I guess Willie isn’t the only one who is jealous … :3

I myself generally don’t appreciate it when artists apologise for their art, so I’m just going to mention casually that I had to keep up a pace of at least two pages per day when I was working on this scene. (Luckily they talk so much that the speech bubbles filled out a quite large part of the page … X_x)

I haven’t talked much about the “familiar” and “totem” animals of the shaman and wizard characters, and if I did, it might be a spoiler for the sequel. But Aeron’s is the wolf, so instinctively he might indeed perceive a doggie as a potential rival … :3

:3

You can visit this area in daytime in Google Street View … I have no idea what it really looked like in 1998, but decided to take some liberties here.
Wait, it’s actually 1999 now … Early January or so. As I recall that winter was mild (i.e. a normal 1990’s winter).

I added the two frames at the top of the page because I realised that I had not yet included a pony anywhere in this chapter. 🙁
Random horses were an essential part of central Gateshead in the 1990’s.

As far as I know, right now I’m in Stockholm. So this page was posted by the Comicpress robot!

The wondrous building they are hanging out at is the CWS Soap Works in Dunston, Gateshead. There really were rotting carcasses of boats in the river around it. Now it’s been demolished and replaced by condos, and the river has probably been cleaned up a bit.

I tried to avoid every part of Tyneside that could be seen in the cute film Purely Belter (2000), which was a bit too much plagued by the “OMG we have to put in all the famous landmarks!!” urge (especially the way the Angel of the North was inserted into the storyline was rather strange). But here I made an exception, because the soap works were too nice to not include.

Purely Belter focused more on the Dunston Staithes, anyway. Here are some screencaps:

The story is about two boys with no money and messed up family situations, who want to get football season tickets. They try all kinds of schemes to raise the money, and encounter both hilarities and tragedies.

Here they try to salvage sellable scrap from the mud by the soap works. (That’s the same spot that can be seen in panel 3 above!)

In the end the film totally fails to get the class perspective, and claims that the reason why some people are poor and messed up is because they didn’t have “a good dad”. Mistaking a symptom for the cause. Sigh.

Next weekend I will be at the comics festival in Stockholm selling books and zines. I still have to print Tunguska #10 (and especially I need to buy a new suitcase, since the old one got destroyed by all the trips hauling heavy books and zines).

Here is the cover. Sadly, Robinson’s pit bull doggie Emma has a kind of limited role in the comic, and her name isn’t even mentioned, but now she gets some extra exposure on the cover for this issue. :3