Hey, my Squids!
Dropping by to give you all a little heads up and insight into what I’m currently doing. As you know, working on a webcomic is a long-term process and there’s a lot of things that can change as you continue developing the story, characters, and world. But, at some point, you have to put out the “definitive” version of your chapters/books/etc. as the final “This is what this part of the story looks and sounds like.” Well, I’ll be doing that with Chapter 1 and 2 soon and wanted to tell you a bit about it and the reasons behind it.
As you may or may not know, Xolani and Micah were originally the main characters, Leira was going to be a villain, and Atticus, who hasn’t shown up in the webcomic yet but will show up in the coming chapters, was going to round out the ensemble. The tale once lived in a more “medieval” fantasy landscape but as I kept developing the series, I turned it into an Urban Fantasy with Leira being the initial lead and the others joining the ensemble sometime later.
With this, I started to change how my characters talked (and sounded). Notably, Micah went from a rather “standard” American accent to having a heavy, Southern American accent. I had to rewrite a lot of their dialogue so that things like “darlin'” came through and lent credibility to that Southern accent. Xolani, for her part, retained her elegant, rich voice and prose.
But the biggest change was Leira. Originally, I wanted Leira to have a Scottish accent but I changed it to a “standard” American accent sometime later. It wasn’t until I was deep into writing further chapters of the comic that I started to steer Leira into an Appalachian dialect. While watching some Youtube videos one night, I thought how neat it would be if Leira’s native language wasn’t English (in Taliah it’s called Procolish), but Abaroguian, named after the city and region she’s from. Abarogue already had Appalachian styled roots and indicators but I thought it would be even more of a world building tool if they also spoke a different language. That language would a mix of Spanish, Portuguese, and Appalachian dialects. It wasn’t a direct translation and it didn’t share the same words as those but it would be a Taliahan equivalent. I got to work building the language and its expansive dictionary.
But there had been a few other changes between when I originally wrote my scripts and drew the scenes and where I was headed with some of the relationships and languages that would build the world. Saul was the biggest change. When I first started putting this story together, Saul was nothing more than Leira’s coworker, someone who knew information and disappeared off panel when all was said and done. But the more I crafted Leira’s life outside of her job, the more I thought it would be very sweet to have Saul be part of that. So I did. He became an important part of her life, more than just a plot device. I came up with routines they had, meals they ate together, and so many other things. That meant that I had to change the way Leira talked about him in the early part of the comic. I had to adjust her language and the emotional impact of losing him.
That leads to the “Definitive” versions of Chapter 1 and 2. While I’m not changing any of the artwork (except the page background in Chapter 1 going from beige to white for printing), I will be tweaking the dialogue in these chapters to mirror the “final” way that Leira, Xolani, and Micah speak, discuss things, and think. I want it to be more indicative of how I’ve crafted them up to this point, in preparation for the next couple of chapters. And I think I owe it to the readers to have characters that feel more consistent in their words and language. Also adding Leira’s native tongue earlier on, so it doesn’t seem like out of left field in other parts of the story. Overall, it doesn’t change the story itself, just how the characters say certain things. I’ll be uploading the definitive versions in their specific collections when all is said and done. Feel free to read them again if you’d like or just know that Micah sounds like they’re from the deep South, Leira has a noticeable accent that’s a cross between Catalan Spanish and deep Appalachia, and Xolani sounds like Viola Davis.
Take care.