Deborah's Continuing Misfortunes

There's a new chapter of my webcomic, Dekpa and Deborah, now online. It's been almost a year since the previous chapter. What took me so long? I actually finished the first half of the chapter in August and did most of the second half in December and early January. Partly the delay was due to researching Barbary Pirates, which was difficult because it's a topic related to slavery, colonialism, and Islam and it's intensely politically incorrect. Books on the topic written in the past twenty years are vastly different in tone from ones written sixty or a hundred years ago. New books had some interesting facts and helpful perspective but I often had to read between the lines obsessively reminding the reader how bad Europeans are to find confirmation of those terrible things about the Barbary Pirates that were plainly stated in older books. And, of course, I had to do the usual research on ship construction and clothing. I wanted to do a comic that required mountains of research and I sure got my wish. Next year will mark the tenth anniversary since I started working on this thing!

Happy Birthday to Thomas Edison, Philip Dunne, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Eva Gabor, Leslie Nielsen, Tina Louise, Burt Reynolds, Jennifer Aniston, Damian Lewis, and Natalie Dormer.