Born to be Brave

On the 16th of April of the year 1044, a woman named Alba wrote and signed a purchase document about what she and her husband were buying. This is the first time --or at least the oldest time that has survived-- where a woman signed a legal document in Catalonia.

Her name was Alba. You can see her signature at the end of the document: "Alba Femina Scripsit", which means "the woman Alba wrote this".

We know she was from the city of Vic, where her father Guibert was a teacher, having moved to Catalonia from Liège (modern-day Belgium). He taught his three sons and three daughters how to read and write, in a time where very few people knew how to, and even less women. He also taught them Latin, since it was a time where Romance languages (the languages that evolved from Latin, in our case Catalan) were not written down yet, they were the language that people spoke, but when it was time to write a document it was done in Latin. We see that Alba used great Latin, as well as an excellent calligraphy; but it's fascinating to see that she used a few of words in Catalan within the text, like era ("threshing floor"), casals ("houses"), coma ("mountain pass" or tiny valley), and puio (modern Catalan: puig; "hill") to describe the location they're buying. This was starting to become common at the time: the text itself was in Latin, but the specifics could be written in Catalan to make sure it was correctly understood.

This is the only document we have from her. But we know a few more things from other documents: she got married to a man named Jobert, they lived in the town of Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer and had three daughters (named Guilla, Adaleds, and Magensburg) and three sons (Guillem, Ramon, and Artall), and from her husband's will we can see what they named everything in their possession: they had a piece of land nicknamed Coma Erma ("Waste Mountain Pass"), a house named Rosta, a cuirass named Claramalla, a horse named Giscafred, a mare called Gaçola, and an hauberk (mail shirt) named Omnia bona (Latin for "All Good").

The Expanse 2.10 Cascade Shohreh Aghdashloo as CHRISJEN AVASARALA

One time they get captured by pirates, just by unfortunate coincidence (and also probably the will of the Bastard), and the pirates end up paying a ransom to get rid of them.

This kinda applies to every protagonist in the World of Five Gods books, but: ongoing personifications of the idea that sometimes you receive a miracle, and sometimes you are the miracle for someone else.

Desdemona is scared of heights. One time, they have to basically rappel down the side of a cliff, and she explodes multiple seagulls to cope.

LMB is clearly having fun figuring out how you can cleverly use pure destructive power for good, or at least very selective harm, especially in the human body. Pen & Des are also having fun, Pen in a particularly nerdy way. As the series goes on, he gets increasingly disappointed that no one else knows more than him, such that they could learn by comparing notes.

As some of you might recall from this essay, I spent the latter half of 2025 working on a comic for the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum in Savannah, Georgia. Tania Sammons, a curator at the museum who had previously licensed my guide to sailors’ tattoos for a show, wrote to me with an irresistible pitch: four cartoonists would be hired, assigned a vessel from the museum's extensive collection of models, then given six months to produce a short comic for publication in an anthology alongside an accompanying museum display.

How could I say no?

My original brief was to research the Anne, the ship that brought the first colonists to Georgia, but in the aftermath of my dad's death the story took off in directions I couldn't have foreseen.

I'm releasing the whole comic online to coincide with the opening of Drawn to the Sea, the exhibition in Savannah. If you're in the area this week (or anytime over the next nine months!) you can stop in and see all the amazing work that came from myself and fellow artists Avery Hick, Rich King, and Sharon Norwood. Details about the museum show are here.

In the meantime, here's a very personal comic.

Content Warning: this piece deals with suicide and parental mortality. Readers with trypophobia may want to skip pages 14 and 15.

Is the best part that he got doxxed? No.

Is the best part that he got tracked down by a local and beaten? No.

Arrested on state at federal charges, looking at up to 5 years and 50K? Nope.

The best part is the local city council's reaction.

After the incident, another video went viral showing what appeared to be that man getting a beating. The Maui Police Department said they had no record of any reports of disorderly conduct or assault related to the monk seal incident.

ALL Doctor Who episodes, both new who and old who are on Internet Archive!

Along with copies of various Doctor Who books and magazines as well as ALL the Torchwood magazines and both yearbooks!!

Here’s the link to all the episodes: