L'Abominable homme des neiges

On the French Drawmadaire sketch blog, the theme for one week was L'Abominable homme des neiges. These are two of my personal favorites, but see the rest here.



Nicolas "Nils" Rivet can be acknowledged for creating this very kid-friendly painting. (Note: The rest of his work isn't necessarily kid-friendly).




And on the not-so-kid-friendly front, Mikl Olivier made this homage to Tintin.

Olivier explains in his post that he chose to make his yeti closer to one of Jean-Louis Mourier's trolls from the French comic "Trolls de Troy" (example here), rather than keep him as the timid, kind-hearted chimpanzee of the original Hergé.

Here is what the yeti is saying: "Mille sabords!"

This is "A Thousand Portholes!" in French, and is a shortened form of "Mille millions de mille sabords!" (Ten Millions of Thousand Portholes!), something the Tintin character Captain Haddock said all the time as a curse in the original French version. A 'sabord', as I am led to understand, is a hole in the hull of old wooden ships through which the guns were fired.

In the English version, this bit of real nautical slang was changed to "Shiver me Timbers!".

So now you know.

Hey, if you've got a sketch blog, please consider making the theme "L'Abominable homme des neiges", and then send me a link. Would love to see what people come up with.