I think this will actually be the fifth or sixth time that I’ve attended Expozine in Montreal.  When I lived there I would go as a spectator, but never had a table.

Now I live in Toronto and make the commute every year to sit and sell my wares.  In past years it has ranged from very successful to completely disastrous.  For the most part I’ve found it’s all in the planning, specifically how you get there and where you go once you arrive.

I’ve got my train tickets and hotel accomodations booked and a wicked travel guest reserved that will ensure that everything will be fun and chaotic within the confines of reason and decent judgement.

With a little luck this will be the best year ever.  I think it may be my last, so here’s hoping.

This is what I’ll be doing on Sunday.   If you live in Toronto, come by and say hey.

If you don’t live in Toronto, well, good for you.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve made a post here, for reasons ranging from the very good to the trivial.  Most of what I’m working on right now isn’t very postable, and there’s always the concern that putting my stuff up on the internet for free will devalue it later when I actually want to publish it in a physical form.  It’s one of the best and worst things about running this site, the ability to just kick things out there for the sake of doing so. Many days I just want to take the whole site down and be done with it, or at the very least start again from scratch.   Maybe most days are like that.

What’s more, when a good amount of time passes in between posts I start to dread ever coming back to this website at all, or at least having to come back and explain myself to an audience that may or may not exist anymore.

Since I changed over to the new wordpress format I’ve lost the ability to access statistics and page hits and views and all of that on the site, which is as good as it is bad, I suppose.   While I can’t track where people are coming from, who’s referring them or linking to this page, it’s actually kind of liberating to not have to worry about the graphs and numbers that go along with a website like this.  I post something and it goes out into the ether and every now and again somebody makes a comment or sends an email or says hi in one way or another.  But there’s no hard data to wade through, no hit talleys to obsess over.  And ultimately that’s why I started this site, so that I could put some stuff up here and share what I’m working on.

Returning to itwasmeteors after a long pause always helps me see what’s working and what’s not.  Mostly it’s the what’s not that stands out to me; the online store is an eternal “back in five minutes” sign and the older drawings look shitty to me now and the links are all out of date.  That’s the part that really struck me this time, the realisation that over half the sites and artists that I link to are no longer operational, or are in varying stages of dereliction.  That’s kind of reassuring, the thought that maybe it’s not just me, maybe other people get swept up and away by their own lives and don’t quite manage to do what they set out to accomplish.  Maybe most people are like that.  Maybe almost everyone.

Anyways, that’s not really the point.  The point is that although I haven’t been maintaining much of an output on this website, there’s been quite a few developments that I’m pretty excited about, and projects that will soon see the day’s light that I’m rather proud of.  I haven’t forgotten about you, whoever you are out there, if you’re even there at all, and I’m looking forward to sharing some more clever little drawings with you soon.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, please find attached a picture from the Kensington Market Pedestrian Sunday, where I was selling some prints and greeting cards, where I met a lot of very nice people and a couple of real freakshows, where I had one of the nicest days of my whole Summer.

This is an old comic I did a long time ago that I had linked to from my old news blog on the ancient version of this website. This comic is as autobiographical as my drawing gets, I worked on these two pages little by little over the course of weeks during the summer of 2002.  I would come home from the strawberry farm after working a 12 hour day and maybe, MAYBE get a panel finished in between dinner time and bed.  Many nights my hands actually hurt while holding the pencil from doing whatever they’d gotten me to do that day.

I thought I’d repost it here before taking some of the old features of the site down once and for all.  Enjoy.