Alright, it’s just one because it took forever.
I promise Haunted isn’t going to be a talking-head comic! I’m just trying to get the hang of things.
BUT WAIT!
As a bonus, we’re throwing in a single page of Shu & Gen’s Formal Event with Xiyuan Drinking Game, page six out of MANY.
Haunted 0.1: Silly small comics
This! Is! Fantastic!
So, questions (which you don’t actually have to answer. I’m just bein’ silly):
1) What was the lead-in for Xiyuan feeling the need to discuss “aliquot” vs. “aliquant”
2) What are the deets on this fancy party they’re attending where glove etiquette applies
3) Is that sim!P-Shep???
The “Glove Compartment” is just too funny. Please (pleeeeeeease) tell me we will eventually get to see the last one. Why would he even wear two pairs of gloves simultaneously? Xiyuan I have questions.
I wonder now if ghosts think that “zombie” is an insult (or otherwise derogatory epithet) and vice versa. Though I’d imagine zombies don’t articulate as well as ghosts can. So scratch that “and vice versa,” actually. I should not be allowed to comment while overtired.
I know I’ve said this before but I love these two and I love their brains. And kudos on the tuxedos — not exactly easy to draw!
<3 <3 <3 I'm actually going to answer them!
1) He's probably giving it as an example after she asked why he obsessively studies English usage. Asking Xiyuan why he's nuts does lead to interesting conversations. Like, "why are you wearing two pairs of gloves?"
2) This particular fancy party? They're at premieres, gallery openings, soirées, etc. every week. They blend together after a while. Xiyuan lives in a tailcoat, after all.
3) YES.
4) Unfortunately for Shu—and everyone else—Yuan would never do something that undignified. He’s either going to handle the situation diplomatically or fly into a rage and curbstomp someone, and there is no middle ground.
TRUE THAT. I closed Photoshop and am not going to look at another tux for a while.
I spent the last 10 minutes googling aliquant and aliquot and am going to try and use it in writing (if I can find a place to stash it in) xD
Is XiYuan germaphobic? But the page implies he’s wearing it for.. propriety. For some reason I’m thinking of footmen and waitstaff now.
Is that your natural handwriting? So neat! If not I wanna know how you did that page!
I have to admit XiYuan and Bernard has left me in the dust. 😂
Hah! Awesome. Who gets to drop those words? Grim? I’m not caught up on your story so I can’t guess.
Xiyuan is… particular about certain things. Let me paint a picture. He was San Myshuno Philharmonic concertmaster before leaving to, as Esk put it, “buy art galleries like they’re Snickers bars.” He knows more about English usage than 99.99% of native speakers, and he learned it out of pure spite. He has an entire walk-in closet set aside for tailcoats. Just. Tailcoats. He was traumatized by the 2007 production of RENT because they cast a tenor as Collins. So while ‘germaphobic’ is a good guess—he’s certainly 31 flavors of batshit—he just gets hung up on certain things, and the gloves are one of them. He likes the way they look. White is one of his favorite colors.
I made that page using a handwriting font! You can make your own at calligraphr.com. They give you a template to write letters in and tell you to print it out, but you can make bold and italic versions if you do it digitally instead.
Left you in the dust how? I at least hope the joke came across, haha.
Oooh thanks! Ill check out the site in a bit.
Nobody will be dropping the words until I figure out how to use it right 😅 Even then, I’ll put it in narrative than a character’s mouth so if i make a mistake, its on me than the sim lol.
I’m actually setting the backdrop & ensemble for a San Myshuno Philharmonic orchestra in my story right now. 😶 what a strange coincidence… well not really since XiYuan left already lol.
31 flavors of batshit 😂 hahaha!
Hahaha, I look forward to that! I’m thinking of when I would use ‘aliquot’ in the narrative, since ‘divisor’ is clearer when it comes to numbers and there’s little use for the adjectival form: it would have to be (a) to demonstrate that a character is high-strung or enjoys learning English vocab, see above; (b) to show a character pulling out a five-dollar word to impress someone; or (c) because I constructed a sentence where I actually do need an adjective—to enforce parallelism, for example—and want to turn it into a meta-joke about why the f anyone would ever need such an obscure word. Your prose is more straightforward and accessible than mine, so I’d be interested to see how your readers would respond to the sort of C-option trick that draws attention to the language and away from the plot. Not that I’d dissuade anyone from experimenting. At least a couple people would appreciate it.
Yuan was there from like… 1990 to 1994. So I think your guys missed him by a couple decades.
The visual of Xiyuan taking off his gloves to reveal more gloves has actually cleared my calendar and answered my emails. The visual of him taking a back-up glove from Bernard just handed me a drink.
I want to be invited to this party so badly. Normally, my Bernard fan-girling takes over but I just kicked that b off-stage and all I care about rn is Xiyuan. Honestly, panel #4 looking at Bernard? The audacity. Who gave you permission, sir? And how dare you?
Do it again.
Gah. I love this more than I can possibly say. Damn this artwork is on point and the jokes.
I bow to them.
I mean, are these chemistry jokes an attack on me?
Back to the gloves. How many does he own? Are there gloves for different occasions that look the same to the untrained eye, but to someone who isn’t a heathen are definitely different?
“DO YOU EXPECT HIM TO WALK AROUND WITH HIS HANDS UNCOVERED LIKE SOME KIND OF ANIMAL?!”
I have died.
(I was listening to a podcast with Howard Taylor who writes Schlock Mercenary and he was talking about how the limitations of panels force you to be so much more deliberate in your storytelling. Like a “look” has really got to communicate something cause you can’t talk about it for 15 pages. I’m reminded of that now, because many its just a little blip but I feel like I *know* what this party was like. And no, I don’t know why this is in parentheses)
AHAAHAHA YESS. ENJOY YOUR NEW FREE SCHEDULE.
I said they were going to be an unreasonable level of extra, and I’m going to hold myself to that. We have a standard to meet. TWO-PAIRS-OF-GLOVES EXTRA. AHHHHH. Did your visual of taking gloves from Bernard assume they have no physical boundaries whatsoever, so Yuan just walks up to him and grabs the gloves from his inner pocket without warning? Because if so, CORRECT.
Welcome to the Xiyuan fan club; you can pick up your complimentary pink-and-white pocket square at the gift shop.
There are differences between the gloves, including criteria that Xiyuan made up and no one else knows. He probably would object to the way they’re drawn here.
Funny you should bring up that point about the limitations of panels. I feel like for this one, there could have easily been 6–8 more beat panels while they try to figure out what the hell she just said. Hah! Takes me long enough to draw these as-is, though. I dropped the ball on the other two… it’s a lot.