The Night After Axemas Annotated 1
There’s a bit of a meta-joke to these Axemas stories, in that they superficially resemble filler. We certainly weren’t above posting actual filler when we needed a break but didn’t want to interrupt our streak of regularly scheduled updates (which remains unbroken up to the present, allowing for short-term glitches we fix within the day).
Axemas stories are like filler, except they’re filler that we generally worked about as hard to produce as we did on the “real” comics. This page goes down easy, but it’s got a lot of scene-setting to do, all building up to the nice irony of describing an old man snug in his bed as “Grayl the Gravedigger.” That appellation, it’s implied, is one that fit him well when he was young.
Elsewhere in Guilded Age, we’ve dwelt on the poor options for adventurers, particularly when they start to age. Fewer than half, it seems, have lived to retire without getting into some other field, and fewer than that would live comfortably enough to give (not inexpensive) gifts to their grandkids. But there are always those who defy the odds.
(Best not to wonder what happened to Grayl’s grandsons’ parents, though.)
