Initially, the plan was to always publish D-Gruppe: Zeitgeist as a 50+ pp comic album. However,as with a lot of plans, things began to get complicated.
Firstly, as this is an old strip from the early 1990s, it has to be cleaned-up somewhat. It was drawn when preparing a comic involved photocopying pages and adjusting copiers took out all those shadow-lines from paste-ups. Even using differing settings a scanner will pick up everything -its why they exist!
With work on lettering The Cross-Earths Caper, not to mention having to draw the final parts of The Jungle Planet and Xendragon and lettering those, I could not give us the time it would take to clean 50+ pages.
There is another problem. Over 50pp would mean the title would need to be priced at around £7.00.
Splitting the story into 22 and 23 pages with the final 12 pages in issue 4 (with back-up strips) means that the cover price is much, much lower.
It also means that I can concentrate on what happens in D-Gruppe: The Resurrection. That may turn into a bumper issue so that all the old stripwork is done with by issue 6 and everything then falls back into post Return Of The Gods continuity.
Will I answer the question of what happened to the D-Gruppe members who vanished while chasing a UFO? No. That will be another bumper issue, possibly for January, 2012.
As a little taster, I’ve added (below) three of the rough pages. These might not appear in the final book. Or, if they do, they’ll be drastically altered as they are some ten years old now!
And what is this other team of German characters that include Wildemann, Leere and Donar? Ahh, more of that in the post Return of the Gods issues!
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