Tomas De Rat / Tomas The Rat

De Ijzeren Vogel / The Iron Bird page 2

Click the image to toggle between the original Dutch text and the English translation.

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In the comic, there was no shading from this point on, except for Tomas being coloured grey in some panels. I added some ‘digital’ shading to the scans in the same style as I would have done it back then with ordinary pencils, to make some objects stand out more.

The panels were originally separated only by a thin line, which made it often difficult to see where a new panel started. Therefore the digital clean-up also involved fattening those lines by placing the panels slightly further apart.

Row 2

Here you get a look at Tomas' arch enemy from the main series, a hedgehog. In Dutch I called him ‘SINK’, which means nothing in that language but somehow sounds evil. I swapped two letters in the English translation to avoid the not quite evil reference to kitchen/bathroom furniture.

In the second panel we get a redefinition of ‘contraption’. Mind that apparently SINK/SNIK is an abbreviation, judging from the marks on this thing. But I don't think I ever bothered to find a meaning for it. Anyway, the ‘plane’ looked so silly I had to add the huge asterisk which is explained at the bottom of the page. And I went for a silly onomatopoeia for the engine sound as well. Have you ever heard a plane go “zuuuuff”? To top it off, I made SNIK say ‘hahee’, which is the kind of mixture between ‘haha’ and ‘heehee’ that all evil guys in the comics use to emphasise their insanity.

Rows 3-5

Yes, that's a skyscraper scraping a cloud. In Dutch this silly joke works better because the word is ‘wolkenkrabber’, and ‘krabben’ (to scratch) is the act of using your hands to e.g. remove an itch.

Tomas & friends are going to Volcano City (an actual city, because I used the Dutch word for it). That's right, some animals were smart enough to build a city right next to a fuming volcano. Don't worry, they will pay dearly for it in the next panels. Also notice the mysterious disappearance of the jumbo-sized bird in the second panel of row 4. We'll keep the explanation to a viewpoint change.

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