Panel 1: Super-duper-rare “straight-on” Empowered shot of the Caged Demonwolf’s alien prison. Pretty sure I never drew the power-draining bondage gear from this camera angle again. Bonus rarity: I also stopped drawing that very specific type of display—with the goofy, meaningless graphics and those little white lines—after this volume, I believe.
Panel 2: Gotta love the phrase “proffered pudenda.” Oddly, the original version of the line was misspelled as “proferred” in the print edition I reference for these commentaries, but I have a vague—and, presumably, mistaken—recollection of being advised to use that spelling by a proofreader. In any event, as I hand-write the dialogue directly on the paper and never run it through a word processor, I have to rely on my own sense of orthography to avoid misspellings. Then again, I read a whole hell of a lot and was a spelling-bee geek—though not a successful one, as I crapped out at the state level—as a kid, so said orthographical sense usually helps me avoid too many problems.
Ah, but that sense is far from infallible, with certain blind spots and odd glitches lurking in my vocabulary—for example, I read a ton of UK-based military hardware books as a kid, so a number of British-spawned idiosyncrasies plague me to this day. “Wait, ‘grey’ is the UK spelling of ‘gray,’ right? No?” And to this g-d day, every time I write the words “offense” or “defense,” for a fraction of a second I’m tempted to spell them as “offence” and “defence.”
A separate but related issue, by the way, is the category of accidental misspellings, as I’ll sometimes get distracted—or get ahead of myself—while hand-lettering and start writing a different word while halfway through the current one. This is why I have to be careful when listening to the radio or a podcast while lettering, as it’s annoyingly easy for words I overhear to start to creep into my lettered dialogue if my attention drifts.
Panel 3: The Caged Demonwolf exciting neologism of the day: “NETHERGROWTH”! Note, by the way, that as my work contains many, many made-up and freshly coined words and phrases, I have to use the term “neologism” on a regular basis. Howeva, I have to consciously use the apparently correct pronunciation “ne-AWL-ogism,” as the 3rd-syllable-stressed pronunciation “neo-LOW-gism” is the one that comes more naturally to me. I’ve even heard a variant delivery that sounds like “KNEEL-ogism,” which presumably unites users of the previous two pronunciations in shared contempt. (Much as fractious users of the competing regional terms “soda” and “pop” sneer in unison at third parties who prefer the term “soda pop.” And let’s not even get started about those folks who refer to all soft drinks—including Pepsi!—as “Coke,” which really befuddles the previous three groups.)
-Adam Warren
