My wife is a gardener and recently she has been making war in our backyard against a weed called “oxalis.”
It’s sometimes called “creeping oxalis” because it can creep across a yard if gone unchecked; it also has a pretty little flower when it blooms. Some folks like oxalis and let it grow in their yards. Apparently it’s been growing in ours but I didn’t know that until my wife declared war on it.
That’s the thing about weeds though – they are only “weeds” to those who deem them such. My wife has grand ambitions for our new backyard however, and oxalis is not part of the program. So she dug deep to the root of it and got it all out.
While she was digging, I was drawing and the pages I was penciling during her excavation featured a slew of new characters. Bounty hunters in fact!
As Admiral Piett would say…
But all good bounty hunters do need names and as I was looking over this motley crew and listening to my wife thrash at the weeds in the backyard, I thought it might be fun to name them after weeds.
In my original sketch of the bounty hunters I had given them other random names: Costa, Rufus, Quintus, Drust, and Fergus. All Roman names because they had been tracking Boudi all the way from Britannia. That’s how they appear in the script.
The more I’ve drawn them in the story though, the more I’m thinking I may update their names to align with different weeds. I particularly like the word “oxalis” and think it could work well for the big guy (“Ox” for short works nicely).
Something about weeds and bounty hunters goes together nicely too. Like weeds, bounty hunters show up when you don’t want them to. And like weeds they can be a nuisance. At the same time, they are just trying to get by in the world and this is the life they’ve chosen. Bounty hunters and weeds are morally ambiguous and if you don’t clear them out by the root they’ll keep coming back.
So, with that in mind I asked my wife for other names of weeds and she pointed them all out to me in our backyard. I settled on a few that sounded like they could work…
I’m not 100% settled on all of these, so you if you know of a good weed name put it in the comments. We’ll see which ones win out in the end.
“Oxalis” is a keeper though, that’s my wife’s favorite.
– Lex
