Chapter 11 Page 1
July 5th, 2015And we are back from hiatus! It’s been a bit longer on the return than I anticipated. Naty is doing much better. Thank you all for sending the well wishes. She greatly appreciates them. She’s ready to continue her excellent work coloring this chapter.
Today’s update is Page 1 of Chapter 11. In this chapter, we will meet another power in the colonial wilderness of Everique — the Liranequois nation. This required a lot of research to get right. For this cover, Julie drew a lot of inspiration from George Catlin’s Snowshoe Dance at the First Snowfall. This classic piece was painted in 1841 and is on display at the Smithsonian.
Also, Kristina Badhand has agreed to illustrate the vignette for Chapter 11. She is the artist for the comic Kaui as well as the Managing Editor for Native Realties Press. I’m pleased to have her as part of the team and I’m looking forward to seeing what she does with the next vignette.
To see a preview of the next page, please vote for Snow by Night on Top Web Comics.
Well, Blaise certainly seems to be fitting in just fine.
Welcome back!
This illustration brings to mind a question I have had in the back of my mind for some time: I have known, indeed grew up with, a number of Iroquois families. In our modern world and given our modern diets, none of them were what anyone could call slender or petite, though often quite attractive. I wonder if that was the case in the colonial and pre Columbian periods? Portraits and other illustrations suggest they were more likely to be slender, but how representative was that sampling? we may never know, only supposition and guesswork.
When dealing with historical observation, we always must keep in mind the biases of the observer and the author/illustrator (assuming they are different). Fortunately for Snow by Night, Samuel de Champlain was a prolific writer and illustrator. I found this analysis of his travelogues and maps. Another site that I have found useful is the Woodland Indians Education Programs, which focuses a lot on the daily live of the northeast tribes. They update their Facebook page with articles and photos regularly.
One comment that shows up repeatedly in the travelogues by the French explorers of the era is how tall the natives of the northeastern woodlands are. The French of this period were really short because of the lack of protein in their diet while the Iroquois’s diet was heavy on protein. We’ve modeled the Liranequois off of those reports. They’re tall and muscular.