Looks like I've just launched another internet comic-strip.

This time, under somewhat different circumstances.

Here's how it went. . .

I ran into this fellow named Adam. He's a part-time juggler who started working a table down at the Saturday farmer's market here in Wolfville. He sells these beautiful hand-made juggler's sticks; the kind where you hold two and use them both to spin a third in the air. If you can do it, it looks really cool. If you're like me, then you look like a guy with three sticks and ten thumbs. But anyway. . .

Adam said, "Hey, are you that cartoonist I've heard about?"

I said, (putting the sticks down), "Why, yes I am."

He said, "I've been hoping to run into you. I'm starting up a newsletter and I'm looking for contributors. Would you be interested in helping out?"

I said, "Umm. . . Let me think about it. I'll get back to you." In my head, however, I said, "Ahh, of course. --Yet another unexpected thing to distract me. So, No. Almost definitely for certain, No. I have enough stuff to get done as it is!" But I didn't want to seem rude, so I told him, 'Maybe,' and left it at that. After all, you never really know. Leave things open and see.

We shook hands and I walked away, looking for pies and lettuce and stuff before getting back to my own table.

Now, the thing you have to understand about Wolfville, is this is the sort of town where you can stand at one end of Main Street and if you squint, recognize people you know when they are standing at the other end of Main Street. This being the way of things, it was inevitable that I should run into Adam again a few days later.

This time, it happened to be while sitting down with some java in front of the local coffee shop built into the front of the old movie theater which now serves as root and center of Wolfville; in many ways, the town's social heart. --The coffee shop which, while still partly under construction, had been having its unofficial opening day not long after I'd first rolled my moving truck into town last year, --the same day, incidentally when I was testing out my newly constructed portable drafting board and setting pencil to the first page of comics I was to draw in this new town. --Which, incidentally, was the page where I first presented Heath's new tower (still under construction) on it's unofficial opening day. So, count 'em up. . . Inagural coffee shop opening, brand new drafting board, my first Nova Scotian comic page, and Heath's new tower designed to be the heart and root of her community. . . By my count, that's 4 neat and tidy layers of synchronicity. Six or seven if you count the various other things which happened that afternoon, none of which I'll bother going into since they were of a more personal nature, but no less significant. In any case, you get triple word scores and free refills for stuff like that.

And that's what I'm talking about here. . .

See, there I was, sipping coffee with Adam, and I was feeling contemplative about this sort of thing. I'd just that week been through a bunch of weird and unexpected life stuff and I wanted to be explicative. Adam was handy.

"So," I asked, putting my coffee down. "How long have you lived here?"

"Um, about four years."

"Alright." I turned toward him and in all seriousness, asked. "Maybe you can tell me then. . , is it just me, or is it like this every damned week in this town?"

He looked at me quizzically.

"You know what I mean!" I said, already knowing he knew what I meant. "I mean, every week! Every week, it's something new. Some new intensity! Some new drama. Some new twist that life throws at you. I've been here a little over a year, and I swear, every single week, the entire world shifts around and something catches me off guard. --I'm not complaining. I think it's great! It has been nearly six months since I've gone anywhere other than up and down the hill, and I've been so busy with new puzzles and people and. . . weird, unexpected stuff, that I've not even noticed the time passing. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

Adam smiled and nodded. "I know what you're talking about," he said.

"It's nothing like how life was where I came from. Back in the city, it took months for events to unfold! Change was slow! Do you ever get used to it out here?"

He grinned. "Not yet. You just have to learn to relax with it. Wolfville is its own thing."

"You got that right!" I sat back into my chair, satisfied. "--So, where do you come from originally?"

"New Brunswick."

"No kidding? I spent a few years growing up in that province too. Out in East Riverside."

"Really?" he asked. "What street?"

I looked at him and laughed. New Brunswick is the size of a small country. "Get real," I said.

"Because, I grew up on Green Road."

I blinked at him. "You're kidding me."

"Nope. I lived up at the top of the hill."

"Green road. Seriously? I lived at the bottom of Green road. --You mean Green road with twelve houses on it. In East Riverside. With Kent's convenience store at the bottom."

"My family owned Kent's."

What do you say to that? And so it goes; another Wolfville moment. Every damned week. No complaints. But. . , well, sheesh!

So Adam and I talked a great deal after that. People around here tend to have very illuminating outlooks on life. Before I got up to leave, he'd done an impromptu interview with me for his fledgling newsletter, "The Grapevine", I'd illustrated a masthead for the front cover and promised to do a regular humor comic strip for it at no charge. I'd been looking for an excuse to launch the pile of Quinton strips I'd been scripting on and off for over a year now. And the Grapevine was a really neat idea. A miniature community newspaper/zine. --New York's "Village Voice" I would think, probably started in much the same way, to give you some idea. Journalism done from the ground up because it was called for, not because Adam wanted to be a journalist.

"I didn't study journalism," he told me. "I just started keeping track of all the cool things going on around town and started compiling them for a regular email list while I was going to university here." After the number of names on the list grew past 400, he figured it'd be more efficient to just start printing.

"What's your print run?"

"Fifteen hundred."

"Jeez. Not half bad! You're working on issue 2?"

"Yep."

"Damn. I'm impressed."

So it's going to work like this. . . the new Quinton strips are going to come out once every two weeks with each issue of Adam's newsletter. They're going to be a bigger format than the old 4 frame gag strips I've published in the past; each one will have about a comic page's worth of stuff, (or about a third to half a page shrunk down to newsletter size; space in the Grapevine is quickly becoming a valued commodity, with dozens of contributing writes and advertisers lining up!) --I'm going to post the strips here on the I Box website two weeks after each initial appearance in the Grapevine so that the folks in town get to read each one first and fresh before I put them on-line for the rest of the world to see.

Which means, ladies and gentlemen. . ,

The time is somewhere in that 1000 year period between when Heath was first living in Millbrook, and when Rubel began his adventures in Oceansend. . .

It gives me great pleasure to re-introduce, Quinton Zempfester, Wizard Extraordinaire!

I hope you enjoy this series! (The first couple of strips are just short ones. The scripts grow more robust as they gather steam.)

-Mark Oakley

July 12th, 2004
Wolfville, Nova Scotia