M*D BL*DE (random pages) (Patreon)

Well, here's a proper blast from the past!

In one way or another, Mad Blade was my "headliner" project for something nearing 10 years - starting in my last year of school, continuing throughout all my university years, and finally dying down sometime around the release of Undertow in 2014, this goddamn edgelord Steampunk Alternative History Inquisition  webcomic saw half a dozen different iterations - including FOUR full-blown relaunches with slightly more intelligible rewrites and complete redraws (third version seeing the light of day as my very first, hastily put together zine). The most current - at least art-wise - version (as presented here) went on for a couple of years as a weekly webcomic in Russian, nearing 120 pages by the time when it was finally cancelled forever. By that point my own old writing - and overall story that I had planed - became completely embarrassing and unbearable to me. Still, a year or two after that "forever" (haha), I made one desperate final attempt to reshuffle and rewrite the existing pages into a more readable manner, partially translating them to English.

And then, I was finally able to let it go. Some of the characters that are still near and dear to me have since migrated to other projects, and a couple of nice plot points will probably re-emerge in Chernobyl (if I ever get to finish THAT fucking thing -_-), but as a whole, this whole Mad Blade is my biggest lesson in how ambitions, abilities and laboriousness enter a very unfair chase when you start a personal project  - especially if you're a literal baby fresh from art school.

So: don't you ever dare to regret not being able to read the dang thing, or lament  it being discontinued, but also - please enjoy the art! ^___^