At last a page from Dinlos and Skilldos appears on the blog! This is a page I'm (almost) happy with, it's page one of a three page strip that appears throughout the book, I guess there will be 6 or 7 Bedtime Stories in all. It's not typical of the book as a whole and I apologise if it verges on the unintelligible. Hopefully you find the language fun even if you don't fully grasp the meaning. As someone whose idea of 'reading' comics as a dyslexic child was just following the pictures I wanted to have at least one strip in Dinlos where the words decorated the illustrations rather than the other way round.
Kackernory speaks in a kind of pidgin-Romany, that may not even be understandable to some Gypsies. There isn't any standard written Romany, it's a spoken language that varies from one area to another and from one country to the next. All the same I'd hope that Gypsies from a number of countries would recognise enough of the words to have as clear a grasp of what's going on as an English reader.
Like I say, the rest of the book is set out to be very immediate and easy to read so this is the exception.
I've been using this page to experiment with different techniques and trying to avoid ending up with a total dog's dinner. I doubt there will many pages with quite this amount of texture and competing ideas on, but I've learnt a lot doing it.
2 comments:
Love this page in its entirety but especially that bottom panel. Very nice.
Cheers, Ian.
Interesting choice. The last panel originally had a bunch of Tombads* praying at the foot of the mountain. I preferred seeing my daughter's wild brushwork and got rid of them.
Despie talking about avoiding certain filmic traps, I have to say this page was intended as a bit of a cross between a frontispiece and a film title sequence.
* Tombads are priests. I think the Romany word is Tompad, meaning a parson or vicar, but it appears in the 17th century cant dictionaries as 'Tongue pad', meaning a 'bad-mouther'. I like that idea. I was going to call them the Tongue-bads. In the end, I'm sticking with what sounds best to my ear though.
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