ILLUMINATION: In Color!
Shaenon: It’s been a while since the last Couscous Collective anthology, but ILLUMINATION is on its way to the printer. Here’s a page from my Narbonic story for the anthology, with colors by the amazing Liz Conley.
Channing: Yes! My dream of completely polluting the Narbonic canon has come true, in that some of the girls have “Skin Horse” brand sleeping bags! Other than that, I’m not involved in this one, so I get to sit here and wait for it with bated breath like all the rest of y’all’s.
I’d be surprised if they actually mad sleeping bags, bed spreads, etc. with famous historical figures instead of popular fictional characters.
Given who her parents are, I’d be surprised if they bought that sleeping bag, as opposed to making a giant bag weaving spider.
Makes sense if it’s a giant Mechanical bag weaving spider.
And the blanket showing Mom and Grandma trying to kill each other isn’t allowed out of the house.
Rosalind’s sleeping bag should have one of Grace’s nanoseconds for the zipper pull.
Grace Hopper was amazing — I attended several of her lectures and she was always riveting. In addition to handing out nanoseconds, she’s known for saying “If it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission” and apparently acted on her own advice more than once.
“I attended several of her lectures….”
I am aroil with envy.
One of the comments at the Atomic Robo creators keep making is that real people are often more awesome than fictional ones. Looking at Grace Hopper’s wikipedia page, that definitely seems to be the case about her.
And the sleeping bag says ‘COBOL 4 EVER’!! Squee! Maybe they could have some of Grace’s ‘picoseconds’ on the popcorn.
Maybe a good mouthwash would take care of that bated breath…
Wait, the Davenports named their kid Rosalind? They really are evil!
It’s a double reference. Since Helen was named after Helena from All’s Well That Ends Well, her daughter has to have a Shakespearian name as well. And since Helen’s a geneticist, she named her daughter after Rosalind Franklin.
I’d always assumed that they were the Narbons.
Nice to know I’m not the only one.
If this is from its own comic, I’m going to have to find it now.
This is cool on so many levels. The main one of course, is that Grace Hopper is cool, but also it’s easy to think of Rosalind as yet another Helen clone, but being a programming fangirl emphasises that she’s Dave’s daughter as well.
Oh, she’s not a clone. Dave gave birth to her.
When that method becomes common, parental leave will finally become reality in the USA.
Welp, that answers that question.
Though, Dave did see it coming even before he went mad.
COBOL 4 LYFE!
I got in on an IndieGoGo funding of a Grace Hopper biopic, I’m really looking forward to it! I had an opportunity to see one of her lectures, sadly I got sick and couldn’t attend. But COBOL was the first language that I seriously studied, and in my opinion, still a fantastic language. It now has database extensions, a GUI interface, and OO modeling. This ain’t your dad’s COBOL!
(But RPG still sucks)
Oh, cool! I really enjoyed the other anthologies, and I’m looking forward to this one!
**Leaves briefly to wiki Grace Hopper. Comes back. Stands at attention and salutes Rosalind’s sleeping bag.**
Indeed. The only proper response.
Do we know any of the others? The one bringing the popcorn is that one from A-Sig who sprouted the skunk tail, but do we know the other two?
I don’t think she is. I mean, this story should be happening either roughly at the same time as Skin Horse or in the future of Skin Horse, and the Whimsy Voice Actress with the skunk tail was in her 20s or 30s or something.
A princess may outrank an admiral, but being an admiral with a destroyer named in your honor is cooler.
“Admiral” comes first though; if she was both it would be “Admiral Her Highness”, not “Her Highness Admiral”.
You wouldn’t use military rank and royal styling together. She would be called “Admiral” for anything military-related, and “Her Royal Highness” for anything else.
Oh, bravo.
I’m kind of surprised Kate Beaton hasn’t done a Grace Hopper comic yet, come to think of it.
As a non sequitur, I finally read one of the articles on the smart mice that seem to be based on what Helen did with gerbils way back in “Narbonic”: I hope Shaenon gets some royalties from the process. 🙂
What’s really weird is that the girl on Rosalind’s left mostly resembles, but also kind of looks like Violet!Nick. Were it not for one of the other sleeping bags being a Baron Misticorn one, I would also present the Whimsy sleeping bag as evidence for this.
“mostly resembles Marcie”
I would totally have bought my daughter a Grace Hopper sleeping bag if they had existed. (But she ended up learning programming anyway.)
Grace Hopper was my Uncle’s direct superior, which was kind of weird since she was in the Navy, he was in the Army, and she had retired twice before he was moved to serve under her.
Ew, COBOL. My least favourite programming language.
Give me assembler any day :p
I squeed over the Grace Hopper sleeping bag before scrolling down to see the second row 😀