, it can be fun to do the work and see the results.

And part of it is that I believe smaller languages deserve webcomics. I’m just trying to make the hegemony of English a little less absolute. But also, right now, people want European products (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)! They are questioning US dominance (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) in tech and culture in particular more and want stuff that is made outside the US. And in some fields, to the extent that they're getting any alternatives, the alternatives are indistinguishable from the USian version of the same thing.

I talked about how I'd only found one newsletter platform hosted in the EU and apart from some terrible translations in its legal section, it looks exactly like a made-in-US product. It’s the platform I wrote this on, Steady (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), headquartered in Germany. It’s not perfect: it still uses Cloudflare as its Content Delivery Network and Paypal for payment processing. But it's a baby step away from depending on US-based companies for services.

Not a boycott

To be clear, I’m not talking about boycotting anything. I’m not advocating for a boycott of Substack, Cloudflare, Paypal or products, services or customers from the United States in general. I’m still working for Evan Nicks at Planet Nude (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), who is in the US and using Substack. I’m not going to sit around berating people for not disconnecting from US tech companies 100%, because as Europeans, we are in a situation of dependency and that means perfection is not within our reach (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) right now. A.R. Moxon at The Reframe posted a thoughtful essay on his first year after Substack (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and I agree with most of what he says about leaving that place there.

Longer-term social trends

The cultural trend away from everything being international with English as the obvious dominant language started before Donald Trump became President of the USA for the second time, but is accelerating now. Ironically, I believe that the job I did for fifteen years, localizing software, manuals and marketing communications for large international firms, helped make this possible: once everything spoke local languages, there was no longer any need to acknowledge that it actually came from elsewhere, and it became easier to geofence and otherwise block off services, starting with entertainment and spreading from there to banking and other things that people use regularly.

In any case I'd like to lean on the distinctly European character of my work a little more.

But to do that, I will need more than just a handful of small languages. Just Danish, Dutch and Canadian French won't be enough. I will need at least one of German, metropolitan French and Spanish. Maybe Polish and Portuguese…

Mind you, I do like the fact that in this present moment, the languages that I got furthest with are Danish and French Canadian. Languages from countries that the US regime is actively threatening. It's a small thing I can do to support these countries.

So, last week, I did an experiment. I can get two pages of the Dutch version of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan lettered and queued up in 1 hour and 10 minutes. So 35 minutes per page. With another 1300 to go, that would be 758 hours to get that comic to parity with the English version (some episodes especially later on would be easier because much of the work is already done, but others would be harder, so it's probably a decent estimate). Almost 19 weeks of full-time work.

So that's not happening any time soon, and doing it at a more leisurely pace would mean that the project would drag on forever. Let's look at smaller projects. Tess Durban in Dutch, maybe?

As for versions in larger languages, it seems to me that the ethical courses of action available are:
1. Relying on fans and friends to translate for me at their own pace and based on their own interest; and
2. Raising funds to pay professional translators professional rates.
I'm not sure how I can get to the point where I can do option 2.

But if you wish to support me making comics in any language (out of the ones that are available to me right now), one thing you can do is join my Patreon:

Let me know in the generic welcome survey that you would like me to work on a specific language (English, Dutch, French Canadian, Danish or other)!

And now, your regular blast from the past

Our blast from the past today is A comely and alluring lass (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). You can read an old version of this comic on the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan website (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), and you can read on from there or binge-read the comic from the beginning (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), which will keep you entertained for many hours. It's kept me entertained for almost 35 years from its very crude early days to the present, somewhat less crude day. I'm also working on the Dutch version (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) again, which is still stuck in crude early comics-land, but which will be emerging from that shortly.