Sorry about the delay – I was caught up in the storm on the Swedish west coast yesterday, and we had several power cuts, and I had to prioritize other things for once in my life. V;(oo);V
But then again, thanks to that trip, everyone who is near Gothenburg can go to Blå Stället in Angered and read the still unpublished next four pages of Driftwood in the comics exhibition in the main hallway. V^(oo)^V

The Neptune shipyard in Walker, Newcastle, was closed down in 1988. I might have chosen a less iconic shipyard for Willie’s dad’s workplace, but its location and the year it closed down fit perfectly for the story.

I’m not at all sure if the tower blocks in the Chandless estate have “prepay” heating — a system that’s still quite common in Britain, where you put coins in a box to pay for your heating. If it turns out it doesn’t, I can always say that they used to live somewhere else with prepay heating, and only moved to Chandless later when they eventually were granted a council flat …

Willie’s mum works for a certain oil company that I’m not going to name. Maybe she would later be involved in that corruption case in Iran 2002/2003 …?

For people “defecting” from behind the Iron curtain around that time (1978 or so), the Yugoslavian border to Austria, Italy or Greece was a popular way out, as it wasn’t as tightly guarded as other Eastern block borders (reference!).

“And that wasn’t even a very extreme version of that look”, Willie is thinking to herself.

There are of course lots of Indian restaurants in this area, not least by the Quayside below Tyne Bridge. This isn’t supposed to be any particular one, because it’s not so easy to find out what one of them might have looked like on the inside in 1998.
For starters, Willie’s mum is having Bhuna prawn on puri, and Willie is having vegetable samosa (deep fried pastries). Mmmm …

Flashbacks to chapter 6, page 24, and of course chapter 8, page 18. :3

Which brings me to …

* * *

Public announcement:

If I actually had anything in my real life that even faintly resembled the relationship between Willie and Aeron, I would not feel any need to draw comics about it.

(PEOPLE, STOP INSULTING MY CHARACTERS.) V`(oo)´V

That’s Grainger Town, the historic centre of Newcastle. They are walking down Grey Street, away from the monument to Earl Grey, a local boy during whose time as Prime Minister slavery was abolished in the British Empire, but also the middle class was divided and conquered away from the working class through the Reform Act 1832.

I just had to put one of those 1998 H&M ads with Gary Oldman in there (although I somehow, maybe not so surprisingly, managed to make him seem darker and hairier), because my aunt had a crush on him in those ads. My mum thought it was disturbing, because she only associated him with his character in True Romance … It’s maybe also a bit of a thank you for making Nil by Mouth, which for me hit a little bit too close to home.

* * *

Yesterday and today I took part in the 24 hour comics marathon. This year my sole mission was to draw as much as possible in that time frame. I am crazy busy these days, so I can’t clean and letter the resulting comic until maybe later next week …

Until then, here is the cover:

It’s a flashback to the time in Driftwood chapter 3 when they were looking for Eva, and it’s a bit unorthodox since it associates to both Driftwood and Eva’s solo comics (but it stays within the Driftwood universe). The story is rather subtle and you might only be able to enjoy it to its full extent / at all if you have read all the comics I have ever drawn. Mua hah haaa …

One of my 24 h comic making colleagues (middle aged German male) looked at the cover upside down and read the text out loud: “The Muggers … vs. Willie, Adolf –” — and when I started laughing my ass off he got flustered and excused himself since he wasn’t wearing his glasses … (Poor Aeron.)

Damn, they should all be wearing knives at all times. Having a knife at hand can mean the difference between life or death, or keeping or losing a limb, when you have all these lines all over the ship, threatening to snare you in the blink of an eye. (That’s yet another thing I’ve learned from Deadliest Catch, although it’s really quite obvious now that I think about it …)

As for why Willie’s dream seems to be so preoccupied with workplace safety … heh.

* * *

In my further research on the subject, I just discovered that I miscalculated in which form Willie is right now. When she came back to her world she started year 12, the first year of the final, not compulsory, two-year sixth form, which prepares you for university. So she actually has a bit over one and a half years of school left now …

Most larger sailing ships have safety nets on each side of the bowsprit, but for some reason I never drew any on the Eagle Ray, so I guess they’ll have to be without. Even with safety nets the bowsprit or any other exposed part of the ship is absolutely not a place where you should hang out by yourself. :<
When work needs to be done in such places, at least two people are assigned to do it together, so they can look after each other.

* * *

This all takes place in 1998, so I’m digging up all the memories I can recall from that time, from clothes and music to what leftist people were thinking and discussing back then.

As I’ve probably mentioned before, at the time I was living in the suburb Hjällbo outside Gothenburg and going to high school in Angered. The northeastern suburbs of Gothenburg are extremely segregated. I knew only a handful of ethnically Swedish people in the highrise buildings in my area, and they had been living there for a very long time. In our school, there was a clear division between the immigrant kids from our areas and the Swedish kids from the wealthier suburbs across the river. My class was a particularly extreme example: the kids from the Swede ‘burb Kärra would sit along one wall and the kids from Hjällbo and Hammarkullen would sit along the opposite wall, while the center of the classroom would gape empty.

On the night of October 29th-30th 1998, thirteen years ago today, 63 young people were killed and about 200 injured in an arson at a Halloween party. They were between 12 and 25 years old, and mainly from our neighbourhoods. Many of them were from my school, and one guy was from my maths class. His friend had been flirting with me, while I was more interested in this guy, who patiently ignored me, since he had a girlfriend already, as I later found out … I only realised that he had died on Tuesday after the fire, and it shocked me a bit, because I thought I had seen him in the hallway at school that Monday, glaring angrily at me for some reason.

My parents had just divorced. My father didn’t call us to ask how I was doing, or if I was even alive, and my mother took the opportunity to send an angry fax to his office, questioning his empathy and responsibility as a parent. He later mentioned that a colleague had “rescued” that fax from the machine before “anybody else” had seen it. And he said he hadn’t called because his sixth sense already told him I was fine.

… People sometimes classify Driftwood as magical realism, but to me it’s just realism. V`(oo)´V