16th March 2007

Hi Folks,

It's a double whammy of Dark Red this week for you guys. And the first page where normal style comic drawings get thrown into the mix. This page was the make-or-break challenge for the Dark Red Comics Production Team, otherwise known as Jo and myself. It took about three times as long as any of the other pages to do and everything else before and after has seemed a lot easier since.

This is tech language stuff and you're quite welcome to skip it if you want! Our new character is calling out for help in random languages. As you probably know he's calling 'Help me!' in French but after that he's calling out for the angels. The work 'angel' came from the Latin 'angelus' and that was derived from the Greek word 'ággelos' which means messenger. It's the Greek our new character starts with in the first panel then moves onto Hebrew in panel five.

My html has completely passed out on me, it's not supporting Greek or Hebrew characters so I won't be able to repeat the words here. Reading right to left, the first Hebrew word in panel five is the closest Hebrew word for angel, it's 'mal'ach', and also means messenger. He then moves on to other references, the second word is 'abbir' meaning mighty and the last word, on the left, is 'Elohim'. These latter words are founds in Ps. 78:25 and Ps. 8:5 respectively.

Jo also had trouble with the Hebrew characters in this page. The words type from right to left and were fiddley to deal with. Also due to a problem with normal cutting and pasting, my Hebrew ended up backwards to begin with. It's all fixed now.

Although this page was a lot of work, I loved it when it started coming together. To me this is the point where the art in Dark Red settles down into itself and starts to look really good. As I've said before, the first ten or so pages were experimental. Thanks for all the nice feedback and comments I've received over the past month or so and thanks for supporting Dark Red.

Enjoy the ride!

Lynn