Ah, lovely misery…

Sorry, that was the first thing to pop into my head… December, the month of holiday cheer, how I loathe it…actually, it’s not so bad. I’m just so broke right now! I’ve got $20 until the end of the month! It’s awful, people owe me money but are in no hurry to pay me! I had to forgo buying books! Ahhh! I’m going cold turkey! I’m not talking new but remaindered and used books on digital comics and about a little known conflict on the B.C. coast with the “locals” (as I call the First Nations peoples) in the 18th centaury that I am dieing to read about! I just finished a book on the Royal Navy on the Pacific Northwest but it barely touched on conflict with the locals. No, I had to go buy dental floss and milk…

I’ve just returned from my condo buildings X-mas tree raising and decoration, quite a party. People brought food and wine, told naughty jokes about Jesus on the cross being “well hung” and singing little ditty‘s about Mary getting an abortion (nobody took offence as far as I could see, we’re a pretty secular bunch but then again so is Christmas). I finally got to meet my upstairs neighbour after she’s been living here for months, turns out she’s a frustrated designer who dabbled in cartooning before giving it all up to become a nurse. We even went to art school about the same time, me in Vancouver and she in Ontario. She blushed when I told her I could hear her playing the recorder, I wasn’t complaining mind you. I helped out with the tree lights, had fun, ate munchies. The next few weeks should be busy, openings to go too, Wednesday it’s the launch at long last of the new Drippytown Comic, including a story that I illustrated for my old pal G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, at a Japanese Karaoke restaurant of all things! As long as they don’t make me sing…

Speaking of neighbours, my downstairs neighbour is at it again. About a year ago he started a campaign of harassment, hoping to give me a heart attack. I know this because that’s one of the things he screamed at me from below, along with threats, hysterical laughter, pounding on the ceiling and guttural shrieks when ever I would, amongst many other things, sweep the floor, use a stapler, sit, vacuum… he once accused me of picking a fight in my sleep… this all stop about a year ago after months of harassment for no good reason but I fear it might be starting up again. He would crank up the radio in his bathroom when I took a bath and last week I was brushing my teeth when he pounded the floor under my feet and shouted “Waaaah!” I know, he sounds a little nuts… so I decided I wasn’t going through that again so I filed a report with the police (the property managers are helpless, or should I say useless) so that if it gets worse they can do something about it. The police should know him, a few years ago the SWAT team took him out on a stretcher after he tore his place apart with a length of steel cable on a bad PCP trip…
I’ve been working on the pencils for the graphic novel, this is going to take a long time so it’s going to be very dull for you I’m afraid. Right now I’m working on the figure placement, trying to vary the camera angles as so much of the story takes place in cramped hospital rooms it’s tough to make it interesting and giving it some room to breathe. I’m adding more exterior scenes so the story isn’t too claustrophic. I’ve got a good caricature of my mother, my brother Leslie is a little harder to pin down. It’s also an exercise in memory, trying to reconstruct the horrible low-rent basement I was living in at the time and the hospital rooms that we spent so much time in. I sit in front of the TV, drawing in my sketchbooks diagrams of the places I once lived and visited, I know that sometime I will have to get a camera and get some background photo’s. I’m not if I went to the hospitals they’d let me go in for a few quick snaps but it’s amazing how much you remember when you sit down to think about it.

The opening s now of the late Walrus, the worlds best kitty, entering the house and finding me in my studio, drawing. This way we get a tour of my home and living conditions before the narrative begins. I know how the story ends, it’s the rest of it that is a work in progress…