The fourth Astorial Story from 1986 now recoloured. Published in October 2024.
I personally like this one for the story-within-a-story structure, where there’s about two or maybe three interlocked tales folding into each other. However, Italo Calvino I ain’t, that’s for sure! I can’t remember exactly when I read Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, but it might have influenced me somehow. The arbitrary style of hopping from one absurd thing to another is just as much influenced by Monty Python TV from the 1970s. On the other hand, I like the way the main events of the story are joined up by water in one form or another. Normally in the Hotel it’s corridors that suggest the narrative joins, but this time it’s a canal.
The “teaser” for this story is that there’s a murder mystery to be solved in its pages. Who or what caused the death of Elizabeth Innsbruck? Likewise, the tragic ending of Rubelia Florenzo, apparently not unrelated? Well, that’s what I used to say. Now it’s evident that I’ve buried the clues so deeply that even I’m not sure who the killer may be, if indeed there is one.
Yellow is one prominent colour. The original photocopied booklet used paper which photocopier shops identified as “gold”. In adding my hand-separated colours and halftones, I had a lot of fun with 100% Yellow, to say nothing of the zing and zang you get when red halftones are layered on top. As usual I have added detail scans that show the grain of the colours. You can also see perhaps the original paste-up marks, scanned from the artwork; my original pages are full of cut-up panels and TippEx. I wanted to show these errors in their entirety. They look even better with colours on top of them.
16pp A5 comic in full colour costs £3.00 – prices below include postage and packing
