Welcome to ACES WEEKLY Volume 46, Week Three!

This week we present the third episode of Black, the extraordinary series we began in Aces Weekly, Volume 43, which we continued into Volume 45.  This time it's a shorter installment than the previous two, and when Anthony Smith told me it was going to be a 4-weeker instead of the 7-weeker I expected, I questioned why.  I was told  that it was because the four weeks completed it with a kind of  ' ending '.  Like an idiot I asked why another ' ending ' couldn't be arranged, and it was only slowly that I realized the obvious fact of it all - that the story of Tobias Taitt in Black is a real story and the truth of what happened to him - and what Anthony referred to as an ' ending ' in the progression of the strip was just a natural pause of a real narrative, the ' ending ' of a period of events, not a changeable situation that can be ordered to suit like a convenient fiction.  And so, much as we all might wish the Tobias who inhabits the pages of Black to get a better break, or evolve somehow to make that happen for himself, we're stuck with seeing how it all panned out for him the way it did, for better or worse, in the future episodes of his story.  And there's no point in us all crossing our fingers.  Let's just hope he has luck... : )

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