For those of you who don't know, I suppose it would help if I explained. . .

Stardrop was created for a local newsletter which circulates around the town of Wolfville where I live. --It is a newsletter filled with lists of upcoming events, of which there are many, (in a given two-week period there are often as many as 10 musical acts or CD launch parties or what-have-you, as well as a multitude of other events. Wolfville and indeed the whole of the Annapolis Valley in which it sits, was one of the landing spots for Americans fleeing the Draft back in the days of the war in Viet Nam. We got more than our fair share of hippies and artists and such, and their offspring, combined with the naturally very musical nature of Nova Scotia make for more exquisitely talented people per capita than anywhere else that I know of in all of Canada. In fact the newsletter came into being as a means to keep track of all the dozens of musical events and gallery showings and poetry readings and sculpting classes and drum workshops, etc. It was pure chance that its very first issue happened to be in the planning stages shortly after I first moved to the Valley back in 2003, so I've been a regular contributor since then.)

Anyway the Grapevine (that's what the newsletter is called), is also filled with local news and articles written by people who live in town. It's quite a vibrant little paper with a dedicated readership. It has a circulation of about 1000 which, given that Wolfville only has 4000 people living in it, makes for pretty amazing penetration.

It is not uncommon for me when walking around town to be stopped by somebody to be questioned about the goings on in a recent episode of the comic strip. --And that kind of encounter has been happening a lot more frequently over the last month.

"Is Stardrop ending? What's going on?"

Well, here's the scoop. . .

The Grapevine, like any regular publishing effort, is a major undertaking. There are ad spots for local businesses which need to be sold and coordinated, there is content editing, printing and distribution, all of which is handled by the very small staff of two people, who up until very recently, were Andy & Arianna, (a pair of wonderful musicians and friends of mine). Well, the grind got to be a bit much, and so the duties of putting together the little paper was handed off to another energetic and bright-eyed pair of willing hands. Namely Jeremy and Jocelyn, who have no doubt been amazed in the last month since they took over, by the work involved in running a small newspaper. My best wishes go out to them in their noble efforts!

However. . .

In an attempt to re-invent the Grapevine, the new editors felt that Stardrop needed a shake-up. Or rather, a total removal. Neither Jeremy nor Jocelyn were regular readers of Ashelle's adventures, and so they felt it was taking up too much valuable space. No problem. I know all about wanting to shape and control the work you publish. I figured, no sweat. I'll just keep making it for my on-line readership, (a conservative but regular 1000 or so unique hits between episodes, probably next to none of them from Wolfville.). And so I said, "No problem. Just give me a couple of episodes to wrap up the story line for the people who are regular readers in town and I'll be out of your hair."

Except they didn't want me gone per se. The new editors still wanted some comics and they wanted me to do them, (which is very flattering, I must say), but they just didn't want a half-page of Stardrop, which to be quite fair, had become rather self-referential and hard to follow for those just tuning in for the first time. They wanted a new strip which would be easier to jump into and get out of. They were thinking like smart editors with a mind to expanding the readership, possibly even beyond the bounds of Wolfville proper.

Hm. Well, I wasn't sure I wanted to come up with a brand new strip. I've already got T&K, and Stardrop and now Jenny M which I want to work on. Taking on a brand new strip would drive me a little loopy. So I was seriously thinking of just bowing out altogether. No more comics in the Grapevine.

And then the "Goodbye" episodes began, and Jeremy visited me at the local Farm Market where I help out my landlady with her Indian Food business, selling deep-fried goodness with delicious Chutney. . . (Mmm. That's a whole other story). So Jeremy came up to me looking rather frazzled. I gather that he'd been getting some back lash for the decision to cut Stardrop. "So I'm telling people that you're definitely still going to be doing comics for the Vine. . , um. . , right?"

Oh dear! Being an editor is a tough job, and I really feel for them. --I even caught some of it myself. I was at a Farmer's convention, (where they were running workshops on how to set up your own small sustainable family farming operation, not to produce goods for sale, but how to raise enough food on your own land just for yourself and your family. I was stunned to learn that it takes remarkably little land, like the footprint of a small house, to grow enough grain to keep a whole family in bread for a year. Isn't that cool? Anyway. . .) So I was wandering around this event which was set out on a farm with tents and tee-pees, and a little girl came up to me and said, "Aren't you the guy who draws Stardrop?" I admitted that I was and she said, "Cool! I love Stardrop!"

This is always nice to hear, but I shook my head sadly, (I'd only just written the script for the final episodes, so I was feeling a bit down about it), and I said, "Yeah, that's very nice of you to say, but it's ending in three episodes." --To which the response was, "WHAT? How come?!"

I tried to be diplomatic in my response.

Like I said. . , being an editor is a tough job.

So anyway. . , the fate of Stardrop is all up in the air at the moment, and I've got a meeting with Jeremy and Jocelyn this week to see what comes next. I've got a couple of ideas, but nothing firm. But something is going to happen! I just don't know what yet.

Come back in two weeks to find out.

Cheers!

-Mark

July 2, 2008

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.

Cheers!

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 upcoming 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. . .