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On hiatus until January! Happy new year!

Illumination Page 13: Language, Mister

Illumination Page 13: Language, Mister published on 77 Comments on Illumination Page 13: Language, Mister

I’m back from TCAF!! Thank you to everyone who stopped by, I had a great time!

My next convention is VANCAF in Vancouver, Canada! It’s two weeks from now! Golly! Stop on by, it is also a free festival!

77 Comments

Aw, man. I love Jim’s expression in the second to last panel, though I think Colin’s “oops, I was caught” is the best.

I love the floofy griffons, like in the last panel.

I like how Collin wants to be like his big brother. XD

Colin’s pose in the last panel demands a plush toy.

This is gonna get goood. Can’t wait to see just how the “curse” affects Colin in particular. He does have the blue coloration, but only on his tail, unlike Jim’s green tail and ears.

He also has blue eyes, and Jim has green eyes, so there is a possibility. Another possibility is that he will only have half the curse, like his hair being brown, but his eyes and tail being blue.

What happened to their fathers wings and tail? They look like they have been cropped off.

Colin seems to know a *lot* of big words for such a wee griffin…

Ten-year-olds can have pretty big vocabularies, especially if they do a lot of reading. Colin probably does out of little else to do with his time.

I didn’t realise he was as old as ten — from his size I was thinking more like 8.

I also thought it was maybe because he’s spent most of his life with much older people (there’s been stuff before about his not having friends his own age). Because in normal society, a kid that talks like that is going to get a lot of grief from other kids for it.

Actually, from his size — *6* or 8.

He really is a little titch.

I’ll admit it’s hard to guess Colin’s age from his size since the only other gryphon we’ve seen in full-form is Jim, who is both full-grown and who is as flipping huge compared to the average male maned gryphon and his human form is flipping tall compared to the average man, but Colin’s birthday is listed in his character profile as October 1995 and the time-stamp at the beginning of this story is June 2005, so he is a little over nine and a half.

He knows words, but not necessarily how to use them correctly. His use of “vis-à-vis” for example, doesn’t really make sense; he’s using it to mean “likewise” but it means “compared to”, or “face to face” (literally “sight to sight”).

And yes that sounds just like the kind of mistake a kid who reads a lot of books does.

Aww! Poor Colin, without any friends his own age. That’s terrible. Although I gotta wonder if its an indicator of the number of gryphons in the general area

What, he hasn’t met Ike’s little brother yet? Or is there some vast gulf of age between them?

Keep in mind that the Finns live outside of the Avalon, and Colin not having his medallion yet complicates him making visits there. As such, he hasn’t been able to meet much of anyone. Add to this that the only link between the families you mentioned is that Paul manages Ike’s band, and there’s no real reason Colin and Cy would have met each other yet. The only place they’ve been seen together so far is in two sketchbook drawings, one of which is obviously set several years in the future from this page. Given their personalities, I can see them becoming friends quickly though.

Does anyone what chapter/page we saw little Jim? Did he not have his green hair by then?

I think we’ve only seen little Jim in the reader questions, which are not in color.

Well, actually, we saw a panel with Baby Jim and Baby Paul here:
https://www.skindeepcomic.com/archive/issue-two-page-13/
And Jim at least seems to have green ear tufts.

Jim seems to have always had green hair since he first got his medallion on or about his tenth birthday. Then, as he told Michelle (on page 33 of Orientations, chapter 4), “I grew two feet taller and three feet of hair overnight on my 16th birthday.”

It might be reasonable to expect Colin to experience a similar pattern.

So lack of thumbs didn’t keep him from watching things on Telly that he wasn’t supposed to be seeing.

Regular animals can be very, very clever with their paws when they want or need to be, and Colin is far more than a regular animal.

To say nothing of how much use birds get out of their beaks, like the incredible work of weaver birds. And then as you say, Colin is smarter then the average bird. Between claws, paws, and beak, I’m sure there hasn’t been many things that have stymied Colin.

Should we know what happened to the father? It reminds me of a bit of furry art where the artist didn’t know what happened, just that he was missing and arm and a wing like he had flown into a lazer beam.

BTW, I think there is a bit of a typo where Colin is talking about having not friends his age.

It’s vaguely mentioned as an “accident” when he was younger, but there hasn’t been any detail. It’ll probably be explained eventually, most mysterious events that happen in this comic get explained in time. Remember! We’re only just now finding out who Phineas the Red was, and that was from Orientations!

As I recall, he has the option of hiding his damaged wings and tail, but refuses to do so. Once again, the motivation for doing so is largely untouched upon just like the origin of his injuries. Which will hopefully change soon enough. HINT HINT KORY.

I still don’t get why his mother corrects him for saying “damn”.

It is weirdly unBritish for her to catch him for what is basically not a bad word, and then for him to correct himself to what is practically the same word. They’re not American, I think. Is she a yank? Are they rabidly Christian? They can’t be. She keeps a shrine not a Christian cross. Both Damn, Darn (and for that matter the words Dash and Dumb) are not bad words. It’s all so odd.

I can’t speak for those who grew up in jolly old England, but hereabouts, there’s a cultural quirk that, at least for young children, makes “darn” acceptable speech but “damn” much less so. At least that’s how it was when I was growing up, which admittedly was more than a few decades ago, so maybe his mum just has some old-fashioned values.

I believe it to be partly that and partly preference. My mother hates damn and bloody and deems them bad/curse words. For under late teens it’s always been frowned on in my lifetime. Well, ma hates bloody at any age. Words are so weird…

Colin’s incredibly adorable; he makes me want to spoil him horribly. I hope for his sake that he *does* get the ‘family curse’, just because he wants so much to be like his big brother… and besides which, a 10-year-old with blue hair would be thought of as INCREDIBLY cool by most 10-year-olds I’ve known. That’s got to be way better than thinking of one’s self as having a funny tail, if the look in Colin’s eyes when he pokes at it is any indication.

True that other ten-year-olds would think it’s really cool, and he’d clearly rather think of himself sharing Jim’s curse than weird, but part of what he’s so excited about is going to ‘real people’ school, where they usually have things like dress codes. Jim’s hair can’t be cut or, if I recall correctly, dyed. I presume there’s a school in the Avalon for those who can’t or don’t want to leave it, but it does limit his options.

Jim’s hair can be cut.
It just regrows in seconds.
One Eyed Bear, pages 6 and 7
Exchanges – Hello, Goodbye, page 24

No idea on if it can be dyed.

Jim mentions that it can be dyed, but every time he changes back and forth he has to re-dye it so he usually doesn’t bother. it’s wayyyy back in Orientations somewhere.

Dye has never been discussed in the comic. We did some speculation about it in the comment section a while back though. That lead me to ask Kory through Patreon about whether Jim had ever dyed his hair. She said then that he had never tried.

Huh, I could swear he’d said something about it – but then, I have a tendency to make mistakes like that, where my mind fills in important details that aren’t actually there.

I know that I once had a character with that problem, so I probably just accessed the wrong memory banks XD My bad!

I can just see it now – the final panel of the chapter – We have everyone in the background staring at colin in the foreground.

All we can see of colin is a cute but naked butt and we have NO idea what colour his hair is and have to wait.

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