1mo ago

I made an illustrated sci-fi epic poem

The full thing is here: https://inivekin.github.io/abosa/

About 1.5-2 hours of reading if you like that kind of thing - or just skim the pics if you like.

I read Beowulf and thought I could do better. I guess I probably didn't but I gave it a shot and I'm pretty proud of a few things in there. I'd like to record it in a sing-songy way someday...

12 comments

Holy shit that's some incredible work. I'll also join the other guy in giving your work the proper treatment when I'm not on mobile.
- Thanks! Sounds like it's just your personal preference but feel free to let me know if there is something I've done specifically that makes mobile viewing undesirable.
  I did try to make it accessible on various screensizes with short segments but I'm sure I could probably make it more approachable. I expect more people might view it as a video but I've struggled to get my performance as intended - maybe I'll try that again soon.
  
  On my iOS Device with Firefox the "tabp to latinize" function either does not work or I'm to stupid to understand where to tab. Taping the text did not work for me
Holy moly! I'll save this for later for sure. Beautiful art direction is what I can see now.
- Thankyou! I tried to make it the kind of thing that's consumable in one afternoon, but I did also try to chunk it up and make it navigable for shorter reading sessions too.
  If you think I could make it more approachable somehow, feel free to let me know. I have mind of an audio version but want it in a certain way that I'm not yet skilled enough to achieve.
  
  My exclamation was less of "this is huge" and more of "wow, this took serious dedication!" It's clearly a labor of love, and it shows.
I'm severely impressed with what you've done here, both artistically and poetically. What an epic project!
Did you invent the alien script as well? It appears to be a letter-by-letter substitution of the English text, so technically quite learnable :)
I've only read a few sections into it, but I've enjoyed what I've seen, so I'm going to come back and give it a little time when I have some. I'd love a pdf/epub etc for an e-reader (or a paper copy!), though it might be hard to get the image/text flow right - and I imagine quite some effort to rearrange the html document into a page-turning format.
- The font is simply Elian script. Luckily this nice person made it a font so I didn't have to do so.
  I do have a pdf and epub version which I made a generator for from the html. My EPUB gen is a bit sus and I haven't got it working right yet but I've pushed the pdf to the main git repo here. Good idea, will try improve them and I should add a link to them from the page itself.
You should make a weird sci-fi manga
- Not a reaction I expected lmao
  Any recommendations?
  I'm not very familiar with manga, what would be the main differentiator between this and one of those? Less words more drawings?
  
  Yeah pretty much. One of the weirder ones I can think of that was good was blame!
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame!

12 comments