Bonus : About Laurence…
Well, I thought I’d be taking a break, but I’m still working hard on a ton of Frivolesque-related stuff. :(
Here’s a little bonus content in the meantime! (Which actually took longer to make than I thought it would. There goes my R&R.)
Thank you guys for sticking with us!
If it helps, this is what George RR Martin refers to as being a gardener-style writer: planting the seed and letting the story grow and evolve on its own terms. I do the same with my writing as well.
Martin even has be beaten when it comes to the sheer amount of characters.
Yours do have a longer life expectancy though. If Martin wrote this Clementine would die and you’d feed on our rage and sadness.
If Martin wrote this half the cast would already be dead :).
The hat your comic avatar wears makes you look a lot like a young George RR Martin actually.
Pray she never develops fourth wall awareness
Don’t worry, she already shredded that wall beyond recognition, so she won’t be aware of it any longer.
That would explain the feeling I have that Laurence is watching me watch you watch her.
“This lead to a dilemma” led
“ended up feeling felt like” is mix of two ways to phrase it.
“much more nonsensical thaN”
Fixed everything, thanks guys.
I should proofread myself more.
You’re welcome! :)
Heh, I totally loved where this went with Laurence. It really helped to install some sort of, what can I say, magic into the comic. Dez, you’re a great storyteller and you’ll never cease to amaze us, whether this was intended or not.
Yes, I totally agree on the magic thing. I like peaceful mysteries like the beginning of the anime Air, so I have a soft spot for the whole mystery surrounding Laurence as well.
You call it “little” bonus content, Dez? I thought it would be just a pin-up! =)
Anyways, if your characters are rebelling against their creator and making their own decisions, it means you’re doing everything just right)
Btw, “a girl that looked eerily similar to Laurence” – didn’t you mean “similar to Flore?”
Also, what’s with the “Gail”? ;)
The four characters were initially called Gaia, Saki, Maki and Yuki. Then I tried to “deweabooize” them later and they became Gail, Rain, Chloe and Marie-Neige. But since Saki was Japanese anyway, I decided to keep her as “Saki” for Frivolesque and kept “Rain” as her code name. “Yuki” was also kept as a nickname of Marie. (Ben is the only one calling her that so far) I reverted Gail to Gaia at the very last minute because it was just nostalgic, and not all that bad. (just before drawing her first strip) That’s why some early material still had her called “Gail”, like that early mugshot pic.
But Gaia isn’t all that Japanese in the first place, is it? It’s Greek.
Gaia wasn’t Japanese but I still thought naming someone after a cliche goddess was too dorky.
Also, the site “Gaia Online” was huge with weaboos at the time, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
Well, I’m glad it ended ended up as Gaia in the end. She deserves a goddess’ name :P
For what it’s worth, there’s about 250 girls/women in my country named Gaia; so while not common it’s definitely not unheard of. In fact it’s roughly equal to the number of female Laurences (but a bit less than male Laurences).
For comparison, we’ve got twice as many Lilianes, thrice as many Clementines, six times as many Chloes, 30 times as many Zoes and 50 times as many Maries (but no Neige, and as second name it’s even more popular)
And because it’s topical, 1/5th as many girls named Corona, which aren’t all to happy about their name at the moment.
OMG I forgot Flore. How could I.. I’m sorry Flore. (And I had looked up Nergal, even. Big fat zero, btw.) Flore’s name is twice as common as Gaia’s when spelled as-is, but when spelled Floor it’s as common as Zoe.
Oh, and no Sakis (I hadlooked her up, but forgot since it’s 0. It’s as popular a name as Nergal :P )
Of course the statistics for Canada (or specifically Quebec) would be more relevant, but I’ve never been able to find first name statistics for another country that are as complete as for my own (despite occasionally looking).
Are any of the characters in this story PC gamers or do the all game on consoles? Somehow I can imagine Marie-Neige building a PC from scratch.
I believe M-N plays on PC, MMO or something.
http://frivolesque.com/archives/comic/fujoshi
Marie does play mostly PC, but she sticks to korean MMORPGs, fan-made visual novels, indie titles on Steam and a bit of emulation. Her machine is as stock as it gets.
So no characters with cool powerful gaming PC’s. awww : ( lol
The only thing about that I can imagine is that she’d do it the way Largo (MegaTokyo) does :P
So, the sixth main character is either the frog, the bear, or the Old God in the box, right?
Err, the Toad. My bad. Please don’t kill me. D:
It’s actually the walrus.
Drat! I was so close, too!
I’ve learned to never question serendipity, and that trying clarify a mystery/paradox only creates more mysteries and paradoxes. So Clementine HAD to become the sixth. And perhaps Laurence should be the classic, “This will never be explained…”.
OR you could just have fun getting commenters to hunt red herrings with Chekhov’s gun. ;-)
Voted for Frivo again and as of this post, it’s 191st place.
“(…) and a hint of the character Paprika from the 2006 movie of the same name (…)”
Awwww… A missed opportunity to use the word “titular”. This is a word too fun to miss out on using whenever you can. ;-)
But seriously, thanks for the insight into the writing process, and for the chibi Liliane. :-D
And in that light, I now regret I never punned before that this comic is spec-tacular.
Very nice to hear a bit more about the history of this comic and Laurence.
I really should have noticed that flapper-ness more readily.