Turpentine and Honey Vs The World

…Well, you knew the probability of getting called a Special Sweetie when you got involved with her, right?

21 Comments

when i saw it had updated i took a whole 5 minutes of sitting down and breathing heavily before i could read it. omg

I’m glad Arsenic looks happy about it…but oh no!! Coco!!!! 🙁 🙁 🙁

Coco’s “Meh” look made my day 😀

I… don’t know if Coco’s face is meh… or those complex feels about someone she really cares about being with someone who obviously makes them happy. Not… you know, overjoyed…but not quite disparaging either. Arsenic’s face though. 🙂

We are all Arsenic.

Except Coco. Sorry, Coco.

I feel so sad about Coco but so okay about everything else!

I feel so sad about Coco but so rad about everything else!

omg Arsenic starred this kiss but coco dot dot dotted it

Just made my day reading it. I love Arsenic and Dom’s reactions. Get the feeling like Cherry might be the one who has a problem with it.

Now comes the struggle of waiting an entire week for another chapter.

WOW NICK IS ME RN

I had pretty much the exact same reaction as the freckled, eyeglassed girl in the background of the last panel.

Thank you for this Continuing Chromatic Wonder

Wait, is that Turpentine possessively grabbing Honey Hart there in the last panel ^^ ? Haha, does this mean she’s the ‘jealous’ type?

I just went through the entire comic for the second time, and while I can’t overstate how happy I am – this is my first piece of media as a bi woman where I really resonated with the two girls in love!! – I have to wonder: I don’t think I saw a single Black person. Have you accidentally created a visual style that’s predicated on having light-skinned characters? I think the darkest person is Coco, and she’s…not only pretty light, but she’s named like chocolate. I know that you’re really into people being able to see themselves in your super cute universe, so I wanted to point this out to you.

Aw, yeah – I honestly think this is somewhere I failed and made a wrong choice when I designed the visual style. I was so into this idea of only having shades of red and blue, like it’s printed with only two inks plus black. Way at the beginning I tested it out and thought using the blues and candy pinks (or grays) for human skintones just didn’t feel right outside of monochrome panels (like the ones on this page) – and I also remember thinking that it’d be weirdly othering to only use wrong-seeming colors for darker-skinned characters. This universe’s relationship to colour has always been weird – like, it’s almost treated more like black-and-white lineart with 2 accent colors than full colour illustrations. I thought it’d work to mostly treat it like the kind of ink drawing where nobody’s skin tone is filled in…but really, that was limited thinking, and the paper colour just tends to read as white. I think this is also part of why sometimes people don’t read Turpentine as Asian. I also started out thinking this’d be about 10 pages long, not hundreds, so a lot of quick & awkward early decisions got locked into the universe. “Coco” is kinda one of them – Coco and Cherry were both just literally my first thoughts for cute candy names to match Honey, but in retrospect it’s not great that the darker girl got the chocolate one. (Sidenote! Another major first-page thing I’m not thrilled about is actually The Sourballs as a band name.)
This limitation in the visual style has become increasingly frustrating for character design – but more important than that, I DO want everyone to feel welcome in this world and feel able to see themselves, and I regret letting the coloring style become an awkward barrier to that rather than finding a better solution. Typing this out is making me think – well, jeez, why don’t I actually work on solving this? Book 2’s almost done, but that means kind of a fresh era afterwards, and there’s gotta be some improvements I can make while keeping the good parts of the style feeling consistent.
Thanks for this thoughtful & valid criticism, and I’m so glad to hear that you do like the comic enough to have read it twice! 🙂

I don’t really get that criticism. To be honest, I just don’t usually notice the differences in skin color unless I actively think about it. In the bottom picture, I could spot 3, maybe 4 and 5, black peeps in the crowd. Unless they’re tan…?

NOT A HOAX! NOT A DREAM! NOT AN IMAGINARY STORY!

Sorry, ut this just called out fro this tagline.

I just got around to reading this, because I twisted my ankle and had to stay off it today. And oh, this is one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen in webcomics.

Reactions:
I love Arsenic being thrlled- having her bro behind her will help a lot.
Coco- I just can’t help but interpret it as “Turpentine. *sigh* Of COURSE it’s Turpentine.” Not totally happy, but kind of ironic, and almost like it was something she was half expecting.

Also, the crowd: I love that the reactions range from dumbfounded to utterly thrilled. And it seems to be evenly mixed between each other’s fans.

I can only imagine what the local music press is going to make of this. Or the arguments that are going to be breaking out within the respective fans. Fans can be really rigid, judgemental people, after all. Or not. We’ll see.

And as I’ve said before, I love that you’re willing to take the webcomic in a new direction, by not just leaving it at UST. Not only progressing the relationship, but making it public.

I can’t wait to see what comes next!

Most of the crowd is OK with this, as they should be! I know Turpentine’s band will be happy for her, or simply won’t care, but I hope Honey Heart’s band can survive the “scandal.”

I’m having a heart attack now help

Kathleen, re:race in BVB: you almost certainly know this, but Dykes to Watch Out For is an excellent example of how to depict different races without literally shading in skin tone. Alison Bechdel has talked about making a deliberate decision when she started drawing the comic that she was going to depict different races without the shading because she didn’t think it fit with the drawing style.

Honey and Turpentine remind me of this TED-Ed animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keMF8YzQoRM