2194 Actually You Can.

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I don’t get fancy with my pages very often because life doesn’t allow me to. A comic with a schedule you stick to, that is this frequent, can’t be like that. Not for someone with my limited talents. I lament not being able to go full force every time, but the reality is that the continuing story is more important than the art. That said, I like to do something different when I can. If you broke this down you’d probably see a lot of flaws, but the feeling of what I wanted comes through enough to get by. When you’re someone like me getting by & good enough is the realm you live in. My best tends to be fifth place, but I get the most out of it I can & hope you enjoy it.

Also, the “a historic” that Nina says is on purpose & conveys her Kansan dialect. In actual sounds it would be “Uh historic”. Which is how I would tend to say it, in spite of knowing it’s technically incorrect. My editor Shane pointed it out so this is not on him.

42 Comments

I’m Canadian and I’m confused. Why would anyone not say “A historic”, do most Americans outside of Kansas have an accent where historic doesn’t start with a consonant sound? Wait, “uh historic”, now I am even more confused, I thought you were saying it shouldn’t be “an historic”. So confused by the clarification of how perfectly normal dialogue is meant to indicate dialect.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/everything-youve-ever-wanted-to-know-about-historic-and-historicalv

I can never remember which is right. when I was little it was very common to say an historic.

I was always taught “an” was only supposed to go in front of a vowel…
Saying “an historic” just sounds wrong to me

I was told the same rule about ‘an’ going with a following vowel. Primary school in Ontario, Canada.
But I was also told there were people who didn’t pronounce the initial ‘h’ in ‘historic’. Hence the variant ‘an historic’, pronounced like ‘anistoric’. And I’ve met a few of these in my globe-trotting days.
Mostly I heard ‘a historic’.

Now I live in Montreal, where the francophones tend not to speak ‘h’s at all, ever, which gets quite confusing when they speak English.

Can confirm about the lack of spoken “h”. I live in Montreal as well (and I also used to live in Ontario). Francophones also have difficulty with “th”. I was amused when a friend told me about how a francophone receptionist once tried to pronounce her name “Heather”.

It came out sounding more like “Edday”. :D

That said, many people here are perfectly bilingual, in that they can speak both French and English without an obvious accent in either language and they can switch on the fly. As an anglophone who still struggles with Quebec French, I’m super envious of those people!

I’m envious too. I can read French. I can read Jules Verne in his original language. But to understand spoken French? Forget it!

I can sometimes understand the French spoken by the news announcers on SRC. But the French spoken by the interviewers or interviewees? Maybe I can guess what they are talking about, but not what they’re saying about it.

Right?! It’s all the contractions and the elisions in the spoken language. Quebec French is just full of them, and it’s kind of maddening when all you’ve had is the standard French taught back in Ontario schools.

When I realized that “Je suis ici” contracted down to “Ch’t’icitte” in Quebecois, I knew I was in for a hard time. I have no idea why they don’t teach this alongside standard French in Canadian schools, or at least introduce students to it, so it’s not such a shock when you find yourself in Quebec and have no clue WTF anyone’s saying.

Its because a some people pronounce historic as “istoric” for some reason.

Then there’s places like Yorkshire (Where I’m from), where the words are more like 128-bit encryption.

RASTA!

The actual — traditional — rule is to put “an” before a vowel SOUND. Therefore, silent or unvoiced consonants (like the H) didn’t count. So placing “an” before “historic” is correct. That is, that’s how we were taught a century ago when I was just learning the rules of my native language (as if English had any real rules in the first place…)

It’s correct omly where the h is silent. Not in otger dialects or accents where it in not.

I think the tendency to sometimes pronounce “a” as “uh” is very common, at least in Kansas, Oklahoma and North Texas. We make Jethro Bodine sound cultured in comparison.

I didn’t see it at first glance either. I’m from Missouri, though, so the dialect isn’t all that different.

Nina looks super cute in that last panel with the pursed lips xD

Also I dig her nearly-crossed eyes when focusing at short range, like that panel, and the last of the previous strip.

That’s a little something which really adds expressiveness to a character.

So proof Nina may still have a thing for Reggie? Is my ship still afloat?

She referred to him as the “weird loner.” I think your ship has run aground for good.

I don’t think Nina is the type to see a weird loner and dismiss them as a person.

I see what you did there

You say it like the flaws make it not great. Flaws are always apparent, and at this point, they’re part of a distinct style we know and love. Like how Ben Templesmith can’t seem to draw a straight line more than a few centimeters long to save his life

And at the other end of the scale we have Rob Liefeld – never be a Liefeld

I dunno, having the second best selling comic book of all time, 3 or 4 original characters in multimillion dollar movies, among other things seems like an achievement to me…

Yeah, nobody would mind Liefeld as much if he wasn’t such a prick

He seems okay on Twitter. A friend of mine talked to him at a convention once and said he was really cool & wanted to talk about everything.

He must have mellowed out or gotten help since the early days he was considered a bit of a creep. [dang I feel old now]

Still can’t draw a foot if his life depended on it or do human anatomy. Mind all that goes to the wayside when you have marketing chops. You could consider him the Edison of the comics world.

As one of my professors put it “You don’t have to be good to be successful.”

I’d take his stylized art over traced 3d models & long scenes of people eating any day of the week. He made superhero comics, not soulless garbage.

Can’t write this stuff… heh.

Nina be like ‘IT WORKS SO WELL THEMATICALLY I CAN’T EVEN BE MAD AT REGGIE FOR IT DAMN IT’

Maybe Thomas can’t write this stuff, as Nina says, but you can …
Or maybe you can because you’re producing a different medium, and ‘writing’ isn’t the right word. You drew it.