So back on March 17 (if my archives weren't screwy, I'd use the permalink, but, alas . . .) I tried to explain my thoughts on nature and magic and atheism. I didn't do a very good job. What I meant to say was something like this:

A man truly awake does not need religion. He doesn’t need gods. He doesn’t need miracles. He doesn’t need holy lands here below or celestial heavens up above. For him, life in this universe is itself holy, as is every patch of ground and every path he walks. Life itself is enough of a miracle. To believe in a god who made this life is to believe in a miracle even greater than this miracle. Who needs more than one unfathomable miracle? Existence is a fluke, a freak, a wonder, a dream, a bizarre uncanny thing. Our own consciousness of this existence is so incredible a phenomenon that I don’t understand why anyone feels the need to believe in anything else more 'spiritual.' It’s all spiritual. It’s all true magic. Why add imagined magic to explain the magic that is right before us?

You have to ignore the old-fashioned "he" standing in for both sexes (grrr). That's a quote from a very good (and at times very frightening) article by Ed Weathers. Makes you think. (And I stole the link from Pen-Elayne on the Web.)

Woo hoo! Free comic book day is coming up soon. I've got three stores in the same downtown block to visit, plus a fourth not too far away if I don't get enough free stuff there.

And I actually went comic shopping recently. I forgot my list though, and I couldn't remember which recent back issues I'd bought of some titles, so I decided to just buy a few new things instead. Of course, they are new to me, but since I'm hopelessly behind, they're not really new to anyone else.

I picked up the first tpb of Phil and Kaja Foglio's very funny Girl Genius. It's called Agatha Heterodyne and the Beetleburg Clank. It was really the . . . catchphrase? . . . I'm not sure what to call it. Anyway, the words "A Gaslamp Fantasy with Adventure, Romance & Mad Science" were the reason I picked it up for a closer look. Then I brought it home, and oh what fun it is! I liked it, in other words.

Then I got Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things by Ted Naifeh. Also very fun. And creepy, and cool, and a little silly in some places. Very much worth the money. More than worth it. (No, I'm not being very articulate today.)

I also grabbed the Prologue issue of CrossGen's Brath becuase I'm a sucker for pseudo-Celtic stuff. I've generally avoided CrossGen's books because I'm really not a fan of computer colouring. Some of it is very good, but a lot is just garish. Anyway, Brath isn't too bad. An interesting character, plot not too horrible. Not a glowing review, I know, but it's good enough I'll try a few more issues at least -- to see how it progresses.

Now I'll shut up about comics and go do something productive. (No, I haven't got "Faerie or Bust" online yet.)

Oh yeah, another thing I learned while doing a 24-hour comic: if there is a blob of wet ink anywhere on the page, I'll stick my hand in it.

Did I say "where does the time go" in my last post? And here it is more than a week later . . .

Oh well. I finished the comic short to submit to the SPX 2003 anthology. It's called "Fey: Fleeing Arcadia" (the "Fey" part is from my eventually-ongoing-series Fey, though this piece is from way, way, waaay in the past). I was originally going to call it "Leaving Arcadia," and now I kind of wish I hadn't changed it. Oh well. It's done, it's submitted, and now I wait with my fingers crossed.

I'm pretty pleased with a lot of the art in it, but the story seems a little thin. I think my 24-hour comic (soon to be online) had a more substantial story, and it was a peculiar ramble about hitch-hiking, pants and boinking.

Well, here it is Saturday already. Where does the time go? (Lately I've been feeling like I'm stuck in the middle of a time-lapse movie, as the weeks go by at impossible speeds.)

The 24-hour comic is done. Woo hoo! Twenty-three hours and nineteen minutes and I could barely move my arm by the end. Sleep and tylenol cured all, though, and my wrist is hardly stiff at all now. It was a strange experience. I learned many things, such as:

• loose inks over tight pencils look much better than any sort of inks over loose pencils (with my meagre drawing skill, anyway)
  
• no matter how well you think you know a character, they can still surprise you
  
• it is possible to draw for nearly 24 hours straight, even when you can't feel your fingers
  
• satyrs don't wear pants (except occasionally as a joke)
  
• faeries are obsessed with "boinking" (their word, not mine)
  
• I really need to take some more life drawing classes
  
• even really awful drawings can convey a surprising amount of emotion and character
  
• it's really difficult to draw facial expressions on a character who looks like a rabbit
  
• satyrs are fun to draw
  
• satyr horns are fun to draw (though they go wonky sometimes)
  
• if you hitchhike by the side of a major highway, carrying a sign that says "Faerie or bust," you just might get a ride from an elf on horseback
  

I'm sure there's more, but those are the things-learned that come to mind right now. I'm going to try to get the thing scanned this weekend (or maybe early next week) so you can see for your ownself.

So my archives between March 9 and March 31 are missing. Hmmm. Probably has something to do with me switching from weekly to monthly archiving (why I chose weekly in the first place, I don't know. Perhaps I thought I had a lot to say . . .).

Disappearing archives aside, I am now preparing to write a 24-hour comic, beginning as soon as I have coffee tomorrow (after first waking up, of course). (Actually that will be later today, as it is after 1 in the morning, but I think of it as tomorrow because I haven't gone to bed yet.) Twenty-four pages plus a cover in twenty-four consecutive hours. That's the aim, anyway. We'll see how I actually do. This evening I made a couple of signs to go on my doors for before and after working on the thing. It made a good warm-up exercise.

And, speaking of comics, Girlmatic is now up and running with all sorts of cool stuff. So go subscribe (which is an entirely hypocritical thing to say, as I haven't subscribed yet. But I will, and before the end of the month so I can get the cheap rate. Because I am cheap. Or just poor).

Here's a cool thing: Amber Benson (who played Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) has written an animated show. It's called Ghosts of Albion and you can watch it online. It's creepy and has magic and London and were-beasts. Much fun.