I totally agree on that last sentence, dear pixelated figure person.

Thanks for the bonus updates brown yak person! Also is the small black panel supposed to be a time gap?

@Groovinbear

Yep, I generally use blackouts or darkened panels to indicate time passing.

I don't think the readers remember her name either.

i don't remember seeing her before

You write entertaining dialouge, internet pixel-art guy.

It seems nobody pointed it out yet, so - 3rd panel, the word "small" is missing it's second "l" =)

@Giovanni

http://neorice.com/hoh_250

and

http://neorice.com/hoh_257

Hmm... whereabouts in this comic's world is a land called Asia, I wonder?

Man those like faded/blured out backround-y dudes are really cool looking. good job.

in noah's defense, even myself i only vaguely remembred that they've met before, to say even less of her name.
And while it mightve been longer since the reader saw her, noah's been pretty pre-occupied lately so that kinda makes up for it :P
I dont blame him really, they met for so little and shit's been going down nonstop for poor noah

Yes Noah, they will have you examined. Very thoroughly in fact, as is the custom with military health exams.

There's an Asia?

Panel 3 misspelled small

@TachyonCode

It also implies that they're a significant enough demographic to be recognized and hated.

Very interesting implications.

Once again, Noah demonstrates how much of a social guy he is and how he can deal with social situations without, incidentally or not, being a d*ck.

Still, where's Asia on this world? I know this is nitpicking but it could be somewhere... Or something like Asia being an acronym for some neighboring countries? I dunno, Neorice, you are the writer/smart person here.

@All

Regarding the use of asian & there being an "asia" in my comic's world;

I'm not a particularly big fan of reinventing the wheel and making up words for things that already exist.

If we're talking etymology in the strictest sense of the word, a ton of names, English words, phrases etc have sources tying them down in earthly history, geography or culture.

...

That being said, I am quite intentional in what type of language references I keep in & which ones I explicitly avoid mentioning.

I find it weird that commenters here think Asia is unexpected, when the characters speak ~XX century English. Doesn't it mean there's England here? ;)

Anatopisms and anachronisms are a must if we deal with alternate realities, and want the audience to understand what's going on.

@Saiko: I realize this reply is a little under a year late, and may come off as pedantic, but I find the Asia mention unexpected because it *heavily implies* that this is an alternate reality of some sort, specifically one branching off at some point in our history after Earth humans invented the language. (Alternatively: there's merely a set of ethnicities specifically named "Asian" and "Black" in this world, respectively - and the root of both terms is different, but we aren't told *how*.)

Now, it seems pretty apparent to me that *neither* the branching history nor coincidental naming conventions are the case - but it would be nice to not have to think about it in the first place, because it's tangential to the plot and distracting (like this conversation). And many authors of fictional settings do not permit such implications to enter their works, for *exactly* that reason - inviting the reader to think about these things, by letting them exist, breaks the audience's suspension of disbelief.

That is why the convention exists, to instead substitute the viewer's language for whatever fictional "common" tongue is spoken in a world. (And why many settings that have multiple such languages do such things as putting dialogue in *other* languages inside <brackets> with an asterisk, but written in the viewer's language, along with a mention at the bottom of the page the first time it's used in a scene, naming which language it is.)

Likewise, the convention of creating fictional names for fictional setting elements generally prevents the author's choice of terms from misleading readers into such tangential modes of thought, and in the same way prevents breaking suspension of disbelief.

Both conventions are time-tested and they work. "Reinventing the wheel" isn't what they accomplish.

I hope there won't be a day when you call me asian girl person.

BTW I have been busy and way behind my schedule, so do not have much time to read your comic or anything.

Don't worry, main-character Person, whose name I legitimately forgot while scrolling down, despite following the comic for years, now, ehem...

Actually, I wanted to comment, on how I had forgotten Mables name already since re-reading their first meeting this afternoon, but my bad memory made it even worse XD I can relate SO much with *scrolls up* Noah.

and in y'all's defense, I'm reading this all in one go and I can't remember her beyond them meeting on the train and at the conference