No chapter today — instead, a small detour backstage.

The Tapas account has been briefly hijacked by the consultant (yes, the one who insisted “we need Lay-lo, no one else” - see below) to share a few pieces of early history. 

The thing is, October happens to be a special month: both Gloria Mu and Lay-lo celebrate their birthdays, which feels fitting for The Last Sun, a story that’s always been about duality — word and image, myth and memory.

And Lay-lo's birthday is tomorrow! A full post will follow on Patreon, with her bio and maybe even some photos — if she allows.

Today take a look at the very first drafts of the comic and read Gloria Mu’s own note from December 2023 about how this collaboration began — against all logic and with plenty of irony.

Gloria Mu:

Can’t believe it, but apparently the Game goes on (yeah, that tune refuses to die), and we’ve actually got ourselves a mangaka.  Lay-lo, a Russian comic artist whose series No_way I genuinely love — fantasy with vampires, elves (and, at times, unicorns) done in that classic, originally Asian canon of horny high-schoolers and small-town melodrama. It’s light, ironic enough so your teeth don’t ache from the fluff, and drawn with spark and motion. That’s what hooked me back then: the art. The comic has rhythm, a sense of space, and a visual flow — from caricature to near-realism where it counts. You’ll ask, why didn’t we go to Lay-lo right away? Why did we wander for three years like the Little Match Girl, back and forth? Honestly — I never even considered that kind of collaboration. The Last Sun was written from the start as something visual, meant for comics, but in a completely different canon — seinen. Think huge guys with huge muscles and huge axes, double-page battle spreads, the whole heroic, painfully grandiose package. Lay-lo’s style, on the other hand, is light, sly, ironic, graphically rich but still soft — even her fight scenes look like ballet. And I was, frankly, wondering: where are my roughneck brawlers from The Sun, and where’s ballet? If not for our stubborn consultant who insisted on Lay-lo, we’d have missed our chance entirely. But now look at these first sketches she sent! The one with little seagulls is my favourite. Check out those beautifully untroubled faces. Adorable. Street punks in back alleys would envy faces like that. All the pomp just blew off the heroes, and what’s left are — well, regular people. Conceptually, it’s a different story altogether, but all the more interesting for it. Because in the end, it’s not superheroes dropping in on blue helicopters who do great deeds — it’s, yeah, ordinary people…