And before I get started here, I'd like to announce that I have a new email address. I can now be reached at moak@iboxpublishing.com --a simple change, but something I should have set in place ages ago, but which I was too stuck to old ways of doing things to actually do. Well, that's taken care of now. You can now send mail directly to Ibox.

Okay then! On to the news!

It was a heckuva move, but here I am nestled comfortably in the heart of Halifax.

I carried the studio (in pieces) up two flights of stairs, (no elevator), all by myself on one of the hottest days of the year. Wow. I had numerous offers of help, but something inside me said, "See if you can do this on your own." --So I did. There's a unique satisfaction in doing it that way. Walking through a door into a new adventure which when faced alone makes you look within and see just who you are. It was symbolic, and important. New beginnings.

As if to further symbolize this, my computer died a hideous death. Two hard drives died in two days, and I lost enormous amounts of data. (I'd always been so smug with my dual hard-drive set-up. Instant, easy back-ups of everything. I'd rescued myself numerous times from losing key files when I would accidentally hit 'save' without thinking. But there they both went, up in a cloud of etheric computer smoke, leaving me gasping.)

Of course, one of the things I'd been focusing on over the last couple of years was learning how to let go. To cut out clutter. I'd accumulated a lot of the stuff over the last couple of decades. I had mountains of junk. Items I would never use, redundant furniture, books I simply would never read and which nonetheless were crammed on shelves, gathering dust. The soul gathers dust right along with this other clutter, the two are linked somehow, and you can feel it weighing you down. Or in my case, I could feel it but didn't know what it was. A load carried for long enough is sometimes forgotten until it's gone.

My girlfriend and I also just broke up this month. --One of those good break-ups. We both walked away loving each other, but knowing that it was time to move on. Ariell will remain a powerful piece in my life, both in memory and in person. We're just not 'together' anymore. I adore her and wish her glory and love and all that good stuff in her life. We did a lot of great things for each other.

--One of which, actually, was the knowledge of how to let go of clutter. When we first got together, she looked around my apartment and said, "Wow. It seems heavy and sad. This isn't a good place for you. It doesn't fit with who you are."

And I said, "Huh? I don't feel sad."

She would continue making such remarks until one day, after much coercion she said, "No, I'm serious. You should try something. I've been thinking about this. This book shelf. Can we try something?"

I looked at her suspiciously and said, "I'm not letting go of my books. You just want to sell them at some used book store."

"Yeah. And I'll give you the money."

"No way! I love my books!"

"Just trust me. If you don't want to let them go, then you don't have to. But let's just try this little experiment. Take all the books off the shelf and make two piles. A pile for books you want to keep, and a pile for books you might consider letting go of. That's all. Afterwards, you can put them all back on your shelf and I won't say another word. Okay?"

I mumbled a grudging response and I started sorting through the books. The first dozen were like pulling teeth, but I managed to create two small piles. After that it got easier. Fun, in fact. Within another couple dozen books, I was actively hurling texts across the room.

"AARGH! I HATE THIS BOOK! The writer was a fascist idiot with no sense of story. Ugh! --And this one! I can't stand this book!"

Ariell looked at me quizzically. "Why would you be keeping things that you dislike so much?"

"I don't know. I read it when I was fifteen and just kept it. I didn't even like it back then. I haven't looked at it since. Why on earth have I been carting it around with me all these years?"

"Exactly. That's what I mean."

And so the process went on. I removed fully three quarters of the books from that shelf. (A third pile was created, those books which I didn't actively dislike, but just which I felt no real care for one way or the other and repeated the process with them.) Ariell took all of the books I'd loaded up in the reject pile, and a couple of days later handed me a small stack of tens and twenties. Keen.

And you know, it was like a dark and heavy cloud had been removed from my apartment, and I did feel lighter. I eventually got rid of fully half my library, the later times launching the house cleaning without Ariell's promting, (but each time trading with her for little stacks of tens and twenties). I now have only two book shelves, every single text of which I actively adore for one reason or another, and I visit those shelves often when before I would just warily give them their space. My mini-library is now vibrant.

I went through a similar process with all my stuff, only keeping those things which were sacred to me. (I did some reading on this process which Ariell had invented on her own. There are whole schools of thought on how to deal with exactly this kind of scenario. I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, but Ariell is pretty amazing.) Anyway, I realized that most of the stuff I'd been hanging on to for so long was just dead weight, much of which I'd collected when I was a teenager. It seems ridiculous in retrospect now. Interestingly, the annoying patch of acne I'd had on my back since forever also decided to vanish. Another little left-over from my teen years, finally and happily abandoned. Neat-o!

Anyway. . . My computer.

I have long had a tendency to learn something and then to obstinantly stick with it against all reason. I'd been running a Windows 98 box forever, and damned if I was going to upgrade. Well, earlier this month, before I had a phone line or internet connection, (both very slow in being installed), I decided to learn more about Flash, the animation program used at the animation studio and which I knew I'd need to master for future projects. So I made a complex animated video game. (Gone, now, thanks to the hard drive failure, so I can't show you just how cool and clever it was. Trust me. You'd have been impressed.) But I learned a ton on it over the course of two weeks.

It was mind-breaking. Making simple animations is one thing, (and even that can be complex), but full interactivity? I'd learned enough Javascript over the years to make Princess Ashelle wave to people as she does on the Stardrop page, and the programming language built into Flash is very similar to Javascript, so I thought I'd be fine. But wow!

Flash is one buggy piece of crud and the folks over at Adobe need to be firmly noogied for their efforts in driving me insane. I have NEVER worked with such a piece of software which I felt was actively fighting against me with evil glee. (At least with the version I was using.) Things which should have worked didn't, things which used to work, stopped, and to make them work anyway required enormous ingenuity and brain crunching, only to have the next step of the process trumped by new and interesting problems, none of which are covered by reading the on-line manuals. Granted, I was practicing on a demo version. And I can tell you, I'm damned glad I've not yet layed out any cash for Flash. I hope I can find a better piece of software to spend my money on. (Any recommendations?) --Actually, I wonder now if using an out-dated operating system might not have been part of the trouble, but anyway, that's all another story. (One which involves a cool meeting with a professional ex-ATI programmer who gave me some of the most remarkable and mind-blowing advice I'd ever heard. Remind me to share that encounter with you someday.) The point here is that of the many, many head-aches which came packaged with the version of Flash I was using, the one which drove me to action was its deplorable use of available screen space.

Flash MX (the *version*) calls for numerous little sub windows to be open at one time or another, the result of which is that the actual animation you're working on is usually hidden under other items. I would regularly look up to realize that all I could see of the artwork was a half-inch strip, which would require closing a bunch of windows to test, after which I'd have to re-open them all. Ugh. It was enough to drive one mad, and it very nearly did. --I eventually hurled myself from the chair, uttered some hot-blooded invective and went out to buy a brand new, huge computer screen. This was actually very exciting, as I rarely buy toys for myself.

So I came home with a nice, shiney 22" flat screen, plenty big enough to handle Flash, and certainly big enough to give Photoshop a lot more breathing space. Right on!

The only problem, was that it required a new graphics card which could offer a digital signal. Okay. Another trip to the computer store. --But then it got bad. My creaky old operating system and creaky old hardware, all pasted together with duct tape, sputtered and choked, and each solution seemed to require more trips to the computer store. It was at this point that both my hard drives failed.

Sigh. Okay. I took the hint and bought a new mother board, new RAM, new hard drives and new cables and essentially built a whole new work station. That took a week of my life (and several stacks of tens and twenties). It would have been easier and faster had I just gracefully let go instead of fighting to retain all my old clutter, much of which I'd been carrying around since the 90's. Some lessons take repeated attempts to learn it seems. . .

Anyway, in the middle of all of this, I had to drop everything in order to drive for two hours out to teach a week-long cartooning workshop at an arts camp in the Valley. Or rather, on top of the Valley, on what is called, the "South Mountain" (Here in Nova Scotia, people seem to opt for the most basic name labels for the various places they live. There's also a "North Mountain" and a North and South Shore, as well as, "The City". It feels like an old Republic serial. Watch one someday and you'll see what I mean.) --Anyway, I drove out to the "South Mountain" where an amazing and very beautiful arts center had been erected. Kids would attend week long camp sessions where all manner of arts are taught by visiting experts. While I was up there doing my thing, there was also a writer's workshop and a ballet camp in full swing. My kids were awesome, and we had a great time. Frisbee games during lunch and cartooning during the rest of the day was a fantastic mix, trees and wind and sunshine all around. It was wonderful. I really enjoy working with kids.

But part of me was longing to get back to the disaster which was my new studio. Leaving a studio disaster in mid-flight, with computer cables and boxes and phone lines not yet installed left me feeling like something inside was also existing in some kind of limbo-chaos. A working studio is an important part of who I am, and mine was a mess.

So camp ended, and I raced back into Halifax where I spent the next week fixing everything and finishing off various art contracts, and getting to know my new neighborhood. --Not to mention, going through a break-up with my girlfriend. This generally took up all my time. But now. . .

Ah ha! Just today, my new scanner card arrived from eBay, (which I surfed on the arts camp computer before breakfast). --Actually, it's a very old scanner card, but one capable of running my very old scanner in the new computer. That scanner is the one thing I kept. You just can't get scanners as big these days, at least not for a reasonable price. But now everything is set!

Stardrop is back with a bang. I was hoping to have her on line two weeks ago, but had no internet connection to work with, so to make up for it, I've posted two whole episodes for you on the Stardrop page. Go tell your friends and compatriots that the Girl Galactic is back! The story is going to get really interesting soon. (It's all been set-up so far.)

And I now get to launch into new projects! How very exciting! I feel like the last few years have been a huge exercise in soul-work and de-cluttering and trying to figure out what the heck I was trying to achieve. It's been a mind-blowing experience in that quiet little town of Wolfville, where the most remarkable people live. But now I am back in the city. --A clean city with clean air fresh off the ocean, and lots of friendly people full of energy. Time to get busy!

Cheers, and have a great day!

-Mark
August 26, 2007
Halifax

^{July 27, 2007}

I found a great building. All stone. --And not the tidy kind of stone, but big, rough-hewn not-square rocks cemented together into a three-story monolith which used to be a Catholic convent back in the 1940's. It was recently bought and turned into apartments. It looks really cool, actually, and not in that Gothic way. --It was built in the 1940's, so how Gothic can it be? I kinda figure a building needs to have survived at least two world wars to be a vampire den. But I'm not a vampire kind of guy, so it works for me.

I just finished off the Super Hero project. I was quite pleased with it. I'll ask the publisher if I can reproduce the pages here for everybody to see. It's very campy. The logo of the paper is right on the chest of the hero. Campy. But it was a lot of fun to make, and it's not a bad little story if I don't say so myself. Greg Beettam, a cartoonist friend of mine, did the script for me, and I kind of re-wrote it as I went. (Greg's good for Superstory structure, which I find a bore, and I tend to be good at all the little frills which make characters fun. We both played to our strengths and this is what we got.

^{July 3, 2007}

People have been asking where I am and what is going on. A very fair question, and I must apologize for not addressing it sooner.

"Incredibly busy" isn't enough of an answer, so I'll give more.

I put T&K on hiatus and didn't tell anybody about it because I didn't want to believe it myself. Jeez. Denial. --And several of you out there don't want to believe it either; I've received numerous letters from people which range from worried to actually angry.

I suggest to those who have chosen to be angry that it's the journey, not the destination which counts. I hope you still enjoyed the comics I have made thus far and that you weren't in it just to read the last page of the last book. --But yes, I do also get it.

For there to be a journey, you DO need a destination, and having the last page removed from sight kind of leaves you with your backpack in the wilderness feeling confused. Oh, yes, I definitely understand. Nobody has been more critical with regard to me, than me.

There seems to be a natural turning point for creators. Bone wrapped at 50 issues, running for about the same length of time I have done thus far. Bill Waterson of Calvin & Hobbes fame called it quits after a decade and a bit. Will Eisner wrapped The Spirit after about twelve years. Even Dave Sim switched gears after about the same length of time and had to do some manner of soul searching in order to climb back on the horse, and Cerebus was never the same after that in my opinion. --Not better or worse, but just very different in style and intent. People change, and the ten-year mark seems to be significant. In any case, I have been finding myself changing too, and because I am wired the way I am, mine was not a graceful shift but resembled more of a crash and flail. How embarrassing. I've always been stubborn and resistive about change and growth, which is probably why it has been so difficult.

In my case, however, this is not the end of the world. I am actually, for the first time, quite relaxed and happy about the direction of things. First of all, I must say that I certainly intend to finish T&K. I know how the next book will go, and where the story is headed. I just don't think I'd do a very good job with it if I tried it right now. In fact, I needed to stop and do something else, -anything else- otherwise the story was going to be pure junk. --The last ten pages of T&K, were in my mind, terrible, and I swore at the outset that I would not kill T&K by pumping out mediocre work.

So I am as of right now, officially and for real, on hiatus, and I will remain there until it is time to make the next book and finish the story. It will happen. I feel that in my gut, just as I knew way back in highschool that I was going to make a comics story with a character named Rubel. But as then, I'm just not going to do it right now.

Interestingly, Life and the Universe have a way of knowing where you are supposed to be. --When I was struggling to keep T&K present, everything was going wrong. Old systems which used to work like charms were failing. Sales had been holding more or less steady since about 2000, with a minor decline due to infrequency, but not as much as one might expect. However, those sales had for the last seven years barely paid for the book itself. Trade Paperback sales were where the bulk of my income was derived. Money in, money out. If the In didn't equal the Out, then I'd slip quietly into debt, but I would happily ignore this because it was easy enough to think to myself, "Well, I'll just lower my personal expenses and next month will be better. Keep moving forward!" And often it was. But more often, it wasn't. And then when it came time to reprint a big book, I'd suddenly have a seven-thousand dollar bill and no immediate lump sales to cover it. Oi.

So even as I was burning out, the financial model T&K had been running happily on for the first ten years was also coming due for a massive overhaul. Putting out a comic book is one thing, but keeping a library of Trade Paperbacks in print is a whole other business. Basically, you need to have a larger income and market share than I did to be able to afford it. In short, I needed to start doing different work to pay the bills.

I would have thought that this would make me grumpy and depressed. I remember getting into comics in part to avoid having other bosses. But as it turns out, there's lots of ways to make money aside from the 'regular' job route.

In a stress-related flash of mania, (the most flashy kind), I decided to start selling fruit smoothies at the local farm market. --It was hot in the Summer and while you could buy vegetables and free-range beef and sizzling things on a stick, nobody was selling drinks. So I bought a cooler and ton of frozen fruit and plunked a blender and some cups down next to the pile of Thieves & Kings comics at my regular table. All the regulars at the Saturday Market blinked at me and the gaudy-huge sign which featured a Rubel drinking a nice refreshing cup of smooth fruit, and asked what I was doing. Then they all bought fruit smoothies and smiled a lot and I was instantly making more revenue in a couple of weekends than I'd been making on an entire issue of T&K in a very long time.

It was also a heluva lot of fun.

Okay then! This wasn't so bad. What next?

Well, I'd been asked numerous times if I ever taught art classes. I'd always said "No" before, but this time I said, "You bet!" --The next thing I knew, I was hosting a comics class for children up at a gorgeous arts camp. That is, we'd all draw and make comics, and then go out an play with a soccer ball at lunch time. And at $30 an hour for my time, bills were now getting paid rather than stacking up. Right on!

I started to take on advertising jobs for my community. Silly stuff, but effective, and again they paid well enough to take care of those Trade Paperback payments. I did a series of B&W comic strips advertising the Farm Market, and I've posted those elsewhere. Here's one of the colour jobs I did for another entrepreneur, as well as a poster I did for the Farm Market. . .

 

And a couple of logos. (Can you spot the T&K influence? Ha ha!)

 

But I definitely wanted to keep making real comics, thus The Walking Mage, and Stardrop came into being. Those I donated to the local town newsletter. They have been rewarding, but didn't make any money. So while pondering my next move, Mike White called me up with a proposal for an animation project. Putting together the T&K pitch has been very good, but as I learned while working on it, the Television market for animation is a very weird one in Canada. It is very hard to make anything which doesn't get minced up by committee thinking and people with executive decision power who know zero about stories and make choices based on the most Douglas Adams-style thinking I've ever seen occur in the wild.

Nonetheless, I've produced a really cool pitch pack; a 28-page full-color extravaganza detailing the bazillion and one reasons T&K should be in full motion. --There is more work to be done; we still want to make a short demo video at some point, but Mike and numerous employees at his animation house started at the time to show the signs of over-work. --Hospitalizations and panic attacks and various levels of gaunt eyes in between. There was no room for me to squeeze in to make a T&K demo. In fact, it quickly became obvious that it was not a good time to be launching a T&K animated project. There will, I suspect, be a right time, and we've worked hard to put ourselves into a state of readiness so that when the opportunity arrives, we can pretty much go into production right away. The material now on paper includes sample scripts, character model designs, (some of which I've posted here), and a series pitch featuring a full, four-season episode guide. (That was fun to write! Being able to work out and polish up an entire story arc was really cool. There's a lot I could describe about that process, but I'll save that for another time). -Anyway, numerous gears are in place but the whole machine is still one which is going to remain under construction for the time being. Toward this end, though I love the open country, I am leaving small-town Wolfville and moving into Halifax-proper August 1st to be closer to the action. It'll be so much easier to get things done when I'm not a lone cartoonist out in the country side.

In the mean time, I picked up some other paying gigs. --I did a poster for Halifax's awesome comic shop, Strange Adventures. (Below)

And I'm doing some full-colour superhero comics for a independent newspaper chain. I can't show you any images from this project, since it's kind of top-secret until the press date, but it's really been fun and quite exciting; there are very few independent newspapers out there, and whether the people I am working with understand what they are doing or not, their desire to invest in comics in the way that they are doing harkens back to the golden age of comics in the thirties and forties. They're going to have something really special on their hands, I think, and I am willing to work with them to develop this thing. --So I hired a writer to produce a script since I know nothing about super hero books, and began hammering out guys in capes. Putting that together pays well, but it is taking up all of my time and in fact the deadline for that project is only a couple of weeks away. It is the reason I've not be able to produce the last episode of Stardrop. Sorry, about that, by the way. When I get the superhero job done, I'll do a couple of episodes in a row of Ashelle's story to bring her back up to speed.

So as I've said, I've been incredibly busy. --And interestingly, all this extra-curricular activity has brought my skill level in comics-making up by several notches. I now know a LOT more about colour work than I did a couple of years ago, and to capture the Super-Hero look, I've started working with a brush and ink pot. Wow. I can't believe I've ignored that whole end of the work bench for so long. Being locked in comfortable cycles prevents learning in a big way. All in all, this period of hiatus from T&K is very healthy, not just psychologically, but also financially and in terms of developing my illustration skills. When I come back to T&K, it's going to be awesome!

The other thing I've been finding is that working with kids at these Summer arts camps is also amazing. I didn't realize how much I had to give in this regard. The kids really seem to benefit from and enjoy the time I spend with them, and I'm amazed at how much I am learning by having to describe what it is I have been doing thoughtlessly for so long.

Anyway. . .

That's what's up with yours truly. Please do not fret and frown. T&K is not going to vanish, and I'm looking forward to being able to afford another print run of TPB #2, so that the story remains available. --I've not been able to sell to any large distributors since I haven't had the books to cover the orders. That changes as soon as I pay off some of these printing debts.

I made a promise to myself when I began this whole show, that by hook or by crook, T&K would be wrapped up properly or that I'd die trying. Give me another year to get my ship re-rigged.

The next bit of work, btw, which you will see of mine out there, is going to be in a Cerebus Roast comic, where we all take a loving jab at Dave. That's going to be. . , amusing to script.

So Cheers to you all, and I hope you can forgive my absence from T&K. Thank-You SO much for reading my work and for being there all these years. You guys are the best! --And be sure to check back in a month to see what I've posted for Stardrop. I'll make sure there are always tidbits and bits of stuff on the T&K website.

-Mark

^{July 3, 2007}

Things are progressing nicely in the Thieves and Kings world. --I've decided that we should animate the music video for the pitch piece. --The reason being that it contains story-telling elements rather than simply being a visual collage. This way we can get in some experience in how to edit together T&K stories, which after all, is the whole point to the exercise. I've been in contact with Tony and he's in a position to possibly re-work Carbon from the Riverwolf CD, adding extra instruments, etc. I'm very excited about this! Riverwolf has been in rotation in my stereo system since the day it was the disk was pressed. (How many people get to say that they produced their favorite CD?).

Anyway, the above is a short bit of test-animation, made in part to figure out how the color schemes should fit together. Flash is the current tool of choice for assembling the animation, making the process easy on the creative people involved.

 

 

^{Jan 8th, 2007}

A happy new year to everybody!

Here's a few more bits of model sheet work.