This has been my favorite story all along. It was a chance to show a full action sequence and put all my favorite things from martial arts: techniques, theory... and precious insights.

So I wanted this story to look perfect! This gives me a chance to show to you a bit of the backstage process when choosing an artist.







Before discovering the brilliant Verry from House of Imagi, two more artists had submitted test pages for Hidden Truths.

Here are these samples and a look at the backstage process of artist selection.

I already had imagined KoL's look in my mind, and the styles of these samples were not what envisioned for this story.

And finally this was Verry's submition that totally amazed me by it's awesome dynamism!





The astoute reader will notice that Verry's take on David is the attire of Berakhiah. Verry at that time wasn't familiar with the series and wanted to show his capabilities. His take was very inspired and I decided that we had to use that attire look on another character. Hence Berakhiah's suit.

And here is again the final result after many many many rounds of revisions...





Aside Verry's beautiful style, I feel compelled to commend him on his professionalism and dedication. Drawing the martial arts techniques correctly took great patience and endless revisions, which he was eager to do to get a perfect result!

On the theory of martial arts I want to explain what would otherwise pass unnoticed. In the final page David and Saul face off on a mental level, shifting in turns through various battle stances. These stances are called "kamae" in japanese, and are the five stances of the Gogyo Setsu. Each stance represents a basic element (fire, water, wood, metal, earth) and thus they follow a circular order of one having the advantage over the other.

So in the following strip, while they had both begun from Chudan (water), David lowers his sword thus changing to Gedan (earth) and then Saul correctly adjusts to Hasso (wood).





They correctly follow the cycle, from Hasso (wood) to Waki (metal), to Jodan (fire), until they reach Chudan (water) again, from where the cycle started.

This is a personal tribute to Iaido, an art I deeply appreciate.

As for the precious insights... I will let the following story elaborate on that, where Kish and David will have a personal master-student discussion.

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