Cross-posted from !gothindustrial@lemmy.world , this is a fan edit of a well-known Norwegian comic strip, includes notes from the person who did the fan edit.

Below is the strip I had to work with:

It had a nice “gag”, but the wording was off. (I think it was a translation problem but I don’t have access to the original Norwegian so I just re-worded it to fix the problems.)

• Like, she’s trying to decide whether to buy this top, but her use of the construct “could have bought” in panel 2 makes it sound like she already bought it.
• Also, there are better ways to say “could probably have bought” in panel 3. one thing I learned in editing this was that words are precious as poetry given ya usually have very little space in those word bubbles
• Along those lines, “a month’s worth of food or four other tops for the same price” is just too many words to cram into one space. The lettering ends up looking cramped. This ain’t Tintin.
• Panel 3 about “loads of drugs” is a little odd too. First of all, it makes it sound like “drugs” is cheap, which… if she’s huffing inhalants, maybe. Which brings up the point that “drugs” covers an awful lot of territory. If she’s really doing the hard stuff she’d just steal the top and sell it, but I don’t think that’s the mood here. The mood is more like “at least I’m not doing something that’s worse than buying this top.” In other strips she’s shown as going to nightclubs and buying drinks, and club drinks are always overpriced, so I figured that’s a decent substitute.
• Once I started thinking about it, “Can I really afford SUCH an expensive top” in panel 1 is a little too verbose and abstract. It’s not BAD, there are just better ways of saying it. I went thru several revisions of the text for panels 1-3, it kinda reminded me of that thing about writers who spend all morning deciding to remove a comma, and all afternoon deciding to put it back. This was interesting for me bc like I’ve done plenty of editing for academic papers and in that case it’s all about making sure the facts come through precisely, but in here in this strip it’s all about making sure the “gag” (or whatever you’re going for) comes through.
• while I was at it, I edited it from horizontal to vertical format bc why tf not. This was a bit trickier than I expected but not too bad, and plus it gave me a bit more space for a couple more words in panel 3, which was really needed. I kinda wish I’d spent more time getting the panel sizes better aligned, like panel 4 is a little narrow and panel 3 could be trimmed a bit and I really oughta find a better font but wtf ya gotta stop sometime.

Nemi is a character from Norway by Lise Myhre. The strip is written in Norwegian but for a while it was translated and ran in England. The character is into metal, industrial, goth, and “dark culture” in general. For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemi_(comic_strip)