October 16th, 2011
Rock Ness Mess part 19
I wasn’t sure how many of my readers would know that brassic and skint were synonyms for broke, but I thought it would be just as fun to put the audience in the same confused place as the King. When I showed this to my friend Steve he said mockingly “Because that’s what you want to do with your comic, make it confusing for people.” So, for my non-Brit readers, was the confusing annoying? Or not?
Also, rejected names: Marcy Narly, Merry Sir Airy.
October 16th, 2011 at 6:21 am
As a French, a little bit of confusion, guesswork from context clues, and the occasional visit to urban dictionary are to be expected; I don’t worry about it. [And I already knew skint, so there.]
October 16th, 2011 at 9:40 am
I enjoyed it. 🙂 And, it isn’t that confusing when you clear it up within the same page. I was all “Huh?” then “Oh yeah!”
October 16th, 2011 at 11:30 am
I didn’t know what skint was, but in panel 2, I immediately knew the king was wrong, even though I didn’t know what brassic meant. The Dinosaur bones in the background of panel 2 were a nice touch!
October 16th, 2011 at 12:37 pm
There’s something to be said for context. I think it’s fine not stating things outright..
October 16th, 2011 at 2:40 pm
May be brought on by listening to too much BBC Shortwave over the years, but this dude from the Pacific Northwest found “brassic” understandable.
Actually “skint” is a colloquialism easily understood as any area that had a lot of fur trading and trapping understands that an animal that’s “skint” has a major deficiency economically (and viably) and for a trapper to be “skint” about now means a busy winter reducing the above to that state.
October 16th, 2011 at 3:56 pm
I think it was perfectly understandable. Also, I love the King’s aide in the fifth panel.
October 16th, 2011 at 6:13 pm
Thanks everyone. I’m glad to see I wasn’t too out there.
October 16th, 2011 at 8:45 pm
The synonyms don’t bug me at all…
kinda wish there was a hint of a tailbone in panel 1, though.
October 17th, 2011 at 8:35 am
Didn’t know what the meant but a few panels ahead and a couple context clues and I was able to figure it out. Didn’t mind that at all as it’s an opportunity to learn a new word. So ya!
October 17th, 2011 at 6:03 pm
I thought skint is a fairly common word. Oddly, the spellchecker in Ubuntu isn’t accepting it.
I am in awe of “nary any mercy” by the way.
October 20th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
I like the GirlGenius reference on the shoulderplates in the last panel.
October 21st, 2011 at 10:55 am
Mummpizz – I read a bit of GirlGenuis but I didn’t see any trilobite shoulderplates. Oh well.
October 21st, 2011 at 12:36 pm
I don’t mind the odd words, because you do explain them thru context. I *do* however, think that the Kings aide should have been saying “Sire” instead of “Sir”… he *is* talking to his King, after all. Also, I think more “!” to punctuate would make the aide seem more alarmed at being burgled and frustrated that his King isn’t getting it.
Murray Canary was awesome.
October 23rd, 2011 at 2:04 am
bah, I commented on this last week but apparently it didn’t go through and just vanished. I said I’m a UK person and was still not familiar with brassic – after looking it up, I suspect it’s specifically a London-centric rather than UK-wide term. Skint is completely familiar though.
I was more confused by Murray Canary, which took me several seconds to get – which is funny because if I was making the same joke [not in a comic] I’d have gone even more obscure, something like “So Hundred-Year-Old Murray was lying!”
May 23rd, 2012 at 2:18 pm
I am still waiting for the MerCanary.
May 25th, 2014 at 3:19 am
Mummpiz: I think the trilobites were just a coincidence, not actually as the heterodyne sigil.