I think you did well.
There's a niche community ("scanlation") adjacent to mine which involves scanning and translating graphic novels, in which it's almost a nonstop process of making these types of decisions. But even amongst professionals, it's kind of amazing how often they'll make very mediocre of awkward translations.

OTOH, if you've ever read some of the Asterix books in English, that's an example of the absolute cream of the crop of translation, which does an amazing job even preserving tricky puns and cultural references across languages.

Btw, I have a folder pretty-well stocked with high-quality Jucika fan art, and I was thinking of dripping such content here, except that I spotted rule #2, 'comics should be a full story.' Unfortunately, most of the fan-art ones are single panel. :S

One odd thing here is the sun is moving right to left, as though she were in the southern hemisphere.

Literally its "Jucika and the first sunbathing" but i think its okay to take that little liberty in translating it as how you did.

I also yearn to catch some sun when I'm stuck working.

I love her Morpheus sunglasses.

as always, im totally at a loss as to what im looking at. this comic artist really puzzles me

Have you tried DeepL for translations? I find it to be much better than Google translate for getting the context right, at least for European languages. Although, if you use a camera to scan and translate, I do not know if DeepL has such a feature since I have never used it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator