Update notice, January 1st 2012:
I am entertaining guests, so unfortunately I can’t draw the next page yet … It will be delayed a couple of days. V`(oo)´V

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In the last panel, Willie is walking up Bottle Bank, with Tyne Bridge to the left. Today the street is a bit less picturesque, with a massive Hilton and some fancy new apartment complex in place of that empty lot and those old buildings. :o/
Here are some photos of the street in 2001, and here is an aerial view from one of the Tyne Bridge towers from 1997. iSee Gateshead has many more historical photos.

I’m a bit frustrated, because part of me wants to show as much as possible of Gateshead the way it was in 1998, but it’s not easy to find enough reference to portray the lost places accurately … V`(oo)´V

They are walking towards Swing Bridge, which swings horizontally out of the way to allow bigger ships to pass. It’s on the oldest bridge site between Newcastle and Gateshead. Swing Bridge was built in 1876, and before it there were the old Tyne Bridges of 1781 and 1270, and the Roman Pons Aelius is thought to have been in the same place.
Since the new Tyne Bridge, completed in 1928, Swing Bridge has seen much less use, and in the 1990’s, the Gateshead streets leading up from it — once the main streets of the town — were very much in decay.

Oh, and by the way … You should look forward to the erotic comics anthology Swedish Comics Sin 3. Just saying … :3

I suspect that Willie just looked at all the courses available at Newcastle University and chose the one that she was the most okay with, even though she isn’t really sure if she wants to go to university at all. But according to her parents she has to go to university. Here’s some information about the course … To qualify, she is focusing especially on maths and physics now that she’s in sixth form.

Actually it looks pretty interesting, and sometimes, in weak moments, I wish I was 18 again and would choose to study engineering. But then I go “NyeaaoooOOOOOOOUuu!!!” and get a grip again. V^(oo)^;V

This year’s 24 h comic! Read the whole thing here.

It was a bit traumatic to research the fashion of 1979 (panel 2) and 1982 (panel 4) …

The story with Willie’s uncle came to me very early on in the creation of Driftwood, probably inspired by some classic cold war stories. While here in Eastern Germany we get reminded constantly about how lethal the border guards were, I had to double-check if you could really get shot dead on the Czechoslovakian border, too. The US army in Bavaria observed that the Czechoslovak border guards around this time were less violent than the GDR border guards, but there were still incidents like the death of Johann Dick, so this story is fully plausible.

The Czech border to Bavaria for a large part runs through hills with spruce forest. During the cold war there was a signal fence a couple of kilometers inland, and another fence and a patrolled strip at the actual border. That fence was about 100 m inland, and there were guards and guard doggies (apparently Wolfdogs) on the outside.
One fun fact is that after 1968, in a gesture of infinite mercy, they replaced the 5000 V electric fence at the border with a double wire mesh fence …

While I did research this somewhat, I am now wondering why I did not draw T-shaped fence posts in the first panel. WTF. I shall return to redraw it. V`(oo)´V