All right, I got the code for comments finally figured out! Instead of leaving messages on my very annoying message board you can now post your thoughts directly to the blog. Let's keep it un-crazy though, okay? I will delete flamers and spammers without mercy.

The old message board will be up for a while longer but I'll probably take the link out eventually. I tend to hang out at Bendis and BKV's boards anway.

Page 19 is almost done.

Pages 17 and 18 halfway done.

I'm beginning to seriously dislike my immediate neighbourhood. Mount Pleasant itself is great but this block has become hell on earth thanks to seemingly non stop construction projects. This summer the culprit is a house a few doors over from the corner condo (the perpetrator of auditory tortures past), another Victorian with delusions of grand realty prices. For the last two weeks starting at 9am the day starts with a loud saw followed by hours and hours of hammering. The giant industrial dumpster parked out front doesn't offer much hope of it being a short term thing either.

Before this wasn't much better with the house across the street from our building undergoing extensive renovations over the last three months. In the early spring we saw the development permit sign for that one go up stating that an add-on would be built into the back. We didn't think too much of it since it would be behind the house so we probably wouldn't even notice it. As it turned out the whole house was being gutted, raised and rebuilt. The road had to be ripped up to add in new sewage lines. Total nightmare. And it's still not finished.

And now, the icing on the cake, over on the other end of the block a house there has put up its own development sign. This one for a complete tear down so a three story condo can go up in it's place.

It's all greed. Greedy, inconsiderate fucks cashing in on a hot real estate market, taking perfectly good homes, not even very big ones at that, chopping them up into tiny apartments and selling them for ridiculous prices ($500,000 for a basement suite?!).

It's depressing. On the one hand there's not being able to sleep because of the noise or close the windows because of the heat (making the noise worse) and on the other... We'd love to have a home of our own someday, in the area if possible but with the prices the way they are it just seems so out of reach. And with all the construction going on, finding that perfect little single family dwelling will only be harder won't it?

Grr.

Ended up going to the Richmond Night Market on Saturday instead. I found a wicked Chairman Mao watch there.

He waves his arm with every tick! Plus it's a wind up which is hard to find these days. I'm digging the irony too.

We hadn't been to the market before and it was pretty overwhelming. A giant Ultraman statue watched over all the flashing lights and tinny Canto-pop. Hundreds of people jostled for looks at the stands displaying everything from Hello Kitty to handbags to electronics. A lot of junk but a few neat finds like a cheap set of speakers for the mp3 player. We ran into some friends and wandered together for a while until hunger started calling and we split for the food stands. We had some fabulous shrimp and dumplings. I loved that this market was in the evening, it saved us from having to deal with swarms of wasps and the midday sun pounding down on the shoulder to shoulder masses.

Today we were at the office, sleepy from an early wake up for a family lunch date. I got page 16 started and then passed out on the couch. Later we met up with Roger and Louise and went to see Snakes on a Plane.

This was a fun film. I was surprised at how much it played like a Hong Kong action film. The pacing, the ridiculous plot and even sillier dialogue... replace the leads with Chow Yun Fat and Anita Mui and you'd have a classic along the lines of Hard Boiled, Tiger on the Beat and High Risk (that last one had a very nutty scene with snakes in a bathroom).

Goofy and worth a trip to the theater.

5 pages done. Garhh. That was a long night. My hand is crazy sore. Vic and Ian want to go to the Richmond night market later today. I hope I can get some decent sleep before then.

There really isn't that much to the movie the Grudge is there?

Just a bunch of backgrounds left to do and I'm done with this batch. I'll bring them home just in case I get another burst of energy but right now the hand has gotten stiff. Grr. It's frustrating to be so close but needing another day.

Page 15 is halfway there. Fallen a bit behind this weekend. Errands and weird sleep. Stiff muscles. These pages have a lot of action in them and combined with everything else I've been half drawing panels, struggling to get the flow of movement to work without it looking like a Michael Bay film dropped into Waiting for Godot.

Couple more days.

And it's not like I don't like action. Quite the opposite, it's my favourite part, capturing motion in just the right way. One day I'd like to draw an entire issue with one well choreographed fight scene. Just go to town. Pull the martial arts references off the shelf, dig up the Jet Li movies. Graceful moves, proper physics, the right amount of violence. That would be cool.

Added to all this there's a car chase... sort of, can't reveal anything of course. There's been this unwritten rule throughout the series: no car scenes. Too static, or too easy or something like that. But here's this cool car scene and now I find I've gotten rusty with cars, or their motion, getting it to look like a hunk of steel barreling down a street. It's not a big deal really. I do want to get it right though.

I finally got the gallery and resume pages set up. Now you too can share in embrassments past! Just click the Portfolio page for more details!

Lulu is already very missed. What a great cat.

I'm glad that Michael Walsh didn't take my comments too personally the other day. He sent me a very nice e-mail:

Ms G.,

Just a quick note to thank you again for taking the time to chat with me on the radio. Comics remain one of those wonderful topics that people can agree or disagree about with cordial passion. I once knew a first-generation comics fan named George Henderson, a former Canadian paratrooper who'd served in the Korean war.
He published an early comics "journal" called Captain George's Whizzbang in the late 1960s out of his Memory Lane comics shop in downtown Toronto's Markham St. Village shopping district. He referred to comics, affectionately, as "the toys of the dead."
What he meant, of course, was that comics were artifacts of a time gone by - childhood - and of moments of pleasure buried in the past. I think George would have been pleased to know that comics were no so much dead as comatose and that the thrilling days of yesteryear, when big kids (a.k.a. adults) could enjoy comics (graphic novels?) openly and shamelessly, would return.

Thanks Michael.

Got Pages 13 and 14 roughed out. Tackling a bit of insomnia right now. Tends to happen on deadlines. Lulu heads home today. I'm gonna miss that lil' hellion.

I had to share this link:

>>>Ride Little Monkey, Ride!<<<

Wow.

Pages 11 and 12 are started up.

The interview went very well this evening although I have to admit there was some frustration involved due to the use of the term 'graphic novel'. I should have done some more research beforehand so I could have been more clear, I knew we would be talking about graphic novels but not to the extent the host had planned out. Mr. Walsh had brought in the 30th anniversary issue of the Comics Journal that had a special reprinting of what they considered to be the first graphic novel ever made, titled It Rhymes With Lust (predating Eisner's Contract With God). I guess because I drew graphic novels everyone thought I'd be following this story which sadly I haven't, most likely because I'm not a regular reader of the Comics Journal (horrors, I know).

The story was meant to be an important milestone in the evolution of the graphic novel to what it is today. Not comics, graphic novels. And here's where I became frustrated, as I see no distinction between the two aside from how these stories are bound.

So we kept on this for some time until finally I said something along the lines of "People who think comics are for kids and don't want to be caught reading them try to apply this term just so they can feel comfortable reading comics".

Which is really how I feel about this. Bless Frank Miller and his body of work (okay, I'm a bit iffy on DK2) but his current crusade to declare comics a dead medium, graphic novels are the future blah blah blah just tans my hide! Come on, they're comics people! What's the big deal here?

The thing that gets me is when people refer to the well known graphic novels, works like V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Sandman and okay, Y -The Last Man they tend to forget that all of these books started off as a series of individual comic books. Yet somehow the book form is an elevated medium, a more adult version to the original?

When I was younger and collected comics for fun and profit (*g*) we didn't think of these books so highly. We called them 'trade paperbacks' and they were meant to be used as an alternative to pulling out the oh so valuable comics from their mylars thereby preventing devaluation. So if you wanted to give your buddy a copy of Daredevil: Born Again or the phoenix Saga you could hand over the trade and not worry about getting it back in the same condition because they were essentially worthless.

I have never considered myself a graphic novelist/artist despite the fact that some of my work ends up in the collected format largely regarded as graphic novels. I draw comics. Comic books. Not floppies, not pamphlets as some have called them and god how I hate that usage. If I wanted to make pamphlets all day I'd work at Kinkos thank you very much.

Some stories are longer than the standard comic, not all books are made to be put out on a monthly schedule you see but you can't bind them the same way with staples because the extra pages would cause the book to fall apart. Hence the book binding.

And because it looks like a book it must be better right?

I don't want to be bitter sounding here, really I don't. I just wish people wouldn't assume the format automatically means better or more mature content. I've read some truly beautiful, mature stories in individual issues of comic books and I've read some real dogs in the bound format (and felt ripped off by the price I paid for all the extra production involved).

A crappy movie on a plasma screen is still a crappy movie after all.

So anyway, challenging interview, wish I was more articulate on the matter.

This afternoon: Birthday party for Kat! Happy Birthday Kat!

Pages are done and now for some sleep. If I can get up in time there's a life drawing class up on Main I'd like to catch this evening.

Almost done with this batch, some backgrounds and it's out.

Just to let anyone know who might be interested, I'll be doing an interview on CFRO, 102.7 FM this coming Thursday evening between 9 and 10 pm PST. We'll be talking comics and graphic novels.

looking forward to the showers predicted over the next day or so. It's been too damn hot and muggy at the office.

Pages 9 and 10 are halfway there, a couple more days and I'll have finishes done on all these pages. It's a strange way to work I know, bouncing from page to page but it's so easy to get bogged down in the details of a single panel sometimes it's better to continue to the next page and go back to the trouble spots later.

It's BC day today, no doubt the pool will be packed.

Okay, the whole fireworks party and drawing board thing didn't work out. We both woke up way too late and sapped of all our energy to do anything. We tried. Got as far as Bert's for lunch/dinner after which we said "aw crap, let's go buy some real food for later tonight and tidy up around the house".

Which we did. Well, for the most part. The laundry we sorted through is still sitting in piles, one to be set into the closet and the other going to the Sally Ann. We had a lot of clothes we weren't really wearing anymore and it was about time we took care of them.

As the fireworks thudded in the distance I got a little grumpy for not going to the party. I wanted to hang with Riel, show her these cool shoes I bought last month. Not that I'm a big shoe show off, we had a shoe shopping day together before the wedding and I don't know, there's a bond now I guess. And these shoes I found are pretty sweet.

Anyway, I was grumpy and restless and tired and surrounded by laundry. And that's when Ian suggested we watch a movie, the Matador with Pierce Brosnan. And wow, two really great Greg Kinnear movies in as many days. Impressive.

After that I fidgeted with the electrics in the dollhouse. Nothing more satisfying than taking apart a 1/12th scale hanging hurricane lamp, shortening the chain, re-wiring the plate with its impossibly tiny screws and getting it to light again. One day I'll get all these fixtures actually installed.

Pages 7 and 8 started.

We saw Little Miss Sunshine this evening. Brutally honest, funny as hell, a wonderful ensemble piece.

Back home and Ian let off a sneeze that sent Lulu flying from the couch into the blinds, onto the table and tearing off into another room. She's having a time out now.

Tomorrow we're at a rooftop fireworks party and then back to the drawing table.

We're sitting in front of the tv watching a show on the food channel about salmon fishing when Ian says, "Oh, I had a dream about you this morning where you set Mel Gibson on fire."

"What?!"

"Yeah, and we got into a fight over it too."

"Holy shit!"

"You were an extra on a movie set and there was Mel and you just set him on fire, poof, and he was running around screaming and you were like 'what?' and I couldn't believe you'd just do that."

"Should I be worried that your subconscious sees me as someone capable of burning someone alive?"

"It was weird is all I'm saying."

"I have to blog this."

He's looking over at me right now with the sweetest eyes. I love my crazy husband.

Page 6 almost done.

The cats are doing their best to not looked miffed but their growling continues. Lulu plays a kind of tag where she'll fly onto your lap or chest and fly right off as if you were a trampoline. It's a bit of a shock if you don't see it coming.

How did it get to be Friday already?

We're going to be a 4 cat household for a few days. Ian's sister asked us to look after little Lulu while her place is undergoing renovations. So far it's a bit like putting North Korea, Japan, Iran and Israel together in the same room with some catnip. Lots of growling and hissing broken by short bursts of chasing each other around but no real violence.

I get to play gunboat diplomacy with the squirt bottle.

After the pages went out I took the evening off to rest the hand and take in some fireworks. We started the night with dinner at the Pacific Culinary Institute. A friend was in town and had a prepaid reservation but couldn't make it so she offered it to us. We'd heard good things about it, inexpensive gourmet meals prepared by students and figured it would be fun to play amateur food critics. It wasn't all that bad. The berries are all in season right now and made for a wonderful dessert.

Afterwards we made our way to another friend's apartment in Kits and watched the show from their balcony. When that was done we sat around talking, oddly enough the conversation was dominated with insect and rodent horror stories. Maybe that's why I'm still up. Visions of Wolf Spiders scuttling in my head. Brr. Think of Randolph Mantooth, think of Randolph Mantooth. Emergency was a fun series. Especially that episode with the... RATTLESNAKE!

Ugh. Hopeless.

Stayed up late to finish these five pages so they can go out in the Fed Ex run today.

Augie just climbed into the dollhouse for a nap. One of these days I'll get a picture so that I may share the cuteness.

One note about this whole Mel Gibson crap. Yes his comments were damn douchey but come on people, the guy got into a car drunk. He endangered people's lives. He could have mowed down someone's kid, someone's parents or grandparents and everyone's more concerned about what he said? Fuck him. I've hated his work since his 'flied lice' line in that despicable crap-fest Lethal Weapon 4. His total disregard for human life cements his title as dirtbag in my book.

Yes I need some sleep.

5 pages just about done.

A final word on Planetes. I've read all the books and as of yesterday we've seen all the anime series on DVD and couldn't recommend them all more.


First off the manga. The premise is simple, a crew of debris collectors work in orbit to keep space safe from errant junk. The time is about a hundred years from the first Apollo missions and space is now a very crowded and busy place where collisions between said debris and working ships can mean disaster. Which says nothing about how damn beautiful, intelligent and cool these stories are. Balanced between heartbreaking stories examining the meaning of existence against the infinite blackness of space and the need for love and connection are moments of hilarity like walking for miles through a lunar wasteland just to get a smoke.

No warp drives, wormholes or aliens here, just hardcore science and that's my favourite part. The real limitations of space are there not to be sidestepped with a bit of puffy pseudophysics but confronted, sometimes overcome, sometimes not and in both revealing humanity's true fragilities and strengths.


When I saw the first of the series of anime I wasn't sure I was prepared to like it. There were changes made that made it seem like a watered down version of the books. A cutesy office enviroment that included a few wacky characters, a passive but pleasant manager, an assistant manager into magic tricks and office politics, and a temp who never cracks a smile. Add to this some wannabe ninjas on the moon and I began to wonder what the heck they were getting at taking such heavy material and making it so seemingly light.


And then some of the more poignant chapters were adapted, and the kookier characters were fleshed out becoming more real in their motivations. Finally, all of these initial oddities connected, culminating in some amazing stuff and driving home the central themes of the books. Ian and I found ourselves sniffling at the end of many episodes.

And of course the art is fantastic in both.

Definitely worth a look.

On the way home this morning we had some lovely lightning and thunder. Only a few flashes but still pretty cool. The rain started up just moments after stepping in the door and continued for several hours.

The Comix and Stories con was mentioned on Brian's board this week and for some reason I got the idea that it was on today. We met up with Vic and Susan and stopped by the hall to see that there was a wedding reception being set up instead. Blah. At least the weather was cooler. We all had a nice lunch and chat at Bert's.

Spent the rest of the day at the office tackling pages. Got those first two fleshed out and then started up another two.

The head cold isn't so bad today. Sneezing and sniffles.

Back home now and Ian is cooking up something that smells incredible. Gonna watch another Planetes episode soon.

Yeah, not too insightful today. Maybe tomorrow.

Out of the gate... with a head cold. Figures, you spend a weekend with a hundred thousand people that one of them will pass on a bug. Nothing serious, just a lot of sneezing. Blah.

So to get the day started I called up Ian who was already at the office and asked him if he'd like to grab some lunch (more like dinner since it was about five o'clock, slept in a bit due the head cold). Ian wanted to go to Black Tuna down by the beach and we both blanked that it was Saturday and the downtown core was going to be swamped with about a million people checking out the fireworks competition.

We get there at about six and have a lovely dinner while we watch the masses go by. After stuffing ourselves on beautiful fish we decide to give the fireworks a try. By now it's seven thirty and the only place left is a patch of green across the street. We sit for an hour or so, looking up at the looming clouds. I've worked on some small pyro teams in the past and whenever the skies were overcast like this, seemingly non threatening but still thick, something about the booming mortars would cause them to spill rain shortly after any show. It was chillier than usual this evening, I didn't have a jacket and I didn't really want to get rained on either. Splitting seemed like a good idea.

We walked towards Granville to see if we could make it to the comic shop before they closed. We've been totally hooked on the Planetes DVDs and there was one more left we hadn't seen. Halfway through the west end we're at a street corner and I look up to see a very familiar head of flowing hair. The actor John Glover was crossing the road and me, being ever the loquacious geek just had to stop and tell him how much I liked his work. He thanked me politely, wished us good fireworks and continued on, his gorgeous, healthy mane bobbing in the wind.

We just made it to the shop. Actually they had just closed but we gave them the puppy dog eyes and promises of a good, fast sale and they let us in. Planetes 6 was ours! Yay!

We then walked over to Chapters but no finds there. I really wish they'd adjust their prices to the current exchange rate because twenty three bucks for a Computer Arts magazine just seems a bit much these days.

We grabbed a cab before the fireworks were set to start and hightailed it to the office where, after some distractions with comics and the gameboy I got two pages nicely started. The rain was nice too when it finally fell.

At around 3 am we heard a loud crash outside. The whole evening had been pretty loud, lots of cars leaving the core, sirens racing back and forth, and rowdies partying into the night. This particular crash was the sound of a lot of glass followed by angry yelling.

We look out and see two guys walking up the street, the loud one was brushing himself off. We couldn't see any glass so we just watched him go up the street with his buddy. When they were just out of sight we looked back and saw a small crowd gathered around the barber shop there. We went downstairs to have a look and sure enough, Mr. Angry McSmash-a-lot had punched a very large hole into the plate glass window. Most of the glass was inside which was why we couldn't see any from across the street. We looked back to where they had gone and now there was a cop car sitting there. We hurried over to make a report but they were too involved with a couple of street racers to care and asked us to go across the street to call 911.

We filed the report but by then the two drunken douchebags were long gone. We grabbed some hot chocolate and went back to the office.

Quite a day all right.

I've avoided thinking about issue 60 over the last few years mostly to keep myself from thinking about how much more work there's left to do. Stay in the present, plow through and some day that cozy promise of fulfillment will just show up on my doorstep.

At the con this weekend I had several dozen people ask me the same question: "So what's next?" and with a shrug I would answer "Dunno, we'll see when I get there."

Just as I haven't let myself dwell on issue 60 I've sidestepped the whole what-happens-after part. I supposed I would take a break, have a look at all my back-burnered projects, consider any proposals that might come in (hopefully from creators I've always wanted to work with) or possibly try something completely different.

After a fun and inspirational weekend at the con I started to think about putting together a booth for next year and what that would entail. Maybe a table or two to sell some art and the ever popular sketchbook, or a self publishing venture, make up some funky t-shirts to sell. Maybe all of that. I started getting excited, ideas began spilling out of my noodle and I was scribbling furiously in my notebook.

And that's when I began to look at the future. Specifically, my schedule.

For some reason my brain locked onto the idea that the end would be around December of 2006. At the very latest February of 2007 which would have left me time to put some projects together in time for next year's San Diego con. I started counting out how long I'd have left after finishing issue 49 this week and was horrified to learn that I wouldn't be done until summer. A whole year. Egads.

I became quite depressed. Now, don't get me wrong, I love working on Y, the story is brilliant and I feel so lucky to have done as much as I have. It's also a lot of work and the idea of trying something new just jazzed me up so much. And that's when I came up with this idea for the blog and my spirits lifted.

Y the Last Year. T minus ten issues. So leading up to issue 60 I'll be blogging as much as I can about it. The fun parts, the hard parts, the couple of issues I'll probably be off in the middle, anything I can write about the experience including the huge bash we're planning for the finish.

Today I opened my e-mail to find the script for issue 50.

Here we go.

San Diego reportage:

Thursday Freak Out: How an Omni Hotel Reservation Lady Screwed Us Out of Our Room.

We should have known something terrible was about to happen when everything went so smoothly in getting to San Diego on Thursday. We got to the airport early, managed to upgrade our flight, sailed through customs, landed in town about 20 minutes early, and to top it all off, just as we were pulling up to the entrance the radio started playing "our song" from the reception, As Time Goes By.

We walked into the Omni, cheerfully greeted reception and asked for our room. After a few moments digging through the records the man (I'll call him Good Cop) announced that our room had been given away. According to their records we were supposed to arrive on Wednesday and because we didn't we were considered no shows and our room was given away. We both gasp in shock.

I related the conversation I had with a their hotel staff on Monday, which went exactly like this:

Omni: Omni Hotel, where can I direct your call?
me: Reservations please.
clicking.
Reservation lady: Omni Reservations, how can I help you?
me: I need to change my check in date for this week.

I provide the name and day we're set to get in to town, Wednesday.

me: It looks like we're now coming in on Thursday now so we need to change that to Thursday from Wednesday. Is there still time to change that?
Reservation lady: No problem, I'll do that for you.

She quotes a date on her screen.

me: Is that Thursday?
Reservation lady: Yes, that's Thursday.
me: That's the day we're coming in so great. Oh and I wanted to ask if we could get a room facing the convention center because we stayed there a couple of years ago and we had a room on the side of that bar and we couldn't leave the window open for the noise.
Reservation lady: Let me check, we're pretty full up for the weekend.
me: Yeah, I know. It's the con, everything gets booked up during that time. The noise is one thing but I also have some mild asthma and I need to have a window open, and we can't leave it open when there's so much noise from that bar.
Reservation lady: Oh, well that will probably help you in getting that because we give priority for medical reasons.
me: Oh thanks. I stayed at a hotel a few years ago that couldn't open the windows and I had an attack in my sleep, it was really scary.
Reservation lady: We have ionizers if you need them.
me: Oh no thanks, the window really does the trick more than anything. If you can't get anything on the pool side of the building then up high is good too, as long as it's far from the bar.
Reservation lady: Okay, I think we can do that. I have all the information on your file now.
me: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.
Reservation lady: You're welcome, we'll see you on Thursday.
me: Thanks again. Bye

Good Cop looks at the screen and says that he sees the medical information there and I tell him that was the information I added on Monday so why wasn't the date changed? He calls in another manager (this one shall be called Bad Cop).

Bad Cop gets updated on the information and says there are no rooms available and that the rooms have been booked for months. We tell him that we booked this months ago so why would we screw ourselves on the one weekend of the year when the entire city sells out of rooms? We made the changes with their reservation department and it's their fault, not ours. On top of that we find out I was charged a night's stay because we were no shows.

At this point I start yelling that I was not responsible for this screw up and I shouldn't be charged for their mistake. They agree to reimburse the charge but that's it. Bad Cop takes the stance that since there was no record of making a change to the date that we must be trying to scam them into getting a room. They call around the city and the only room available is one night at the Marriot on Coronado Island and no matter how inconvenient and awful that is for us that's all they can do and Bad Cop escorts us to a cab. No offer of compensation for the ride over either.

We were shaking with rage on the ride over. How the hell can we get through this weekend like this? We drop off our stuff and quickly hurry back to the convention center (another twenty dollar cab ride) and were just able to get our badges before the 7pm closing. There was five minutes left before the show ended so we decided to check in with the DC Comics booth to get a signing schedule set up. We found Fletcher, one of the booth managers who shall be forever known as Saint Fletcher. We mentioned our predicament and asked if he knew of anyone who might know of a room available in the city. He thinks for a second, winks in that knowing way and says, "Give me a moment, I'll call a guy."

Ian and I stand there stunned that there may actually be a solution and sure enough, in a couple of minutes Saint Fletcher returns with a man who says he can set is up in the Gas Lamp.

Holy crap! Holy crap! We were so happy! We were saved! Saint Fletcher rocks!

We stayed that night at the Coronado, a Shining-esque creepy night at that but the next morning we were at the Marriot Gaslamp. Yay! Double Yay!

I will never stay at the Omni ever again. I may stop by the bar for their very nice Arnold Palmers but as for the hotel... forget it. Never trust a place that can't read a bloody calendar.


Friday was a hoot. We didn't win at the Eisners (as expected) but we got to hang out with Shane and goof around drawing cartoons on our programs all night.

The signings at the booth went very nicely and I thank everyone who stopped by to say hello and get sketches.

I'll post more soon, time to go and be a social butterfly.

San Diego is a go go!

Ian and I will be arrving on Thursday afternoon so we probably won't see too much of the con that day but we'll be around. No signing schedule yet but chances are it will be the same time as Brian's. Check in with the Vertigo booth for more information.

Some quick notes on sketches:

I do free sketches at the booth. I ask they not be resold because that's just tacky. Anyone who wants a sketch from me can get one by mail for free as well. I'm not here to make you rich, only to make you happy.

Bring a backing board or your sketchbook because I'm not hauling paper to the con.

If you have a request for a character not in Y bring reference, my memory is only so good and I don't want to mess up your board/book.

I will not do nudes of your favourite character. Sorry, that's just my policy.

I will do my best to get to everyone but if time runs out please check with the booth attendants for future times. If there are no other times on the schedule check with the FAQ here regarding mailing in for a sketch. And feel free to say hi regardless of whether you can get a sketch or not, it's always nice to hear from you.

See you this weekend!

Breyer's ice cream now officially sucks.

Ian picked up a carton of Breyers today, that ice cream that features ads with cute children reading off the oh so simple ingredients to prove how natural it really is. I used to really like it, that is until this evening when we had some for dessert.

After a few bites we began to wonder why the hell it tasted so gummy and awful. We checked the label and sure enough there were these not so simple names on the list: milk ingredients, sugar, modified milk ingredients, polysorbate 80, guar gum, glucose, mono and diglycerides, cellulose gum, natural vanilla flavour, carageenan and oh yeah, pure ground vanilla beans (makes you wonder why they had to add the natural vanilla flavour if there's ground vanilla beans in there hmm?).

We checked to see if this was some diet version or for people with gluten alergies but the label only said Breyer's Natural Vanilla (with real vanilla specks!), not that I saw a lot of specks in there either.

Sure there are many more important things out there to feel betrayed about (Wal-Mart, Bush, leafblowers, Vancouver's real estate market) but this is especially disappointing. I can understand when you buy the cheapo stuff you get crap but spending all that money for crap when they've always claimed to not be crap? I feel ripped off.

And now my stomach is all rumbly and that taste keeps hanging around. Ick. Breyer's blows.

San Diego. I've gotten a few e-mails lately asking if I'm going. The answer is maybe. The thing about weddings is they tend to do a royal number on your bank account balance. I'm presently waiting on some income to get the tickets and the hotel all paid for. I will say that I'd really like to go but it's up in the air.

I've also had some invites to do some cons/signings for this fall. Right now, work is piling up and with all the travelling and back and forth of the past couple of months, another plane trip would juts make my ears bleed. For now I'm just going to hole up in my office and work. It's the final stretch and I need to be there for it. When it's all done there will be lots of time for a tour but presently the book should be my primary focus. Thank you for the consideration.

Requests. Please read the FAQ regarding sketch requests before e-mailing. It's all there, it's all I have time for. Unless you send in the SASE with your information you won't get a response.

And what is a backing board? It's that acid free piece of cardboard you usually get with comics in bags. If you can't find one you can send a sturdy piece of art paper like bristol or sketch paper. These survive transit very well. Please keep the size reasonable, it'll save you on postage.

And I have no pages for sale just now, still working on the details there.

Hope that wasn't too grumpy sounding, I've got a lot of work to get back to.

I have a stack of everything to get done here. I have just spent the last week dropping everything, and I mean everything, to work on a script that had to be in by the 11th. A call had come in last week from parties interested in producing this story idea Ian and I have been playing with for the last few years.

Fortunately, as it turned out, our Simpson's story for Treehouse of Horror was bumped to next year leaving us this little window of time to do it (leftover free time from all the wedding madness of the last few weeks).

Thank you notes, bills, e-mail correspondence, sketch requests, dinner appointments, house cleaning, laundry...all dropped.

And somehow we did it. A complete 90-ish page script, done, within deadline. Me doing the first draft, Ian taking it in parts and rewriting as it went.

And I really have to say, regardless if this thing ever gets made or not, that it was such a wonderfully satisfying experience to just write like that. Work down the outline point by point, adding bits, solving problems, giving this sucker life after so much planning and talking about it.

Yeah, I could get used to this writing thing.

But for now, back to everything else...

I had this dream this morning where I was visiting someone on a bike. I had to lock it up with one of those combo locks because the area was rough and there was a person standing nearby that I had apparently had a history with, enough to make her want to steal my bike the moment my back was turned.

I had used this lock before but it had been a while so I wasn't sure of the combination. I looked at the numbers already on there and tried to memorise them knowing that the moment I locked it up those numbers would be scrambled and I'd be screwed if I forgot them. To make matters worse it was a 7 digit code, a lot of numbers to remember. I got a piece of scrap paper out of my bag an rummaged for something to write with which turned out to be a colour marker, the colour being "coffee with milk"

So I write down these numbers, watery coffee looking numbers and I lock my bike and I go inside.

Then I wake up and realise where those numbers came from and why they're so important: they're DC's fed ex account number which I use all the time to send pages out.

And then I remembered an issue of Planetary I'd read a few months back where the lead character uses this special code to activate some vault or weapon or something: the same number only the one and zeros were removed.

So, sacred mathematics or the result of deadline pressures seeping into the subconscious of the artistic mind?

Hm.

We're back and I've been meaning to post for a while now about the absolutely wicked wedding reception we held after getting home (I should be getting photos shortly) but today I was prompted to write in after hearing some absolutely, knock-me-on-my-ass great news.

Recently there was a story on an NPR show (All Things Considered I believe) talking about Y and as a result the first trade has shot up the Amazon charts ahead of the Da Vinci Code and the last Harry Potter book. Granted those are hardcover sales but holy crap! Number 37!

My face kinda did this weird Tex Avery thing that I'm sure others would have found amusing had I not been alone in the office listening to the It's All Gone Pete Tong soundtrack.

Wow. And wow.

Add to this the wonderful news of the book being nominated for a Harvey and this has been a lovely week indeed.

Wow.