Nemi - Friday I'm in Love (fan edit)

I'm thinking one reason Nemi never got really popular in the US because of editing and translation problems. If you think about the original...

• strengths: it's got a great narrative. panel 1 sets up a great WTF moment, which is then backed up with details (and a secondary gag involving the bunny) in panel 2. Panel 3 provides a wacky explanation, and panel 4 ends with a gag. As always, the art is outstanding. The strip has some great fundamentals, but it has a couple secondary problems:
• Nemi's strips often have non-speech-bubble text on non-white backgrounds, as in panel 1. idk why they do this, but the text takes a little bit more effort to read. I thought about adding a speech bubble but wtf we're in the meme era so I turned the text into white with black outlines. I realize this would be hard for non-computer-artists to do, so I don't begrudge Ms Myhre. But really her editor oughta tell her about the lack of word balloons. Maybe it's an artistic decision tho.
• Another problem is that the strips are often wordier than they need to be. Maybe it's a European thing, like Tintin used to be. Anyway, there's no need for Darth Nemi to be reciting the whole first stanza in panel 1, she can break it up into two halves so that the stanza ends in panel 2 with "I'm in Love" which has a lot better comedic timing imho. Plus that way the bunny gets to say "Monday you can--" which suggests all kinds of possibilities, like "Monday you can... shove it up your exhaust vent!?" The excessive wordiness is definitely something the editor oughta be telling.
• wording/translation problems. I think whoever did this translation is not a native English speaker. There aren't any grammatical problems per se, but there are just a couple phrases that don't "flow." Like when Darth Nemi says "Waking you up... gently. You like Star Wars. And The Cure!", it doesn't really sound like something a native English speaker would say. And I realize there may be regional/national differences, etc. And I kinda like it when non-English linguistic patterns are adapted into English. But it just takes a little bit away from the strip, adding just a bit more cognitive load and just slightly disrupting the immersiveness. I went over several different rewrites here before I came up with "waking you up...with love! just like you love star wars! and the cure!" I'm still not 100% happy with it, but I think it makes explicit the "logic" of Nemi's action, which is fundamentally kinda sweet, and which is not otherwise immediately obvious.
• in panel 4 the speaker of "Are you crazy?" is a bit ambiguous. I'm pretty sure that Nemi is supposed to be saying it, BUT it would also make sense for the dude to be saying it. The word balloon kinda points at Nemi but it kinda points through to him too? Plus, there's a big gap between Nemi's first utterance and the "Are you crazy" utterance, which suggests a switch in speaker. It's another case in which after a bit of thought it's probably obvious to the reader, BUT that's a bit of thought that is distracting from the gag. So anyway, I moved the word balloon up a bit to make it obvious that Nemi's saying it. Also, the wording of "Are you crazy?" is a little off-- that's the kind of thing you say when you're talking about violence, not rabbits. "Are you weird or something?" sounds a little less drastic, and imho also helps attribute the utterance to Nemi.
• I'm not a big fan of the original lettering... it's a little hard to read at reduced sizes. I ended up using the "Garfield Sans" font by Dr. Lex. This has an attribution license, and I wasn't sure if that meant I had to add the attribution to each comic strip... but I ended up doing so bc it watered down the loathesome "Facebook Nemi" source at the bottom, and plus I admire Dr Lex for making a font and giving it away. The font is all right, tho the periods and the dots under the exclamation and question marks were tiny, so I had to enlarge the font of the ellipses in panel 3, and manually add additional pixels to every "!" and "?".
• Anway I ended up removing the "Facebook Nemi" and changing it to the "Nemi.No" source which more recent comics have used -- this still forwards to the detestable Facebook, but at least it doesn't imprint that vile name on the strip.
• as before, I changed it to a 2-by-2 layout with a black background more appropriate for the web.

Once again this was a great educational experience, if you've read this far I hope the writeup has been interesting.