Bonus
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Where does the name “Black Orchestra” come from?
The name of the organization that Cordo and his colleague start up, the Black Orchestra, was inspired by the name of a spy network set up by Stalin during World War II in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, in anticipation of a German invasion of Russia. Stalin’s network was called the Red Orchestra (source: David Owen, Hidden Secrets, Firefly Books, 2002, p. 45).
In the script’s earliest versions, the group started by Cordo was called “the Organization.” The simplicity of the name was meant to evoke the project’s low profile. However, when we came across a reference to the Red Orchestra, it was too tempting to give Cordo’s group a more colourful name. And speaking of colour, we chose black for two reasons: it’s used to designate secret operations or black ops, and black is very rarely associated with the good guys.
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Sometimes dumb luck is just dumb
We want to avoid situations where our heroes stumble upon illicit transactions, completely by “accident.” It’s far too common in comics that, no matter where the hero goes, there happens to be a villain with a plan. We want our heroes’ missions or adventures to be based on information that was painstakingly gathered on the ground, sometimes over several long months. That implies the existence of an infrastructure and a lot of agents who are gathering and analyzing information.
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Axioms
You can’t launch a project like this one without having at least some pretension. We don’t consider ourselves comic experts, but we know enough to feel free to play with the genre’s limits (not to say its clichés). So when we started the project, we determined a series of principles or tenets that would order the world of our stories. We’ll be describing these axioms in coming posts.
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Welcome
After months of hard work, our webcomic has finally come to life. We hope you’ll find the characters and their lives so compelling that you’ll want to come back regularly to escape your day-to-day life and immerse yourself in theirs. Our fondest wish is that the number of readers will continue to grow, so the adventure can keep going for a long time.
Think of this section as the Bonus Features on a DVD. It offers information that will help you better understand the inspiration behind some of the storylines, the narrative processes or the characters. Look for periodic updates of these features.
