‘Tis pity he’s not Jewish

Yesterday I posted this comic in Hebrew.

Today I present the English version.

But that’s not all.

On my way home from school yesterday I was thinking – comic readers take for granted that comic panel sequence will follow the same direction as their written language.

Hebrew is written right-to-left.  I studied it in college about a hundred years ago.  So I dug up my old stuff and pieced together some dialogue based on some real conversations I’ve had with Jewish kids on the West Side of Los Angeles.

And I also drew the cartoon from right-to-left.  If you are some kind of detail freak you would know that I always put the light source on the right side of my comics.  So to make my head explode even more, I also changed the direction the light was coming from to the left.

Finally, as a left-handed person writing in English might admit, being “-handed” against the direction of the text can cause your hand to sit in your ink.  This happened to me.  As a right-handed artist working in English, it’s easy to make passes from left-to-right that don’t smudge my work.  Doing the Hebrew cartoon from right-to-left caused a whole other set of headaches.

So there you have it.  Today I just flipped the image horizontally and dropped in the English translation.

By the way, the title is inspired by the great 17th century John Ford play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.  Yes, someone in the 1630s got away with that title.

חבל שהוא לא יהודי

Back to Shul

I’m skipping Weekend Kids today to make up for the lost comic this week.

Shabbat Shalom!