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Guard Story No.8 - - A Guard Tale - A Study in Concentration. A pre-Guard adventure for Albert set during the Great War.

***Please note that I am using a standard thumbnail image for all the full size pictures on this page. This is purely being done to save myself sometime.***

story © Adrian Banfield
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story © Adrian Banfield
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story © Adrian Banfield
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story © Adrian Banfield
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story © Adrian Banfield
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story © Adrian Banfield
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Did I say that a story in the Guard Tales series would be no more than two pages? Er, well, I lied. The above story ran to six pages, but it was such a good story that I didn't want to truncate it. The story is set during The Great War (which in Albert's world ran from 1930 to 1935), in neutral Turkey. It wasn't easy to recreate Istanbul, but looking at photographs of the city, the minarets dominated the skyline, so I added some to my skyline. I wanted a tram in the story as background and ended up making a San Francisco tram (from the Lego Adventure Book volume 1 by Megan H. Rothrock), designed by Craig Mandeville. My thanks.

I also wanted to add some local information about Istanbul, so the information about some Istanbullus being ferry spotters is accurate. The Turks call their ferries vapur (without the letter 'e'), after the French word for a steam powered ferry, vapeur. (From Pamuk, Orhan Istanbul: Memories and the City.- 2005).

I was hoping to convert my tram to be more like a Turkish tram, but as is the case when I make a Lego model, I always seem to be missing several all important bricks, in this case rounded red bricks. Eagle eyed readers will notice that the first tram is red and white, whilst the second one (seen briefly later in the story), is all red. This was due to me obtaining red bricks which I replaced the white ones with. Although, I still haven't got the rounded red bricks yet.

When thinking about storylines I sometimes tend to think 'A film' feature. Tens of extras, a big landscape, special effects and so on. I then come back to Earth with a bump, when I realise that I've got to covert the ideas in my mind into reality. And I then end up with a 'B film' feature story. But I'm quite pleased with this story.

This story features a younger, less experienced Albert, who through this adventure learns to use his brain to solve the problem and his brawn less.

The station platform sign for this Guard Tales story, is a based on a Turkish railways station platform sign. The photographs I viewed were in black and white, so I'm not sure what the colour was for the border surrounding the platform name. I decided on a dark blue border colour.

text © Adrian Banfield, 2015; artwork © D.C. Thomson Co. Ltd.