Featuring the Comic Book Creations of Writer/Cartoonist Mark Oakley!
What
is, Thieves &
Kings?
“Thoroughly
engrossing self-published black-and white fantasy saga. [. . .] This is
a story for fans of Bone, Elfquest, Nausicaa, or Harry Potter to fall
in love with; highly recommended for teen and adult fantasy readers
everywhere.”
Thieves & Kings, Apprentices, Book I
The wait, (and it has been a long one), is finally over! The new Thieves & Kings book has arrived! Click here to find out what this book is all about.
$15.00 Canadian,
104 pages, squarebound, black & white interior.
Within Canada $18.50 CAD
To U.S.A. $22.50 CAD
International $28.50 CAD
News From the Studio. . .
January 21st, 2010
Paintings on the wall!
Your truly just found himself in the middle of an art show. With his work being featured. I can't say I ever thought that was going to happen. Cartoonists and comics guys exist in a different bubble universe than do contemporary artists, and our works tend to make appearances at comic shows in big black folio binders people can flip through. --But usually, (of course), reproduced in all the printed paper things we call, "Comic Books". So having our work put on a wall for public display isn't as necessary an event as it is for other artists. Painters and sculptors and such.
And so it took me by surprise somewhat when the opportunity presented itself.
I mean, it's not a huge deal. It's not the national art gallery or anything like that. It's a small cafe with art on the walls and cookies and sandwiches and the soup of the day. But it's still. . , just so COOL! (I am sorry that I am not a particularly good photographer. The pics came out rather grainy. Also, these were taken after hours when there were no customers around to disturb; usually the place is bustling.)
Ariell, (the original inspiration behind the main character in, "Stardrop"), happens to work at the Designer Cafe, and she's also one of the reasons the food tastes as good as it does. And through her, I met all the right people, including a woman who puts small showings together in small venues like this one, and one thing led to another. . .
The neat part is that comics art is designed to pop and tell stories. Cartoonists have been studying and reducing the craft to its most pure essence so that the artwork crackles off the cover. Comics readers and artists take this for granted, but man, when you take it out of its normal environment and plop it into a landscape where people don't read comics. . . You see the effect!
Artwork for sale in cafes and restaurants is nothing new, but in this case, patrons have apparently have been immediately struck by the artwork and bend over, peering into the ridiculous amount of detail in my old Thieves & Kings cover paintings before even seeking food. And for me, it's just really weird and kind of awesome to see so much of my life's work displayed in one place.
Though, it's not all of my work. There's not enough wall space by a long shot for everything I'd have liked to hang up, so just some of the plums of the lot were picked out. --Including a painting which has never seen the light of the public eye ever before. (An old study of Rubel and Katara had they been living in our world, having a different kind of adventure altogether).
Anyway. . .
I should mention that all of these paintings are for sale. --I've never openly sold paintings before, and so I decided it would be grossly unfair to all the people who have been supporting my work over the years to not give them the opportunity to make purchases while coffee shop patrons who have never even heard of Thieves & Kings make off with the best pieces.
The paintings are all priced in and around $1000, with the smaller ones being around $600, which is certainly steep, but I work on the notion that there simply aren't that many of them in existence and there probably won't be many more. (Though, I would like at some point to do a series of just-paintings at some point.) The Mermaid cover is gone, though. That's just a reproduction on the wall.
--Which I should mention, are available. 18" x 13" prints cost $30, and any painting I've done is available in that format, though I've not really worked out how to ship such things effectively yet. I'll put up a proper order form when I get that nailed down in a few days time.
So anyway. . , that's the story of the week!
If you happen to be in the area, it would be lovely if you could visit. It's a great little cafe, and they make some of the best food in the valley. (I've watched Areill improve her panini over the last seven years to the point where it's just about the perfect sandwich.) The Designer Cafe is in Kentville, Nova Scotia.
If you do happen to be interested in buying a painting, please inquire with the one you have in mind and I'll let you know if it's available and what the pricing is.
Cheers!
Mark Oakley
January 21st, 2010
Wolfville, Nova Scotia
I've always been a sucker for a good radio drama. . . There have been a couple of really good productions I can think of; a handful of books-on-tape read by accomplished voice performers. So with this in mind, I decided that I might as well write some scripts and put together my own little radio drama series. . . Only to discover that such projects are rather more complex than one might imagine.
--Not impossible by any means, but I learned that it is very easy to do it poorly, and a poor radio drama is a shockingly disruptive thing to listen to. --If a voice actor cannot pull off an excellent performance then there's nothing, nothing at all to distract the listener. I was hoping to read for one of the parts, and realized that professional speaking is a big deal. --I'd lined up a number of willing voice actors, but I found myself unwilling to advance for fear of not getting it done right. (I know! It's a terrible reason for not trying, but it did make me stress somewhat.) Still, I learned quite a bit in the process and would like very much to make another attempt at some point when I am feeling more certain of myself.
Anyway, I was also left holding some really nifty audio gear. --A very cute and effective digital sound recorder. By way of testing it, I brought it with me to Acadia University for a talk I was asked to give at one of their graduate English courses. Now, due to the fact that I was rather new to using the device, I wound up pointing it in the wrong direction, but you can still hear my voice clearly enough. Future items posted here will be much more clear. Please treat this as the experiment it is.
I don't know about you, but I've been finding my trips to the grocery store to be rather amazing these days. Those places are so full of color; such an array of marvelous packages, but so very little of it is fit for human consumption. I don't really think about it a great deal anymore; after all, I live in the land of Farm Markets, but even so, I do make regular trips to grocery stores. And nearly every time, I'll see a deal on the rack, some kind of salty snack or can of something tasty. And I know before I pick up the package that the label will amaze and astonish in a bad way. None of that stuff is food! --And you can see it in the people around you. Those who eat crap look terrible. Those who eat real food. . , they glow.
I like to glow.
August 22nd, 2008,
There's a lot of excellent thinking emerging these days. Many threads of awareness which are spotted throughout the vast internet. I've done a lot of reading over the past decade, (both on paper and screen), into many areas, most of them the sorts of things few of the people around me found to be particularly interesting. Studying politics and history on one's own time isn't exactly a typical sport, but it is a source of fascination for me. (My book, The Seventh Expert, through Annick Press is an example of this fascination, specifically all things medieval.)
Anyway, over the past five or six years, I've noticed that a large number of documentarians have jumped into this same ocean of emerging thought and have grasped hold of some handful of the many threads. The threads are all woven into a whole cloth, but it is a cloth is so large that one finds it difficult to examine with care more than a few parts of it at a time. I have, (being me), tried to look at the whole thing, and so I've spent hundreds of hours reading and pondering, but this results by necessity in a generalist's view. Others, however, those whose energies drive them to make documentaries, are the sorts of people who are so fascinated by a small handful of aspects that they are able to create very precise images to share. --Yet a documentary, while it is a wonderful device, remains simple. A documentary can lay out powerful patterns and fill them with enough researched details to create a succinct picture of the film-maker's mind, but it is only one picture, and often it will contain bits of flawed logic in spots which are hard to catch because once you are visiting the mind of the film-maker, all views within are by nature, internally consistent. And so it is important upon emerging from the world of a documentary to double-check and compare the ideas which have been shared with you. This should be seen as a challenge rather than a problem; it's just the way stories all are. But the stories themselves remain valuable, because while there may be flaws, the larger patterns are often fairly complete or in need only of some adjustment or gaps filled in. They are tools through which one can start to build their own knowledge of the world, and the exploration into the huge realm of human history and the new ideas which have been growing of late is an adventure!
Anyway. . . Every now and again, I'll find a documentary which does a particularly efficient or inspired job of putting together its share of threads into a coherent story. I'd like to share a couple of the ones which stand out in my mind. --Of course, many of the readers who enjoy my work, I have found, tend to be very aware people, and so I recognize that I may be sharing old ideas with them, but still. . . It's not like I'm printing this stuff on expensive paper. The digital medium has wide and plentiful acreage. The following film is the third part of a series called, "Zeitgeist". Very cool stuff. I'll post the first part another time. (The middle part I didn't care for, but that's simply the result of my own explorations. You are of course invited to make your own.)
Cheers, and enjoy!
August 4th, 2008,
Well, here's something new! --Many of you have probably seen plenty of 9-11 stuff, and are also probably quite tired of it. This one is really neat, though. --A group of pilots requested the flight data recorder info for the various planes on that fateful day through the U.S. FIOA, and put it through their own comparative analysis, contrasting it with the findings of the official 9-11 Report. Their work is both very sharp and very revealing. --I've seen a lot of this kind of material and usually there are several mushy spots, so it's nice to see some clean thinking. I do have a couple of reservations with some of their conclusions, but they have nothing to do with the major points offered. See what you think.
For more information on this video and the group which made it, visit, pilotsfor911truth.org
July 15th, 2008,
This is one of my favorite (very) short little animations. Alan Watts is one of those modern day philosophers who I place in the same general category as Joseph Campbell and Ray Bradbury. Enjoy!
July 2nd, 2008
"Where do you get your ideas?"
I've been asked this many times, and while many writers find the question understandably peculiar, I find it peculiar in a way which I really enjoy tackling because the answer is never quite the same. It's sort of an exploration of one's own mind, and I've always found this a fascinating exercise, usually because there always seems to be something new and interesting going on up there. --Often it involves a series of questions I am trying to find answers for, and when not doing that, my mental energy is spent following up on all the other little items in the world which fascinate me. There has always been a great host of them, and when the internet came along, that great host expanded dramatically. While much of what my mind produces is cobbled together from many different areas and thus takes a fair bit of effort to share with the world, every now and then I come across a diamond in the rough which I can simply hold up and say, "Hey! Check it out! A diamond!"
Well, having spent so many years with a website which I felt was sorely under-exploited for all its potential to communicate, I promised myself that when I performed my next massive overhaul, I would find some way to make a platform for those various items which have little or nothing to do with my comics, but everything to do with what fascinates and intrigues me. (--Which I suppose is directly and inextricably linked to everything I do in comics.)
So to start off with, I thought the first post I'd make in this area should be something appropriate to the whole subject of communication. This little gem is all about using the media to its fullest extent for all the right reasons. Ladies and gentlemen, --the gallant Bill Moyers offers a rousing keynote address at the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform. . .
Over-Seas customers, please inquire about shipping costs.
The Red Book Vol.1
(154 Pages)
cover price: $18.95
ISBN 0-9681025-0-6 Pay: $15.00 CAN
The Green BookVol.2
(260 Pages)
cover price: $24.75
ISBN 0-9681025-1-4 Pay: $20.00 CAN
OUT OF STOCK!
Instead receive all
the back-issues which went into this volume for the same price. Your
name and address will be kept on file and when the book is reprinted,
you will be mailed a free copy!
The Blue BookVol.3
(184 Pages)
cover price: $24.75
ISBN 0-9681025-2-2 Pay: $19.99 CAN
The Shadow BookVol.4 (272 pages)
cover price: $24.75
ISBN 0-9681025-3-0 Pay: $20.00 CAN
The Winter BookVol.5 (208 pgs)
cover price: $24.75
ISBN 0-9681025-4-9 Pay: $20.00 CAN Apprentices, Book I Thieves & Kings Vol.6
(104 pgs)
cover price: $15.00
ISBN 0-9681025-6-5 Pay: $15.00 CAN Thieves & Kings presents. . , The Walking Mage
64 pgs ISBN 0-9681025-5-7
Full Color
$11.00 CAN Thieves & Kings presents. . , Riverwolf Music from Oceansend
Songs written and
performed by Tony Davis, with CD package
& booklet design by yours truly, including a
water-colored short comics story.
$19.99 CAN
To finalize a PayPal
purchace or just see what you've ordered so far, click
the "View Cart" button
JENNY MYSTERIOUS
(Latest material
