I want that mirror

He is wearing a banyan and banyan cap, 18th century mens sleepwear. A banyan is a loose robe of simple design, like a bathrobe made of very expensive material. Perhaps more like a smoking jacket, if you've seen those. The design of the cap is based on Persian clothing, you can tell by the tassels.

Now, men wouldn't wear these to bed, but something comfortable to lounge around the house in. Gentry took their sweet time getting dressed in the morning and might recieve callers in their banyan if they were feeling casual.

Wikipedia has more to say about them

Can you tell what that is on the far right? I will be very surprised if you guess.

Truth comes out in the dark

I feel like the top panel should be dominating the page more. Enlarged, with the other panels made smaller and embedded.

 In other unrelated trivia, I realized I've often been drawing their unbuttoned buttons on the wrong side. Oops.

I'm really sick (how could I catch flu this late in the season??) It's supposed to be spring. I know we had a snowstorm this week, but-

I'm going to give sleep another try.

Facetious means full of shite

You might think it odd that they weren't praying for the soul of their deceased father/grandfather. But really, 18th century English gentry were completely complacent about religion. None of this Hell and Purgatory stuff. The dead were assumed to be in God's benevolent hands. It was the living who were supposed to be in need of moral guidance. The facetious remark about God being stronger than fairies is completely out of character. Which makes you wonder...

..what else is Allan not being straightforward about?

 

Apologies

A family emergency took me to Cincinnati for a few days. Give me another day to put myself together and I will have a double update Tuesday night.

That's book abuse.

That ...could have gone better.

Butterfly, you are drunk.

Though I am currently posting Chapter 2, I have finished coloring Chapter 3 and am penning Chapter 4. This helps me pace things more consistantly and look at the overarcing story instead of the next page. Because sometimes the story you set out to write isn't the one you end up writing. Well, any story should grow in the telling. It's just that Allan is a self-absorbed attention whore and for a while believed the story was all about him.. ahem. But we're past that now!

I guess the point I was ambling toward is that Chapter 4 contains a. mild nudity and b. more cuteness than a barrel of kittens. Just wanted to say this story is not aimed at children, even if it is a fairy tale. It's for adults who like fairy tales, or older children with laid-back parents.

How bout that nose? He cut it shaving.

Waiit for it..... Culture shock in 3...2....

Happy Pi Day and Birthday Bonus!

3.14 is Pi Day. And 3/15 is my sister's birthday. So, I have a bonus for you. In addition to today's update, I added 2 pages at the end of Chapter 1. I though it might be good to put a couple extra pages at the end of each chapter to give a sneak peek or a different point of view of what's going on.

Winding up the clock

Tristram Shandy is an actual book, a bestseller of its time. You can check it out from your local library or read it online at Project Gutenberg.

It opens with the narrator talking about the circumstances of his conception. Parents are literally in the act, when mama says:

Pray my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?--Good G..! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,--Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?


"Winding up the clock" became a popular 18th century euphemism for sex. Bonus trivia: "Playing backgammon" referred to gay sex.

Little green men

If he wasn't green, it didn't happen. Right? Right.

Horrible Histories did a comic skit on the Green Children of Woolpit. Watch it here on youtube; the total clip is 14 minutes, the relevant part starts at 3:12.

OMG I can't believe you said that

Sober, Allan? You're one to talk!

Standards are something that apply to other people, aren't they?

Let's stop here before we get lost, shall we?

I draw many of the forest scenes from Glen Helen, a nature preserve by the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio. So if this looks more American midwest than England, I apologise. I have to work with what I have instead of pining for what I don't. I'm working from photographs at the moment since it's winter, and they are enjoying May, but at some point I'll get the seasons to sync up.

The thing about Glen Helen is that its always had an enchanted feel. I sometimes think that if there were fairies in the Victorian sense, they might choose to live there. There were some very venerable oaks, almost to a Princess Mononoke size, but most of them blew down in a freak hurricane a few years ago. Yes, hurricane. You have to understand how far landlocked Ohio is from the ocean to appreciate the strangeness of that.

The Victorian concept of fairy- a supernatural winged being of miniscule size that embodies the innocence of childhood- does not yet exist. 18th century fae were more like the Irish Sidhe- powerful yet unpredictable creatures.... it might be safer to play Russian roulette than to mess with them.

It's not the Bridge to Terebithia or anything

It is just a stream, on one level, and yet..... Joseph Campbell would have a lot to say about the symbolism of it all.

 I'm rewatching Revolutionary Girl Utena, which is just chock full of every kind of symbolism and allegory imaginable. Geeknights has started an episode-by-episode review on Youtube, where they point out some things I missed before. 

And of course Utena paraphrases a passage from Demian, by Hermann Hesse, which was a good read and also chock full of symbolism. In reading about Demian, I ran across a new word (an extreme rarity!) Bildungsroman.

Trying to remember the word for the moment illustrated here, but it escapes me. Maybe next time!