Song Lyrics in English (Patreon)

I thought it'd be more fun to write them directly onto the pages than to just drop them in text form, so here. :)

TL;DR: the following is just a little ramble about my thoughts on words vs. meaning and prose vs. dialogue, in case you're into that sort of thing. ;)

I've always rolled my eyes at song lyrics written in comics, because there are so many  layers of meaning and emotion added to a song when it's sung and played that you can't capture in text alone. 

Which is why I was happy to have Berto's song translated into Spanish; the majority of the people who read it will either have only a slight inkling of the meaning, or not pay attention to the words at all, and only "hear" the song through the visuals. 

I jotted down these basic lyrics quickly, pushed them through Google Translate, and sent them off to Kier, a kind patron who has offered to help me with the Spanish in Elephant Town. I felt kind of silly sending off the lyrics in English, because they're so simple and unpolished. It's funny how poignant and heartfelt something can feel inside of you, and how clumsy and cliche it can sound when you assign a limited vocabulary of words to it, when you don't have the time to be clever and creative.

I'm always a little embarrassed by my prose writing. I don't have an impressive vocabulary, so I rely on arranging the words I know in a way that takes advantage of pattern & repetition, cadence of sound, the element of surprise, and wordplay in order to express a thought closer to the way I see it in my head, and that takes a lot of thinking, and most of the time, it still isn't right. 

Dialogue, on the other hand, is fun for me, because people (characters) rarely take the time to polish their words out loud - most people's speech doesn't come out like a well-constructed prose paragraph - so there's a depth that comes through deceit, sarcasm, hesitating or rushing, letting a sentence fall short of being a complete sentence, using the wrong punctuation, suggestion via ellipsis, repeating words by accident, repeating words on purpose by way of emphasis. Dialogue is human and uncivil, messy, wrong. Dialogue is more honest than prose because it can't easily hide its ulterior motives. It's perfect because it's real.

Adding visual art to dialogue gives the same kind of layering effect that listening to a piece of music (rather than just reading the lyrics) does.

When I made my first comic in third grade, I'd already fallen in love with drawing and writing. When I put the two together for the first time, I found my language. It's still not perfect - every page of Elephant Town falls a little short of what exactly I'm trying to say, because my art still isn't skillful enough to get everything right - but the dialogue is right, the facial expressions are mostly right, the lighting is awfully close. It's as close as I can get to showing you the story that's in my brain that I want to share with you.