In late 2023, while I was halfway through drawing Naxman's Deep, it occurred to me that all of the Paperworld pictures up to that point had been set in the same 'relative present' timeframe. This was followed almost immediately by the thought that this whimsical little world probably has a suitably odd history, and it might be fun to draw a few snapshots of that. Thusly, in the opening months of 2024, I bought myself a little bottle of historically-authentic iron-gall ink (the same stuff they used to write Magna Carta, which is still legible centuries later), grabbed my A5 cartridge pad, and set about crafting a spin-off series which I dubbed Paperworld Yesteryears.
The first half-dozen or so ideas all came to me in one go, albeit in varying degrees of completeness, and some of these got drawn, in no particular order except what happened to tickle my fancy, over the next few months. One aspect which I particularly enjoyed was the adaptation of the usual Paperworld style to allude to various historical styles of illustration: within the first two instalments, the series had already lurched from a pastiche of hagiographic mediaeval portraiture to something approximating Victorian pulp sci-fi, while pigeons and snails (both of which seem to keep sneaking into my work somehow) had already found their way into the eclectic mix.
While all of the other drawings are shown from an 'omniscient narrator' perspective, I like to think of the Yesteryears as being approximations of various historical artworks which exist in-universe. That sketch of St Shrove for example, cowpats and all, is safely filed in the basement archives of some library or museum, perhaps just out of sight off the edge of the page in one of the main-series Papertowns pictures.
