After working hard all week, I jumped into bed for an early night so that I'd have lots of energy for the big Saturday, which in addition to the Free Comic Book Day event, hosted by Halifax's own famous Strange Adventures Comic Book Shops, I sell T&K books and posters down at the Halifax Farmer's Market, which means getting up at around 6:00 AM on Saturday. So with my head buzzing with excitement for all the things starting on Saturday, I managed to not get a wink of sleep that night. This was partly due to my normally working through nights, but also because my mind was racing in circles. Oh boy.

The Farmer's Market is always wonderful. I have a table which sits between an organic meats and vegetables vendor run by an amazing mother & daughter duo who are two of the happiest people I have ever met. (Meagan gave me a little ball of sheep's wool from her new herd which had been sheered the day before. I'd never handled raw sheep's wool before, and it's quite amazing stuff. Smells like barnyard but in a good way. Both Meagan and her mom blinked at me when I said that, insisting that in large quantities it was actually quite stinky.) To the other side of my table is a French Chocolatier. Mmm. Our little room in the labyrinthine market, (which is hosted in several giant rooms and hallways and dead-end corridors of a stone and mortar series of heritage buildings. It's one of the most beautiful farmer's markets I've seen), also includes a crepe maker, and a bread maker. You don't even have to leave our little section of the market to find breakfast. Set in the middle of all that food and chocolate is me with my posters and books. This earns me some odd, but generally favorable looks from curious patrons. (Update: A really neat woman took a couple of pictures of me and the market and posted them on her blog. Being a terrible photographer myself, I don't bother much trying to get pictures of any of the places I visit, so this is a treat! Go check out her blog while it's fresh.)

Anyway, my morning was typical, which means to say it included several cool encounters with fascinating people. A woman started telling me about Japanese brush painting, and I sat her down with me to give an impromptu lesson with the brush pen I have. I learned how to paint bamboo. Keen.

Coffee and the up-beat market air carried me through in high spirits to lunch time, at which point a mysterious scroll appeared from out of nowhere on my table.

No, really. It just appeared.

On top of that, there was an extra layer of coolness, (if such a thing is possible), because I'd only just finished drawing the final chaper of the new 100 page T&K book, (due for release next month. More on that in a bit), which features front and center just such a mysterious scroll-of-coolness which appears when least expected and at the time which is most perfect. Which is to say, I thought I was done with mysterious scrolls-of-coolness, but there one was looking right at me. Excellent!

--What happened was this: I'd left the table for about five minutes, and when I got back, I discovered the little scroll bound in a hair elastic. Upon opening it I found a neat sketch by hot new comics talent, Faith Erin Hicks. I blinked at this, and thought two things. The first was, "Wow. Faith sure is good with a pen!" and second, "Hm. This must have found its way down here somehow from the Free Comic Book Day panel of sketch artists. --Maybe it was delivered as a subtle gesture to remind me that I'm supposed to be up there right now doing sketches also. Hmm. Whatever the case, I'd better pack up and get moving."

At which point a young man showed up and introduced himself. "Hi. I'm Dan." --One of those awesome guys who you instantly connect with. He's a comics guy as well, but with no clan or tribe of his own. He explained how he had a huge stock of art supplies which he never used and how he wished that he knew some other cartoonists. --A story I knew well. Having other cartoonists in one's life is always a great way to fire up your own enthusiasm for the medium; working in a vacuum isn't nearly so rewarding, and indeed, I'd been openly wishing to the universe at large to meet some other cartoonists partly for this same reason. Living alone in a bachelor apartment with your drafting board is great from certain perspectives, but I'd been really pining for some artistic company to groove with. I was very happy to meet Dan.

So I invited Dan to come with me to the Free Comic Book Day event, because that's where he could meet all kinds of like minds. He offered to help carry some of my kit up the four steep blocks from the harbor front, for which I was very grateful, and so off we went, chatting happily. My mind was well on its way to turning into utter mush from lack of sleep, but that didn't seem to matter. It was a really, really good Saturday, and sleep-slurred speach was forgiven. We soon found ourselves at the comics event. I was roundly greeted by the hosts and by Mike White, (another awesome comics guy, who got out of animation and is getting into comics, --the exact reverse of what we thought was going to happen. I will have to tell you all more about that later). I parked myself at the end of the long row of artists, each of whom sat before a line of people who were eagerly waiting for free sketches.

I spied Faith down the row and excused myself to inquire about the mysterious scroll. She blinked up from the sketch she was doing, (she had one of the longest lines of eager people at the event), and seemed as confused as me. "What?" she asked. "Gee. I really liked that sketch. So the guy I did it for just abandoned it? Aw. That's too bad. He must have forgotten it and walked away. Oh well." Then she returned to sketching.

I went back to my spot at the long table and broke out my pen kit when Faith appeared again beside me.

"Excuse me, but you said your name was Mark. Do you mean Mark Oakley?"

"Um, Yeah."

"Oh my god! I had no idea! Wow! You're like one of my favorite artists!"

"No kidding? Wow, I think your work is awesome as well!"

"You DO? Really? Wow!"

We sort of gushed at each other for a minute and then had to get back to sketching. I saw Dan over to one side sketching on his little computer-I-phone-blackberry-thingy, and remembered that I'd offered to find a spot for him at the artists table. My mind was seriously beginning to fade on items which were over twenty minutes old, usually a sign of having passed the twenty-four hours of no-sleep mark, and I immediately set about remedying the situation. I introduced him around and we found an extra chair and everybody made space, and Dan got to work. If he was looking for motivation, then he'd found it. There's no better way to give somebody a reason to draw than to have a ten year-old standing in front of you asking for a sketch of Spider Man.

"Wow. I'm kinda nervous," he said. "I was just planning on getting some groceries at the market. I didn't think I'd end up like this. . ."

"Don't worry. You'll do fine," I assured him. "Everybody goes through this a first time and everybody survives."

He looked up at the ten year-old standing in front of him and asked, "So what can I draw for you?" The kid shrugged and told him he didn't know, and Dan prodded a bit. "You can't think of anything you'd like?"

The kid squinted and then barked, "I want the old Mickey Mouse and Sonic the Hedge Hog being abducted by aliens!"

Dan went a little white, but I'll be damned if he didn't turn out a great sketch of exactly that scene. Initiation by fire.

Anyway, I did a bunch of sketches for a bunch of really neat people. There's something about running twenty-four hours on no sleep which serves to loosen up one's drawing hand; I don't do it very often, but I really enjoy sketching under those conditions; I never quite know what I'm going to produce when the intellect is all-but disconnected from the instinctive side. I was quite pleased with the results, and either the people I was sketching for were being very nice, or they were also pleased with what I gave them.

After the event, Mike and Faith and I got a chance to sit under a tree and talk comics while waiting for the restaurant to clear some table space for us. --It was a bustling day in Halifax, (there was a huge international hockey event going on in town, so the streets were full of people and so were all the eating establishments). But this was good, because despite being incredibly hungry, it offered a wonderful chance to sit and talk at our leisure. With several books coming out over the next few months, (four to be exact), I had a lot of questions about the industry. --And Faith, despite her genuinely sweet and humble attitude toward it all, is one of those people who happens to have her finger on the pulse of what's cool and how it all works; she's quickly rising to rock-star status with her latest book promoted by SLG Publishing. I've been keeping myself in a self-imposed seclusion from the comics world for nearly three years now, the last 12 months of which, as you all know, I'd stopped altogether drawing T&K, so there was a massive amount of catching up to do.

I realized upon reflection that the world really does move in huge patterns; they start and end, and since the first issue of T&K, I'd managed to live through one entire cycle which had reached the winter of its life and was plowed under for good a couple of years back. The comics world as I had known it is dead. But there is an amazing new cycle beginning which is just in its infancy, and its face can be seen in the dozens of pocket-book sized graphic novels which are filling the racks at both comic shops and regular book stores. The artists, readers and creative energy driving the new scene is really different and really exciting, and it seems I am about to become a part of that world. I certainly feel naked enough, having gone from the small-press Mark Oakley of the Nineties, riding high on the quirky edge of the Black & White industry, to the Mark Oakley who had Had Enough and moved away from the city to experience life from a small town, farm-life perspective. I spent a couple of years essentially making a living selling iced tea, chocolate truffles and fruit smoothies from a garage-sale blender at the local farm market. By the final year, I'd stopped even taking books with me to sell, so deep was my desire to disconnect from the comics world.

--Of course, anybody following my weird career will note that I did not entirely sever the ties. --I have kept a pilot light lit, doing free web strips and the odd illustration job here and there, but for all intents and purposes, I Box Publishing was a closed shop for nearly three years. I tried to explain this turn of events to myself through many rationalizations and spent a lot of time being actually quite afraid of not knowing what was going on with my life; I'd always been so sure of myself, with laser-pointed direction for nearly thirty years. I realize now that it was a very important phase, and indeed, a mental health exercise enforced upon me by my subconscious self which was doing everything short of outright sabotage to make me stop drawing comic books and do something, -anything- else with my time on this planet.

Too much time locked into one perspective and failing to engage the world the way humans were meant to, with their hands and feet out in the sun. . . staying away from that part of life for too long is very bad for you, especially if you happen to be a writer. You must LIVE in order to write, and that's a large part of what the last few years were about. I moved to small-town Nova Scotia in 2003, and really this is when things began to wind down for me in the comics scene. And in that time, I have collected hundreds of amazing experiences, met dozens of amazing people, and learned a LOT of very hard lessons of the spirit, which while difficult were absolutely necessary if I was going to continue as a human and certainly as a writer. So after many adventures, something finally changed last Fall; I felt the need to start work again, and this led me here to the city of Halifax, and work is exactly what I've been doing. I've done a lot of writing and drawing over the last several months, the latest batch of which has been T&K. There's far more to this whole story of my weird life which I will have to tell another time as this blog entry is getting rather long.

So. . , to get back to the tale at hand. . , the dinner was fun. It took the form of one of those long sets of tables pushed together and jammed up with happy cartoonists which you often see after large comics events. And at this point I was really at the end of my rope. I realized just how far gone I was after sitting down to talk with Cal Johnston, owner of Strange Adventures. We chatted aimiably for a short while and then he had to see one of the other guests off. When he and the departing guest made space, the woman I'd been smushed up against on my other side said to me, "And now there's a free chair you can sit in."

"Oooh," I replied, feeling dazed. "Actually, I'm so tired, I think I'll just stay here for a while."

"Yes," she said primly, "but I'm finding your presence rather invasive."

Huh? Oh no! I realized that she and the gentleman sitting across from her had nothing to do with comics at all and were, in fact simply trying to enjoy a private dinner together. Ugh. Who the heck needs a sleep-deprived Mark practically sitting in your lap while you're trying to eat dinner? I apologized profusely for being an ass, (and indeed, I apologized over-profusely which made it all the worse), and decided it was long past my bed-time. So I called a cab and returned home.

Phew!

Most of Sunday passed, and here I am having woken up briefly to write this entry, and I am looking with some trepidation at the mountain of work still left to do before the end of May. Luckily, all of the principal artwork for the new T&K book is done. All it needs is a cover and a bunch of pre-press stuff, and then it's off to the printer. I'll post again when I've got the cover done and I'll talk more about that book at length. It's going to be rather unique. I'll also have a couple of questions I'd like to put out there to people, so be ready with your pencils!

Okay. I've got to do some more sleeping, because my head is still spinning. Cheers to you all, and I'll post again soon.

-Mark
Halifax, May 3rd, 2008