A lad in his cave

On the whole I've avoided putting up any sneak peeks from the last few chapters of the Winter book to avoid spoilers. This flashback to Jack's boyhood appears late on, but was originally intended to occur early in the story - it just got squeezed out with all the set-up we had to do there. It explains why Jack is remarkably well-equipped for dealing with mythological occurences despite having grown up as a working class lad in South London.

Technical note: the colors muddied up (above) when I cropped this for posting, and don't do justice at all to the subtleties of Nikos's original coloring. That seems to be an artifact of exporting JPEGs from Serif PagePlus, which we use to put the comic together, and then editing in Microsoft Picture Manager. You can see that the version below is much better; I edited that in Photoshop, which handled the conversion to standard RGB much better. Don't ask me why PagePlus didn't export in a standard format, though. I'm only the writer so I don't mind parading my ignorance of graphics technology - Leo will fix it but he's currently on Dartmoor.