It’s perfectly okay for sarnothi to swim immediately after eating.
When I was a little kid I designed a superhero who manipulated surface tension and controlled water. He lived in Venice which is really the best possible city for a superhero like that, I think. His name was Captain H20. I was not good with names.
Took some advice from Kilyle and modified Sai Fen’s speech bubble style a bit since she’s underwater. Thanks for the feedback. I was trying to think of a way to work dialogue into a strip to answer the question many[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Guess she decided to use the “water pump” after all. (btw, for those that don’t knw about the semi-hidden director commentary, check the Transcript link for some… kind of out-there info.)
In early drafts of the story, all sarnothi were basically waterbenders. And just for extra super-crazy trivia, in that same VERY early draft, there were slated to be two OTHER races revealed to be living under humanity's notice on Earth at a later stage of the story: avian "airbenders" living in cities disguised as clouds, and fire-breathing dragonoids who consume stone and react to water as if it were acid. In this draft of the story, humans were to be eventually revealed as "fallen" earthbenders who forgot their elemental artform. Todd would have been the first human to regain the ability. This concept essentially evolved into the four Clans of Sarnoth, whose general personalities are very loosely based on the same four elements in terms of "feel" (Sar'Teri: Earth, Stoic. Jin'Sorai: Fire, Passionate. Mor'Kama: Air, Aloof. Tel'Dora: Water, Nurturing.)
The green-and-black tool in panel 2 is a combination filter and aerator. The "kelp leaves" Tai Li's egg was sitting in are actually an aesthetic camouflage for the parts that extend into the tank itself.
I’ve answered this question in commentary before but for those that missed it or don’t check the comments very often, sarnothi breast feed their infants. It’s for a much shorter duration than humans do (a few weeks to about a[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I figure Sai Fen remembers the different sounds Suko made when he was younger to identify "happy" from "hungry" pretty reliably.
(Final colors will be a bit more delayed than usual.) I think toys that stimulate sensory input would be even more important than usual considering she’s confined to a tank for a while. And yes, to those that asked but[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Some of the toys new and some of them are Suko's hand-me-downs. Non-toxic plastic infant toys that won't leech bad things into water if submerged. More fun for her than a bubble-clam would be, anyway.
She can’t even wear those for a few months yet, honestly. If you’ve been watching the dates on the last two strip’s time progression, you may have come to the realization that I’m doing a Christmas story. In the middle[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…