Com'c #194

TOOT for Com'c!

Commentary Transcript

- Elephant in the room

"Mokita" is a word in the Kilivila language, which is spoken on Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands near Papua New Guinea. It has a meaning similar to the "elephant in the room" idiom: Something everyone knows, but nobody talks about.

Near the end of this str'p's production, when I decided to take the word as a title, I knew at once that it would be this elephant lady's name if I let her have more appearances. So yeah, this girl is officially named Mokita.

Elephants are huge. What we see in the str'p is just a small fraction of Mokita's face. It's right below and in front of the root of the trunk and the tusks. My reference image was this, which admittedly is not a real elephant. It's a life-size statue, which was good enough for my purposes (I needed to see how big she should be compared to Jane). That statue, incidentally, currently costs $8,750, but only because it's on sale. The ordinary cost is $12,500! As cool as it looks, that's a ridiculous amount of money, in my opinion. But hey, mom and dad, I think I know what I want for Christmas this year...

The discussion in panel 1 was expanded on a bit, then mostly cut because it was dominating the str'p. Here's the bit before the current panel 1:

Jane: He's not a turtle, he's a tortoise.

Marc: Tortoises are turtles too. They're just land turtles.

Jane: If you say "turtle", people will think of a sea turtle. Isn't it better to avoid confusion?

In real life, this is a bit of an American/British distinction. In American English, "turtle" can cover all chelonians (sea turtles, tortoises and terrapins), while in British English it doesn't cover tortoises. (Even so, some American works have characters correcting others about this.) Meanwhile, Norwegian is one of many languages where they're all called the same thing: "skilpadde" (plural "skilpadder").

Personally, I think we should just call them all frogs.