Let's see now. . .

Well, first off.  The latest issue, #31, ships from the printer to all parts world wide on the 7th of April.  It'll be in stores and mail boxes shortly after that.

Next on the list of things. . .

I'm happy to report that a couple of very creative friends of mine have recently launched themselves into the professional world with a bang.  Jonathan Moriarty, game guru of my little social circle, with a couple of other people he recently hooked up with two years ago, recently returned from a giant gaming trade show in Las Vegas, (and what better place could a giant gaming trade show be held?).  Their showcase product, `Mystick,' a card game with pictures and numbers and such, was voted by retailers and professionals as the #1 most interesting and enjoyable new game at the whole show.  Number one!

They had been painfully scraping together thousands of dollars to launch their product, putting themselves in debt with family and friends.  Watching from the sidelines from the position of knowing a little about the difficulties in making a small company start rolling, I was very happy to learn that their initial print run looks very much as though it will vaporize from their stock shelves and they'll be racing to do reprints by the end of the week.

There are a couple of really neat aspects to the whole project, my favorite being that in one stroke they solved two of the most difficult problems in making card games, which are; (1) getting the artwork to look both beautiful and unique, and (2) finding a way to pay all the artists when you can barely scrape together enough cash to go to press.  Their solution?  Use the classical paintings of long dead artists from previous centuries.  I don't care how much you pay your illustrators, few artists today are going to out-paint the renaissance greats.  And because copy-right laws declare that such works are now in the public domain, you won't break your bank trying to put a project like this together.  All in all, it was an ingenious stroke.  And with Jonathan involved, it was only natural that the game mechanics turn out to be fun and well balanced.

Another friend of mine, a fellow named Michael McMaster, also returned from a recent convention, only his was a little more far flung from the comic shop scene.  He deals in the haunted house market.

Yeah.  I didn't know there was such a thing either.

I'm talking about those Disney-style fun houses which sport warped mirrors and pneumatic laughing skulls which jump out at you. . .  When you add up all the theme parks, mall attractions, carnivals and tourist spots in North America, it becomes clear that there are millions and millions of dollars tied up in the rubber zombie market.

Michael is a big, scary looking goth guy who is also one of the friendliest and most talented people I know.  When I first met him, he grinned at me with a pair of prosthetic fangs which looked entirely real, if you ignored the fact that people can't really have vampire fangs.  He popped them out to show me, and I was very impressed.  He described how he would wear them to vampire game sessions at bars and nightclubs, and by the end of the evening, without even trying, would go home with orders for several sets, which he would make to fit the wearer's specific teeth for only two or three hundred dollars.  He made them using the same materials and tools dentists use when crafting dentures.

Anyway, prosthetics and make up and movie costume work was his forte, and recently he and his wife and a couple of others decided that they would make a go of it in the haunted house business, using some of their unique engineering ideas to make a splash.  The first result was a talking robotic rubber head upon which different masks could be applied, and which would sing or talk along with a CD of pre-recorded music and computer signals to the artificial muscle mechanics in the head.  ---Achieving effects which, up until now, could only be done in the most expensive and highly computerized robotic monster shops in the world.  (The Muppet and Star Wars people, for instance.)  Except, Michael and his company have found a few clever ways to make their monsters for a fraction of their competitor's often prohibitive costs.  As a result, everybody at the trade show was throwing money at them.  Michael is looking to rent a building for the company, and he is enthusiastic about a number of other unique and exciting products which nobody else has ever brought to the market.

I love this kind of thing.  A lot of the people I know have been dwelling in the X-Gen doldrums for years now; smart but broke, creative types who could take the world by storm if given enough time and a little start-up cash.  It's good to see it happening.

Anyway, on to some actual I Box news. . .

I met another fellow named, Tony.  He teaches Kung Fu across from the Hairy Tarantula comic shop, and I'll be doing an album cover for his latest CD.  Among Tony's many talents, music and singing reside near the top of the list.  He's really very good, and he thinks along similar lines of creative control that I've gone down before.  For instance, he recently turned down an offer from Warner Music.

After doing a little of my own research some time ago, I was amazed to learn just how badly musicians get treated by the big music companies.  Now, most people know that record deals are usually very one-sided (and never in the favor of the artist), but I had no idea just how bad it was.

Check this out. . .

One band recently took the time to explain the workings of their particular contract.  As it turns out, from the sale of their CD, which retails for $13 U.S., they see about .59 cents per unit. And that's bad enough, but the shocker for me was that they don't even see that tiny amount of money until the bill for their studio time, which their record label only loaned to them, had been paid off.  Yet even though the band pays for its own production, they do not own the copyright.  The label does!  I'm not sure if it's actually possible to create a worse deal.

I can see how these sorts of amazingly unfair deals become the norm, however.  Imagine if any other supplier in any other industry conducted themselves the way young musicians do.  Think of the auto industry.

"What?  You mean you want to use our steel to make your cars?  Oh, wow!  Really?  Wow!  We're going to be famous!  This is great!  Where do we sign!  Wait until we tell our families!"

Yeesh.  When you have a supplier coming to you from that kind of head space, what's a sensible business man supposed to do?  Even if only some executives are the sort who have no qualms about taking advantage of naive kids, then it's still only a matter of time before you end up with the type of system which exists today.  --Where artists work for peanuts because they've been too dazzled by glossy magazine covers to think clearly during contract negotiations.

Anyway, the band which offered this look at their contract workings went on to say that they absolutely love being able to distribute their music on-line in the form of MP3's.  If they allow a customer to download one song from their website in MP3 format for only a dollar, they still end up making a lot more money than they would by selling a whole album through the record label.

A good number of the terrible copyright infringements in music you hear about. . , the terrible crimes against the artists which are spouted in the media, are more than likely just the record labels screaming because they realize that there is a real danger of their becoming dead weight.  Dead broke weight.  About time, I say!

Though the thing I like best about self-distributed MP3 music, is the way some of the best aspects of human nature shine through.  Bands which distribute their music over the net don't seem to get ripped off.  While it is possible to illegally download practically any piece of popular software from the net, it just doesn't seem to happen with self-distributed music.  When a music listener pays a buck for an MP3 from his or her favorite band, there is no incentive for that listener to repost it for illegal, general consumption, the thinking being, "Hey, I paid for it.  Everybody else can as well!  And Jeez.  It's only a buck."

And on top of that, if you like and support a musical group, why on earth would you want to steal from them?  The net seems to be self policing in this sense, and I like that a whole lot!

So anyway. . .

When Tony asked me if I'd be interested in doing an album cover for him, I said I'd love to.  I've heard him perform, and his low budget demos make it clear why Warner Music was looking him up.  Anyway, I told him I'd want to listen to what he'd recorded in order to get my hand in gear for a suitable painting.  I also told him I'd probably want to print the image as a cover for Thieves & Kings regardless of what happened; I couldn't afford the time otherwise, and it would make the cover a lot less expensive for him, since I'd be getting from it what I needed.  I wasn't certain about his reaction to that.  I hoped at the time that he wasn't disappointed, and it worried me somewhat.

A few weeks later when he handed three tracks of the music to me, all of which he'd recorded sometime after our conversation, he quietly suggested that the three pieces told a story that most people probably wouldn't hear, but that a writer might understand.  I hoped I would be enough of a writer to catch whatever he was talking about, because I sometimes miss points in artwork that others seem to get.  Well. . .

After listening to the piece on my own after he'd gone home, I got a little choked up.  I still have to ask, because it's possible that I'm hearing things, (we writers do have a tendency to make the oddest connections out of nothing), but I'd swear that Rubel's story as told in the first issue of T&K had just been struck to music.  ---And saying this doesn't do his work justice.  If Tony has done what I think he's done, then he's managed to skip past all the fluffy comic book stuff which so often seems to fuzz the space between what I envision and what I end up managing to commit to paper, and he caught the essence of the story.  "Exactly!  That's what I meant!  Right there!"

I hope I manage to do something special with the cover.  I'll keep you updated on the progress of the various aspects of that project.
 

In other news. . .

Linda Medly, the brilliant fantasy comics creator of Castle Waiting, will be joining the Cold Cut Island of booths at the San Diego Comic Con this summer.  Welcome, Linda!

This year, like last, I'll again be sharing space with the Xeno's Arrow guys, Greg and Stephen.  Sadly, my other Toronto friend, Tara Tallan of Galaxion, will be forced to remain behind over the summer because, as has been mentioned elsewhere, she'll be giving birth to her first child.

Let's see. . .

Oh.  I remember what I wanted to write about but never got to doing for one reason or another.

Earlier this month over one weekend, the apartment below started thumping.  Loud, loud music.  Heavy base.  Tea cup rattling stuff, though of a brand I wasn't familiar with.  Indian music it seemed, but somehow, `old'.  I don't know how exactly to describe it.  Anyway, there is a young teen who lives in that apartment, and sometimes he turns up the music loud as I recall doing myself when I was his age.  He'd play it loud for a minute or so, presumably standing by the amplifier nervously, enjoying a rush of defiance, but quickly turning it down before the end of a song because he knows the neighbors can hear.  Or something like that.  I went down once when it got irritating and asked him to cut it out, which he did.

So I figured, it had been a few months and he was having a that Friday afternoon.  But wow.  If it was loud before, it was really loud this time.  Tara and I looked at one another, dazed as the music played for a while, and then vanished for a few seconds, only to come back up again.  Up and down with no seeming pattern.  `Weird party,' I thought.  After half an hour of hoping it would go away, I finally sighed, put my shoes on and trumped downstairs.

I passed a frightened looking neighbor from across the hall who stood in the hall outside her apartment in the din, looking shaken but too nervous to do anything.  Outside the offending door, it was like standing next to the five foot speaker in a night club.  The air was dense with sound; you could feel your innards vibrate.  Now since this is completely selfish in any apartment building, I was surprised, because when I had confronted the kid the first time, he had looked intelligent and kind; genuinely concerned when I'd told him he was annoying everybody, as though the thought that he might be causing a disturbance hadn't even crossed his mind, and now that it had, it made him feel bad.  Odd.  So I banged on the door.  (I had to bang hard in order to be heard.)

The music vanished and a short, middle aged Indian man answered.  The kid's dad.  This threw me for a beat, but I explained that my furniture was being vibrated across the floor of my apartment by his music.  The man's wife told me from over his shoulder that it was, as I must know, the weekend.

Hm. . .

It's surprising just how much adrenaline everybody gets filled with over this kind of conflict, all of which is made worse by the fact that most people have a sever lack of experience with such matters.  Confrontations, I find, are like any social situation; you primarily get good at dealing with them only through repeated exposure.  ---And remember how long it took you to figure out how to talk to the opposite sex?  Or how to deal with condescending authority figures.  Or just work out how to be friends with other kids?  We all spend years getting these things down so that we can move through society without acting like morons.  But in many people's lives, adult confrontations do not happen anywhere nearly as frequently as other types of social interaction, and as a result, most people have only a bare minimum of reference points to base their actions on when push comes to shove.  There's a lot of flying blind, and a lot of, "I wish I'd said. . ."

I've been lucky to have spent a few years in constant, often brutal warfare with my brother when we were in our teens.  I wouldn't be so conceited as to say that we were unique in this way; sibling rivalry is nothing new in the world, but I bet most brothers don't drive each other to the point of arming themselves and seriously planning for the day when blood would be shed.  I was by no means a model brother, and things were pretty intense before I finally grew up to become what I very much hope is a much nicer, much wiser person.  Childhood is tough, by all accounts, but the two of us learned a huge amount about operating under the stupid amounts of stress we'd put on each other.  In any case, I tend to find that I'm reasonably well versed in dealing with this kind of affair.  I wasn't addled by adrenaline, at any rate, and managed to defuse the situation with a minimum of bruised egos.  The music dropped to a level where the neighbors were no longer in hiding in terror, and I could feel that whole quadrant of my apartment building slowly exhale.

It occurred to me afterwards, that the teenage kid had probably picked up the loud music thing from his parents.  It certainly explained why he looked so surprised when I knocked on his door the first time.  It also struck me that those odd drops in the volume level were more than likely when either husband or wife wanted to speak to the other.  Yeesh!

But anyway, none of that is what I wanted to share.

Here's the part I thought was interesting. . .

The next day, I went out to the corner store to pick up a few things.  For some reason, however, I decided that rather than go to the same store I always visit, I'd instead cross the street to a different shop which I'd only gone into once before during the first week after I'd moved in to the apartment nearly a year ago.  I have no idea what made me choose that one evening out of a hundred to cross the street, but I did.

I noticed that there were Christmas lights strung in the shop window.  "Hm.  In March. . ?"  But decorations are nice nonetheless.  I greeted the proprietor and fished about for the items I was looking for.  When I went up to the cash to pay, the man at the register asked me if I lived across the street.  I looked at him.  A small Indian man.  I nodded, and he asked which apartment number I lived in.

"You knocked on my door yesterday to ask that I turn down the music."

Unbelievable.  I laughed and immediately stuck my hand out to introduce myself.  "Wow!  My name's Mark.  Pleased to meet you!  Sorry if I sounded angry the other day.  I normally try not to."

He was terribly ashamed, and he'd obviously fretted about it since the previous evening.  He explained that for his family, it had been Christmas day, and that they had been celebrating.  Christmas?  He explained that in his culture certain holidays were held according to where the moon was at certain times of the year.

He also explained that he had not realized that sound could travel through the walls and ceiling as well as it did, and he apologized profusely.  I could only feel delighted.  Not at his embarrassment, which made me ache to witness, but by those queer motions of the universe we sometimes see.  ---He been wanting to explain himself to me so very badly that it almost seemed as though his desire had literally pulled me from my apartment and into his store for that sole purpose.  Events like this are where I see magic at work.

By the time I'd left, I'd wished him a merry Christmas, assuring him that we were square with one another, and that I was really happy to have had the opportunity to make contact with him.  ---Communities are hindered by the industrialist approach to society our world has embraced.  Apartment buildings are terrible places for cultural roots to try and grow, so I feel it is important to take advantage of this kind of opportunity whenever possible.  I sprinted back across the street and rushed up all those flights of stairs, (skip the slow elevators!), to tell Tara all about it.

Poor Tara didn't understand my elation.  She felt terrible for having disturbed somebody's Christmas, and fretted about it for hours.  But that's her.

Anyway, that's the story I wanted to tell.

Hm. . .  I should probably mention since it seems to have come up. . .

Tara and I are still living in that weird limbo of not really knowing whether we're together as a couple or not.  Still, Whatever we are, it seems to work on some odd level.  I'll have to examine this a bit more before I can say for sure.  I may be living on my own somewhere else a month from now, but we'll see.  If either of us decides to start dating other people, the game of musical houses starts again, but for the moment, life seems stable and good, and I like the way the sun falls on my drafting board.
 
 
 

-Mark Oakley, 
March 31, 2000
Toronto
 

Oh  yeah!  Andrew Pam, Katherine Phelps and Rachel Bradshaw, I Box's friends in Australia, have all been a huge help in updating the oft neglected synopsis and comment library.  Thanks you guys!  (Particularly Rachel, who copied from text a big pile of my comment sections!)

Naturally, I encourage everybody to visit Katherine's site, glasswings.com!