Band Mail #2

Finally, FINALLY, new comics!
Thank you, Courtenay, for playing the Send Mail To Fictional Characters game! There are several other questions in my inbox that are completely great and will have their turn…but this one was clearly irresistable.

16 Comments

I *love* grumpy baby bunny.

“Scowling Ballet Photo” was me twice a year for, like, eight years.

Sooo glad to see a new comic! 😀

mmmmm… ham radio lessons…

Ha ha, thanks, guys! There was a lot I liked about this one. It’s really minor, but I totally liked how Honey’s sadface in the second last panel turned out. She’s just so genuinely like “d’aww, no, don’t go home! I’M WIDE-EYED AND CUTESY.”

OMG is Turpentine Chinese?!

ugh, sorry. I replied to the wrong comment AND saw that you already answered the question further down, sorry!

Don’t worry! Judging by how often people ask, I definitely still need to make this clearer in the actual comic via artwork/context/dialogue/etc – like, if *anything* in the comics isn’t clear without reading comments, I need to do a better job. BVB FAQ: yes, Turpentine is Chinese!

Glad to see ya back Kathleen, hope the move went well. I love the grumpy bunny photo best, myself.

Is Turpentine of Chinese descent, or did her parents just think it would be a cute idea?

Addendum; I must be blind because I never noticed the Mailbag Game link before. Gonna have to think of a question!

Glad to be back — the move was a total pain, but the payoff is great. My new job is a design nerd’s dream, and I live in a gay district like three blocks from the ocean. Hell to the yes.

And yeah, confirmed, Turpentine is Asian — which is pretty ambiguous due to the fact that pretty much every character in the BVB-verse is drawn in a very stylized way. Context for any character’s ethnicity becomes a little bit weird in a world where blue and pink seem to be naturally occurring hair colors, facial features are totally elastic and often over-the-top unrealistic for effect, and a lot of characters have weird stylistic quirks common to NO actual humans, like not having pupils in their eyes like 90% of the time. So yeah, her Chinese family is clearly not a major plot point, but her new year baby picture is a minor attempt to establish it.

Side note: for the first couple of drawings I did of her, I was thinking more of one of those jet-black-haired cartoon white people, like Lois Lane or Veronica Lodge…and then I had a moment of thinking about how the disproportionate representation of those Jet Black Hair Cartoon White People always vaguely bugged me.

Also, yes please send mail!

Side Note II: it’s also clear to me why generations of comics artists just looooooooooove characters with black hair: they ink so nicely!

I vaguely recall reading somewhere that no person of caucasian descent has truely black hair; it’s usually dark brownish if you look close enough, so says my unverified half-remembered source.

I died my hair black for awhile (my genetics are like 95% scottish/irish/random white), and people told me it looked strange with my skin color. Maybe a Weasley Red next.

You may recall that I’m translucent pale, and I spent many years doing that deliberately unnatural black hair dye with the Superman-style blue shimmer. I mean, it’s kind of cool, but yeah, it’s not a combo that any caucasians are born with.
I’ve had red hair for a while now, and I’ve been scheming lately about the best way to redo and maintain it as not just red, but super-intense cartoon red. The tricky thing is that I want to keep it fairly long without destroying it with too-frequent bleach. Hairchat 2011!
Also: high hopes for getting the rest of my computer setup unpacked and permanently functional this weekend, and doing more comix finally.

Heh, I love how they clearly had upbringings that didn’t /quite/ fit with their personalities. XD

Oh, I thought she was Vietnamese until I read the comments here, because I associate the “Lee” spelling with Vietnam and “Li” with China.

But in either case.

First time I read through your archive, I pricked up my metaphorical ears when I saw that Clementine’s last name was Lee – when you are a person of color reading in a majority white genre, there’s always a little moment of “?? Is this – ??? Maybe one of us?” Same as when Coco said something in Spanish a few pages back. ??? The hair? And then when I got to this comic I beamed. It’s nice to find yourself not in another Joss Whedon’s Sunnydale-type whites-only environment for once. It just feels good. :finger guns:

Yeah, I was thinking the exact same thing! I don’t know why I didn’t figure out that Turps was Asian before I saw this page. It’s nice to see minority LGBT members, especially with all the stigma in Asian families (though I’m sure every ethnicity has that too).

I also appreciate having a trans girl in the mix. I’m a trans Asian guy (crazy rare right) who’s just done a really good job of pretending to be just a lesbian to avoid conflict and it’s nice to have 2 members of the Sourballs representing two aspects of my identity and being OPEN about it. I turn to webcomics a lot for guidance and it means a lot to me to see myself in these characters