h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Fortunately, earning enough to ensure that you won't starve might give you entree into the emerging fat artist movement.

Maybe I'm just babbling.

Hello! There are some fat artists indeed. Me, I'm on the lean side. Artists can make money, but by basically going for commercial fads. Some are good enough to create their own fads, and then they make hundreds or thousands of painting all basically conforming to the fad. Really stereotyping themselves. Those ones make good money. But if you want to make unique, 'artistic' art … you're sheet out of luck, especially in South Africa. You'll be lucky to scrape by. In my comic, Iolanthe is that kind of artist, and her society is basically South Africa under a different name ...

Violet Flowers decided to change her name to Iolanthe.

Or the other way around! Iolanthe might use 'Violet Flowers' as a 'nom de plume' in my comic …

Anyways she's based on a real person, the artist/poet Breyten Breytenbach, whose wife is named Yolande, of which Iolanthe is an alternative form.

Yolande or Yolanda is a pretty name. I've never met anyone whose name was Iolanthe. In the Seventh Grade, my school glee club put on the Gilbert and Sullivan's "Iolanthe." The boy who played the title character was going through his voice change, so in one of his songs his voice would crack on the highest note, whereupon he would go down an octave. He seemed to be extremely embarrassed about this, but I could see nothing wrong about it. Performers are allowed to extemporize, and he had an attractive voice regardless of which register he was in.

There doesn't seem to be anyone IRL named Iolanthe!

I did the octave-jumping thing a lot in church, back when I went to church, when the psalms had parts either too high or too low for me...