I'm in an entirely new place now.  I'm all alone and finally there is nothing left to do.  All the unpacking and organizing of my stuff is done, (furniture and all the things which sit within and upon it all).  The shopping for nuts and bolts and light bulbs and new food. . .  All of that stuff has been taken care of so that I am sitting here at last, late at night on Canada Day with nothing left but to deal with that unsettling feeling which stirs in the gut whenever we are forced to look at the world from a fresh viewpoint with all other considerations temporarily turned off.

Tonight, all my friends have other engagements.  They are off at parties or watching fireworks or whatever, events I somehow managed not be a part of.  No matter.  I need this night.  Almost looked forward to it.  It opens the eye of the mind and the heart, and it terrifies and exalts at once.

I know that little has changed.  I'm living a mere mile or so from where I used to live, but it is enough to firmly knock me from the old pathways and patterns.  Shopping for food.  Arranging furniture.  These are safe tasks; patterns one can focus on to the exclusion of the real situation. . .

Which is what, Mark?  Oh, whatever is it that you see tonight?

Everybody knows this feeling.  It's the same one you discover lying with you when you lie awake and alone in a hotel room, or when you wake up before everybody else on a camping trip, or in your lover's bedroom for the first time, or beneath a bridge with a back pack under your head.

You finally discover yourself in the Now, with the entire weight of your life truly behind you, (surprisingly light), and while the sensation at times like these can be very profound, I nonetheless find it difficult to navigate; a challenge to find something meaningful and lasting to take from the experience. These are not moments to squander.  Even now, I should probably stop writing.  Writing for me is something safe.  Describing the sensation until it dissolves into afterthought.  I'll have to stop shortly in order to do this properly.

Needless to say, the difficulties of the last month have resolved themselves. I found a new place to live in the nick of time.  I am sharing a house with three other fine people.  Two girls; Kaitlin and Helena and our landlord, James, who lives in the basement and who is more a fourth room mate than he is a land lord.  --I imagine that a landlord is most often somebody who lives far away and who doesn't fix the heating and the torn screen door, and who you imagine laughing a twisted laugh over the monthly checks his prisoner tennants send him.  James, rather, is a guy we will be eating breakfast with.

So I am in a house with a new family.  And I think perhaps that just maybe, after all these years of growth and change, I may have at last learned enough wisdom to live with a family properly this time around.  Childhood is difficult, and none of us in this new house are children.  While I have not yet lived with these people for more than a couple of days, I think I can safely say from what I have observed in them, that we have each managed to arrive at this point in our lives after having dropped off most of the baggage, hang ups and knots of bitterness which can latch like burrs on the unwary through the course of a lifetime.  --The unwary being those who are not able to be honest with themselves, and not prepared to deal well with those elements honesty makes clear.

I love my new room/studio.  It's only one room, but it's big.  And for the first time since moving out of my parent's place, I have ALL my stuff in one place.  Drafting board and computer and books all within a healthy roll of the chair across the creaky, honey hardwood of a Victorian house in downtown Toronto.  I can make comics without having to run in circles, or be disturbed by people watching the accursed television in my peripheral vision.  Ahhh. . .

It's easily the nicest/best feeling room I've had in years.  The colors all work.  I feel weird admitting this; it's almost embarrassing to reveal that I have never been able to entirely achieve a sense of being where I was supposed to be.  This is the first time I've gone to the trouble of properly decorating my room.  Always, I would leave picture frames sitting exactly where I had leaned them against a spare space of wall upon moving in the first day.  Pictures would sit growing dustier, with me never fully unpacking and not ever feeling quite settled or right.  Like each place has been a waiting room, or a bus station where I sat working hunched over the equivalent of a lap top with my travel worn possessions gathered beside me.  Waiting for the next bus.  The right bus.

Just yesterday, I was standing in the vast emptiness of my last apartment a couple of days after I'd moved all my stuff to the new place. I just stood there, with a trickle of sweat running down my temple in the heat, just looking around, surveying the walls and dusty floors, holding in my hands those few objects I'd forgotten to pack and take with me on moving day.  --A bath towel and a broom and a package of soap from under the sink.  Sad, solitary things which make the heart ache when you stand alone clutching them.  (What are such things?  Loyal soldiers which had almost been abandoned.  I'd gone back to rescue them.)  So I stood there sweating in the summer heat on the very last day of my paid rent for that place, and I caught myself thinking, "Well, I've got this stuff I came for.  I suppose I'd better be going home now. . ."

Ahh.

Home.  It was the first time this had happened, and so quickly.  Usually, for the first four or five months, I constantly refer to my last dwelling place as 'Home' or 'Back Home,' while the new living space is usually just that; a living space waiting for me to attach to it some spiritual value.  When I realized how quickly I had done it this time, it made me smile.  On moving day, (a Tuesday morning), when I'd first unlocked the front door of the house, James had left a note on the shoe mat for me.  "Welcome Home."

Now I realize that new room mates, when they first get together, often think that they've got it down; that they've got it right and that everything is going to be perfect for them.  But having moved in with other people twice before now, I can say with some authority that this time certainly feels the most convincing.

Anyway. . .

Other things are in the works, getting closer.

On the tenth and the eleventh of this new month of July, I will be appearing in two of the huge Indigo Books locations around Toronto.  I'll be doing a 'how to make comics' art class of sorts for kids.  (I've done these before, and they've always been a great deal of fun.)  I don't know how much promotional value they will have for Thieves & Kings; could be a little or it could be a lot.  Frankly, the change of pace will be most welcome either way.  As well, I will finally begin, maybe as early as later tonight, a brand new painting, which will be the cover for Tony's latest album.  I finally managed to find the time to get together with him for the first time in over a month.  We were both distracted by a number of other things and other people surrounding us that evening. My mind was elsewhere, but we did manage to connect properly for a few moments.  He played some of his latest tracks, and let me read some lyrics scratched on note paper which had finally come to him after a two month dry spell.  (Two months which had had him very worried.)  This last two months has been very tumultuous for nearly everybody around me.  I am happy to see that people seem to be settling back into their lives, me included.  I hope those of you out there who have also experienced recent tremors in life are also finding it is all working out for the best.

Anyway, on the subject of paintings, I am happy/sad to announce that I've sold one.  The mermaid painting from last issue is now gone, (or will be on Monday when I FedEx it off.)

I'd run out of liquid funds but still hadn't managed to reprint the $1 first issue.  This was irritating, in that without it selling T&K isn't as smooth or easy.  The cheap/giveaway first issue has proven to be a wonderful sales aid.  Giving the first chapter to potential readers is so much more effective than trying to say, "Look!  There's this new story which is done in a way entirely differently from every other fantasy novel you've ever read.  It's really worth looking at if you like the medium."

Especially because I feel awkward saying stuff like that about my own work.  (Even in a third person, 'I can pretend that I didn't really write this,' kind of way. )

Anyway, a fellow named Brian Moseley who has been reading T&K for some time, had contacted me a number of months back.  He'd hit it big in the IPO tech stock gold rush of the late nineties, and he asked if he might be able to do something to help in financing a T&K related project I might not otherwise be able to afford.  He'd worked in a similar way with a number of other artists whose work he enjoys, and I thought this sounded like a fine idea because I'm a guy with a whole bunch of dream projects.  So we talked about a number of different plans, and we put aside some time to get together and hammer out details.  In the end, however, we found ourselves talking in circles as the reality of some of my ideas turned out to be somewhat more daunting and demanding that a comics production schedule would allow for any time soon. The one thing which was assured and clear was the initial intent, and so I settled on something basic and proven.  A nice, healthy 10,000 copy print run of the first issue.

Brian offered to finance this entirely, and in return I offered to give him one of the original T&K paintings.  Any one he wanted, (with the exception of the first issue, which I'd given to my mother as a Christmas gift way back in the first year of T&K.)

Brian thought this was a great idea, and after a good deal of deciding, (lying out all the comics and going over them with close friends), chose upon the mermaid cover, which is certainly one of my favorites.  So this is the first painting I have ever sold, (and hopefully the last for a while!  They're still hard to let go).

Anyway, while it is proud and immediate thing to be able to announce that a big sale has been made, I find as well that this makes something shrink inside me and feel wrong.  I much prefer to think of it less as a sale than I do as giving a painting to somebody who will handle it the same way I do any of my favorite things.  Like finding a home for a kitten or young pup.  And the money I look at as a metaphor for the expense necessary to raise a Cat or Dog to maturity.  (Although Thieves & Kings is getting on in age, it is still a small and fragile thing on the world stage.)

This is a world where people and things can so easily become commodities, each assigned their decimal values; a process which puts a great deal of wear and tear on the sprit and true essence of all involved.  It's easy to destroy a soul in today's economy, so one has to be careful.  Luckily, it only requires one a bit of care and thought.  So thank you, Brian. Your attention is most appreciated.

Anyway, with all these recent changes in life; girlfriends changing into just friends; my moving to a new place to call home, and sending favorite paintings away, (something I never thought I would do!), I suppose it is time for me to shuffle off now.  These big things are just little bobs on the surface; there is much more going on, I am sure, and I've been avoiding the inevitable tonight with this writing.  I've got some star gazing and soul plumbing to do.  It's time to stare into the face of my own mortality again tonight, and shiver and be awed by it all.

Take care.

Mark
Toronto,
July 1st  2000