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The Gold Digger color series starts out big. Three multi-issue stories flow directly into each other before there’s any sort of break. In the middle of this, Brianna, Julia, and company finally return from Jade after being missing for several issues… and no one’s talking about what happened.

The third part of the lead stories features one of my favorite names from Perry, Uhm Di Turrok, The Halls of the Extremely Dead. This is a bigger, badder, trap-filled complex (and poor Stripe gets pretty beat up!)… that Gina eventually gets through, and the guardian of the place tells her to come back in one year, when she’ll be ready to learn the secrets of what all this is protecting. (Now, how can he know ahead of time just when everything will be right…?)

My understanding is that Perry started working out a really big story about the time he did Beta. And this volume has a lot of groundwork for that story. And even then, it draws on earlier bits. Gina is getting hints of the mystery of the nomad artificers, who date from the beginnings of the universe, and first came up in the limited series.

After that winds down, we finally find out what happened on Jade: Julia’s nemesis, G’nolga held Brittany hostage to force her to throw a match and lose honor. Much of the rest of this volume deals with the Arms-Master tournament, as she tries to reclaim her title. It’s the biggest story yet, all on Jade, as there are plans afoot to effectively take over Jade by use of little-noticed privileges that come with the title “Arms-Master of Jade”. The final few issues break up into a couple of smaller stories, and the first half of a two-parter.

Physically, this volume is a bit smaller than the previous ones. The page count of the color series (understandably) went down to 24 pages, so this volume is a mere ~450 instead of 600, and is shrunk a little from standard comics size (~9.5″ instead of  ~10.5″ tall), which does occasionally make some of the lettering a bit small. Though the paper quality is much improved the binding is iffier; my copy of this tends to creak and pop alarmingly, and a couple of pages are partially lose.

Overall, this is very solid volume (well, solid story) of Gold Digger, with over half dedicated to one really well-done story. There’s been a couple of printings, I don’t know how they differ, if there’s any real differences between them. So while it’s out of print, it doesn’t seem that hard to get.