Two separate panels in today's daily comic. First, Cathy and Maurice sit at their kitchen table with a notebook.

Maurice tells Cathy, "Ton cahier est presque complet! C'est un bon guide pour étudier. Your notebook will be a good study guide."

Cathy begins to write, "You...r..."

"Non, vraiment," Maurice says. "I want to borrow it to study with."

"Il est utile?" she asks. It's useful?

(Author's note: Whether within the dialogue or in my footnotes, translations are not guaranteed to be direct or literal, and several characters are language learners and make common errors. I'm also a language learner and make errors on top of that.)

In the second panel, Jon adjusts himself in his wheelchair and looks at Ella while Ella stirs something in a pot. One of his endearing personality traits is that he's the kind of person who can't sit still to save his life, even now that he's a paraplegic.

"I need to get back to the gym. Being sedentary is bad for me," he says.

Ella replies, "Unless Giant synchronizes our shifts better, I don't know how that's gonna happen. Unless you want to stay there for 8 hours! Or if Cathy can get her license, maybe."

"Did we ever ask her if she has a license?" Jon says.

"I've never thought of it until just now! Maybe she does!" Ella muses.

Page 100, in which Maurice travels to Lyon.




Cleaning up the messy art today. There's no real stopping point; I can only tell myself that it matches the other art well enough and I should move on.

Holidays are material for mutual discovery in Alien Romance, as characters from different cultures and backgrounds become acquainted with each other's traditions. I've been skipping ahead a little on Draft 3 to the scenes that take place in Lyon, France, because they take place in and around Christmas, and I don't want to be starting that work in February when I'm thoroughly not in the mood. In fact, Maurice and Cathy first meet just before Christmas, go on one café date, and then their second date is a New Year's Eve pub crawl. Well, it was going to be. Somebody sabotaged it, so they end up sitting on a park bench with no shoes.

Oh no, I was going to put a cut here, but I forgot how. Oh well. If you want to skip it, just skim.

French Christmases are less flashy, more observant, and she dresses up for Mass (which I drew in LA Fourvière, so sue me, it's pretty and easy to get reference photos of the interior) and then attends a feast with extended family. Lumières, the big Festival of Lights event that takes over Lyon, hasn't been established yet, and anyway it ends before Maurice arrives. Before it became a grand municipal spectacle, it was just candles in the windows, so I drew some of that. And I drew Maurice walking through the famous market, eating a carrot for dinner in a nod to my own lean times.

The following Christmas, Cathy gets to experience it American style! A retail paradise! And I actually explored this with an important plotline that ended up getting bumped to Halloween. Cathy has no interest in mall Santa. She doesn't get confounded by mountains of gifts because they're all on tight budgets so they only give each other small token gifts. She does buy Maurice a shopping bag full of gifts, but soon learns that was a mistake.

Maurice comes from a small Midwestern farming community where most everyone is Christian and the holiday is a little more like a picture print by Currier and Ives. (Just a little!) Maurice and his parents own the local grocery general, so they sell the goods that make Christmas happen for everyone else in the county. But they don't do much to celebrate, themselves. Old Isaac may or may not have a Russian Orthodox tradition in his family background; he's never practiced it himself. It could also be a Muslim background, as the name 'Arzamastsev' is fairly common in southern Siberia and around Kazakhstan. Simone is Vietnamese and was only peripherally familiar with Catholic trappings when she arrived, so she minds her own business, and her business is retail.

Maurice has personal hangups about gift-giving in general. He feels like there must be a point or a philosophy behind it that he's missing, because his parents never taught him. And, sure, he had all of his good red-blooded American friends and neighbors to learn from, but he feels culturally alienated from them in a way that they wouldn't understand and would get personally offended over if he tried to explain it.

Ren is one of those friends from back home. He and Maurice are comfortable with each other's quirks, and Ren doesn't try to contextualize or challenge Maurice's discomfort with gifts. They clash over other things, though. They're both maturing rapidly, and growing in different directions, and the power balance between them is getting upended. I never dive into Ren's personal experience with Christmas. His experience with religion is complicated. Right now he's in a period of spiritual transition, but the foundation he has to build his spiritual life on is unstable.

More later, maybe.

Just a quick one today. It's been a day on the Interruption train to Distractionville, so all I did was answer a prompt in my writers' group. The prompt was "The music room." So I only drew Maurice with an acoustic guitar and the first verse and chorus to "What Child Is This?"

Some days, you can only collapse where you stand and listen to some soothing music.

Ren shouts, "Showoff!" to Maurice, who is riding a horse bareback. I felt like drawing horses today. I've drawn better horses than these, but they're good enough to get the point across.

Ren and Maurice grew up in a tiny farming community. That's their childhood friend, Lil Debbie, in the foreground, getting ready to give Cathy riding lessons. "We won't be doing that," she says as both she and Cathy give the side-eye to Maurice.

Commentary, woo!

Jon is on the floor with a band around one of his legs, exercising. I apologize for my hack job of the human figure here. My friend helped me look for reference photos of people doing resistance band exercises on the floor, but none of them were of paraplegics, and the photos of paraplegics all involved the wheelchair or at least an assistant. Jon is alone down there. Cathy is on the couch, reading a magazine. Maybe a copy of France-Amérique, to ease the headache of having to learn English by immersion all the time.

Ella and Maurice are coming out of Ella's bedroom. "Are you talking about me in there?" Jon asks, looking up from the floor.

"Of course! Whatever else in the world is there to talk about?" replies Ella, as Jon hmphs at her. Then she notices what he's doing. "HEY! Are those my pantyhose?"

"They have the right amount of give," Jon says.

And Maurice, leaning against the wall in the hall, says as an aside, "And take, apparently."

Maurice used to work for Jon as Jon's home health aide. He was the target of Jon's alpha tendencies day after day for a year. Now he's free and not obligated to bite his tongue every time he has something snarky to say to Jon, but they're actually close friends now and have worked out the power imbalance between them... sort of. They still have some work to do. It's a whole process.

***

I'm going back to doing long commentaries, plus narration. Is this annoying to people who have been with me awhile? I know I can just tell new readers to go read all my archives, but I tend to assume they won't bother to.

I can start putting it under a cut if people prefer. Let me know. I'm feeling my way through this whole presentation process.