Dekpa Goes to Sea

Finally, I finished it; Chapter Four of Dekpa and Deborah is online. A special nine page chapter, you'll notice there's a lot of Dutch in this chapter. I haven't learned Dutch, two Dutch friends of mine, who wish to remain anonymous, translated the dialogue for me. Thanks, you two.

I had no idea I was going to have to devote my whole spring break to this. I worked almost non-stop yesterday from the time I woke up at 9am 'til I finally went to sleep at 4:30am and I still wasn't done. And all I was doing was colouring--I'd finished the inks on Thursday and the pencils the day before. Instinctively I think I still expect to be able to knock out four pages in a day if I need to; pencil, ink, and colour. I have to remind myself that back when I did that I was using one pen, sketchbook paper, and I was scanning at half the dpi. Now I use four pens and a big bristol board and I scan at a higher resolution. I have to admit to myself that, even if I wasn't currently going to school and working as a tutor I still couldn't work at the pace that I used to. After this comic--which could be years from now--I may try doing something rougher and simpler.

In addition to all the Daniel Dafoe I listened to yesterday, I also listened to three Doctor Who audio plays; Year of the Pig from 2006 and, from 2007, Circular Time and Nocturne. Of the three, Circular Time was by far the best. It's actually four short stories, one for each season; "Spring", "Summer", "Autumn", and "Winter". All of the stories star Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor and Sarah Sutton as his companion, Nyssa. Nyssa continues to get much more interesting material than she ever got on television--the "Winter" segment even delves a bit into the fertile ground of her father issues, though there's not far the audio plays can go with that due to the understandable reluctance to recast for the late Anthony Ainley. But she has a pretty adorable first romance experience in the "Autumn" segment while she and the Doctor are staying in England, in an unnamed village where the Doctor has apparently returned for years to play in a series of annual cricket matches.

The "Summer" segment has the two being arrested in the late 17th century and interrogated by none other than Isaac Newton, played by David Warner, who deduces a pretty far fetched amount about them and the future from the anachronistic coins in the Doctor's pocket. It's pretty entertaining though not completely plausible. In light of what I wrote about yesterday, I was amused to hear Newton demand to know if they were Catholics.

Even the first segment, "Spring", is good. Very fannish, it's one of the audio plays that mines what sound like hardcore fan speculations for a good story. In this case, the Doctor and Nyssa find a renegade Time Lord (Hugh Fraser) ruling over a species of sentient birds. The translator circuit in the renegade Time Lord's TARDIS is revealed as necessary for his schemes because it's impossible for him to learn to speak the language which requires one to have the break, throat, and even feathers for display, of a bird. I have to wonder how the TARDIS manages that.