Comments on: Ask Gremlin Experts E. T. and Elizabeth Bryan

By: Sweetwind

Sweetwind — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 16:50:26 +0000

As long as there aren't any of THESE kind!

By: apsmith

apsmith — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 14:51:47 +0000

I’ve read a couple of Dahl books, but my son was just reading Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator – hilarious, but also it seemed rather timely, given the talk about space hotels in the next few years. Let’s hope we don’t run into any Vermicious Knids the first time we drop in for a visit…

By: Sweetwind

Sweetwind — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 18:29:23 +0000

My son's 2nd grade class is doing a unit on Roald Dahl so I wondered if you had read his book on Gremlins? I hadn't, but oh my goodness, here's an on-line copy! [pause while Sweetwind reads for half an hour. Funny, the text says gremlin Gus has a brown face, but in the illustrations he's definitely green!] This looks like it could have been an influence! What fairy stories inspired you the most when working on Gremlin Trouble, and was this one of them?

By: Sweetwind

Sweetwind — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 17:55:46 +0000

How much of your writing on gremlore is "real" and how much did you personally make up? Google found me a reference [PDF] to Percy Prune as being "created in 1941 to show airmen and women how to use equipment safely. Prune never got anything right and was always wrapped in bandages." Is his gremlin association traditional? Are you the first to document his son's exploits?

By: apsmith

apsmith — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 11:00:42 +0000

So I was expecting it to explain how GPS actually works! I guess it was billed as a ‘history’… I bet it was the “plush” dolls that doomed it with IONS. Anyway, have you thought of adding a few pages of explanation for a broader audience? I bet it could sell via Scholastic or some other education-oriented company!

By: Sweetwind

Sweetwind — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 18:51:05 +0000

As a married couple publishing their own comic, you are walking on a path blazed by such couples as the Sims (no, not THOSE Sims) and the Pinis (no, not THOSE... ooopsie, Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" hit for "pinis" is being blocked by my workplace as "inappropriate content"...) Anyway, can you tell us some about working on the comic as a couple, and how the creative and business bits sync (or fail to sync)? Does the division of labor described in the Insider Reports article still hold? ("Thomas draws. Stories are developed as a team. Publishing, marketing, and distribution are Elizabeth's jobs.")

By: Sweetwind

Sweetwind — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 17:29:36 +0000

An internet search on Anti-Ballistic Pixelations tells me you also published Saiko & Lavender by Michael Vega and Diana X. Sprinkle. Have you published any other titles or cartoonists, and would you publish other titles in the future?

By: Sweetwind

Sweetwind — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 17:10:48 +0000

I noticed, especially in Volume I, that some of the dialog in balloons
as well as some of the narrative is typeset (or maybe the word is
machine-printed?) rather than hand-lettered. I noticed because it’s my
pet peeve (I’m of the belief that all comics should be hand lettered, or
printed in a font that resembles hand lettering!), but it didn’t bother
me in this case because it was used judiciously :-) But I couldn’t quite
figure out how you decided when to use hand lettering and when not. Did
you follow some sort of rule?

By: Sweetwind

Sweetwind — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 17:09:17 +0000

In Gremlin Trouble, the term “Fay-Tuing” is used by the
extraterrestrials to refer to fairies. Is this an actual word from
somewhere?

By: Sweetwind

Sweetwind — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 17:07:51 +0000

I can see where some of the character’s names come from: Princes
Hexadecimal, Octal, and Binary form a logical sequence, and it’s funny
too :-) The technolutionaries’ seem to be named after great physicists
(Dr. Pi Yukawa after Hideki Yukawa who
discovered the pi meson, for example). Was there any particular
inspiration for the names of Del Delage and the evil sorceress
Jenif-fra? What about the “Brandy” in Dr. Brandy Schwarzchild?