Hmmm, what to say about this one. I feel like a lot of what Byron goes into here about his weapons of choice, I’ve already discussed in the annos or treated as fairly obvious. I doubt I need to explain why Byron gives an abbreviated account of Bayen and Brayen’s demises, for instance, which we would shortly be expanding upon in the main text. As with many things about Byron, the short answer is berserk-related trauma… but because of what we’d soon be doing to him in the main canon, we show him as pretty put-together here, for contrast.

Another year’s arrived, and I have to say I’m still not feeling the drive to work on a fresh comics project. That is weird for me to say, considering I once planned to be doing nothing but comics scriptwriting into my eighties. I’ve got creative stuff keeping me busy… I’m reworking Shakespeare’s Trump in light of recent events, may have another fictive exercise out next month, and am puttering away hard on a big crossword project I hope to have out before summer. And I do still edit Gisele Lagace’s comic and her various side projects, contributing dialogue here and there. And then there’s some editing for Seven Seas manga translations. So I’m not completely “out.”

But scripting a new comics series of my own, the desire isn’t there. Even though I feel like I have the knowledge to do a better job than ever before, my passion has shifted to exploring other areas, other media. Maybe that’ll have changed by the time these annotations wrap up, and maybe not. But one thing I’ve learned the hard way is that you can’t force the muse too far, no matter what you think the audience would like to see from you.