You thought I'd given up, right? Admit it!! Just kidding.

Previous installments can be viewed here: start, second quarter, third quarter. Now we've arrived at the fourth quarter (these are not mathematically exact quarters, you nitpicks!), which ends the first chapter of the story.


 

  

There, that's it. Now what do you think? (I think it's a tad boring but you have to start somewhere. I like spreading clues about future excitement, but I'm not sure if they are enough.)

Actually, the *real* story starts a few months earlier, when the characters get to know each other in Paris for the first time. But Paris is hard to draw, and I decided to jump ahead in time and start with the "swimsuit special" instead. This creates some problems, because there are things happening in Paris (April-May 1920) which cause some things to happen in a certain way in Ginestra (June 1920). If the reader graciously accepts some unexplained elements (they are not too many), I'll do my best to smoothly include them without explaining too much. This will create a chronologically interesting situation in the future, but don't worry, I'll keep this Goldenbird neatly linear.

Coming this far is an achievement for me, personally. I definitely want to go on soon  - now the introduction is over and we can advance to the action! Trouble is, this world is very absorbing. I feel that i could spend hours and hours (often far too late at night) sketching out characters and dialogue and researching landscapes, design and architecture.

If you haven't read enough comics yet, check out Yuji Iwahara's Koudelka and King of Thorns. That's a mangaka, ooh boy. He is very economical with the screentones and puts more effort in the inking, creating depth and sculpting shadows the old-fashioned way. Some scenes - to be honest, a lot - are eerily reminiscent of Mike Mignola's artwork in Hellboy. No harm in that, but it makes me wonder if that particular "amekomi" is more famous in Japan than other foreign works. Maybe it's the movie, maybe it's an artist's inside tip, a bit like Moebius. Going back to Iwahara-sensei, his story lines are perhaps not the most unique scifi-with-a-horror-twist material (or possibly the other way around?), but the pretty pictures make up for it. (That's my gripe with Hellboy, too. Demons and Nazis and ancient soul-sucking tentacles, we've seen it before - but not in such an appealing graphic package...)

I made some gag strips with Hitler and Goebbels when I was a teenager, but I can promise you that I won't have any Nazis in my comics - not in this one, anyway. Oh okay, maybe a few proto-Fascists. Demons are also overrated, but if you count them metaphorically, you could find quite a few. And tentacles... let's say I'm working on it.