A British reader expressed surprise at the fact that there was a working lift in the building in the beginning of this chapter, so now they are all broken down in this end of the building …

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Against all odds, I actually finished drawing the comic the other day. Now I just have to letter and edit the book, and it looks like that should very well get done in time for the file delivery date to the printer. So, yes, there will be a Swedish Driftwood book at the end of April. V*(oo)*V
(That book will only have the main story, because the short stories are too weird. I’ll make a separate Swedish book with short stories and extra artwork next year or so.)

Last night Ilan and I celebrated the feat a little with sushi … I got kappamaki + avocadomaki and then even more avocadomaki at Musashi (best sushi in town :3).
Yeah …

Yeeaah … Miss Piggerson in Berlin!

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Here is a cute website I found about Gateshead local history: gateshead-history.com

Local patriotism at its best … :3

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As for how it’s going with the deadline for the book:

I ignore my brain most of the time and just draw the next page. When it gets too whiny I tell it that we could always potentially make a director’s cut in the zine publication (and the English book).

I took some liberties here. Let’s assume that maybe Willie goes to the Thomas Hepburn Community School. At least today it’s specialised in maths and science, and it’s not so far from where she lives. It’s far enough so she’d have to take a bus there, though. I’ll probably never know how the (school?) bus lines went in east Gateshead in 1998, so let’s just pretend that there was one that went along Carville Street, and then along Sunderland road past Fox Street, and ended up near her school at some point.

Entire neighbourhoods in that area were demolished in the late 90’s and early 00’s. The buildings in the two first panels of course don’t exist anymore. During that period of time, there was extensive redevelopment of East Gateshead, perhaps turning it from this to something better, or gentrifying away large parts of the original residents after having let their neighbourhoods go to hell on purpose, depending on who you ask. (Here is an interesting paper (pdf warning!) about art and gentrification in Gateshead.)
To my great joy, a massive photo documentation was made at that time, involving the residents of the affected areas themselves, and a small part of the photos can be viewed on Flickr. (I used two of them as reference here.)

The Thomas Hepburn Community School was named after the Thomas Hepburn who founded the Northern Union of Pitmen in 1831 and fought for miners’ rights. (More about that here.) Nowadays it seems to be a pretty decent school (with its own special blogs about science and maths that are disturbingly cutesy in a somehow typically British way), and has a brand new building. But there is a facebook page that suggests that things were a bit different around the time Willie would have gone there …

I shamelessly copied the maths from K.A. Stroud’s Engineering Mathematics, the section described as “what they should have taught you in sixth form but probably didn’t”. I am distressed that I used to know this stuff but now I struggle with it.

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It feels a bit weird to do so much research on a place that I have never visited. If/when I go to Gateshead for real, I’ll probably have insanely emotional reactions to everything and start crying and laughing all at the same time when I see the Chandless tower blocks (if they haven’t been demolished yet by then) …

I made a Tumblr for Driftwood! I’ll post some background information, sketches and reference images there, and also update notices about the comic, so the Tumblr fiends can get alerted about updates there. Lots of doggie related posts, as well … :o3

I finally caught a cold that I’d been fighting off for a week. Now I have a fever and feel like crap, so I am severely doubting if I can make the deadline for having the “real book” printed in time for the Stockholm comics festival … V>(oo)<;V
My self-preserving instincts are reassuring me that it’d be better anyway to first publish the last chapter as a zine, and collect it all in a book a bit later, not as both a zine and a book at the same time as I’d been supposing. Also, it would be really terrible if the quality would suffer if I’d have to rush it. Hmm …

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I want to recommend the documentary film / video zine Hold Fast, about “maniac sailors, anarchist castaways and the voyage of the S/V Pestilence”. It’s about a bunch of people who fix up a decrepit fiberglass sailing boat and sail around in the Caribbean with it, living off the fat of the sea, and being die-hard sailors in these times when yachting relies a bit too much on motors. It’s a cute and quite delightful film. :3

I’ve been scanning and retouching all the Driftwood pages for the upcoming book, and it’s kind of funny, or distressing, that I used to draw much more neatly in the early chapters. Hardly any lines ever go further or stop sooner than they were supposed to. O_o
Now I draw much better but also much sloppier, because I know I can always fix anything in Photoshop later …

I have to finish both Driftwood and a story for Swedish Comic Sin (also Driftwood-related :3) until the end of this month. I’ve taken two months off from all dayjobs for this period of time, so I can focus only on these comics. The deadline is a bit tight and it’s a little bit stressful, but mostly I just feel like I could get used to this. V^(oo)^V

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Oh, and I totally forgot to mention that I drew a title page for this chapter a while ago. Whee …