[Edit: please note, Salvager Kain will NOT be continuing on 29 May 2010. Please read the blog entry "Babydelays" below. Thanks.]

Aaaaaaand, coming to a close, page 24 of Tales Of October #1. The end! Ta Da! Comes full circle nicely, don’t you think? A little cliche, sure, but… ok, a lot cliche. And, as is now standard, poorly inked. Well… I’m nothing if not consistent.

At least we got Pargimus up and off his ass, huh? Took a talking dog and couple hallucinations, but the man is UP! The next question could be “where’s he off to?”, but if I told you “to go get scared by more hallucinations, then break into the wrong house and fall asleep on the wrong couch”, you might not want to keep reading. And even if you did, you’d have a heck of a long wait, eh? Ah well. Moving right along…

So! Yes! Salvager Kain #6 will be returning, in just five days! Awesome, huh? Back to color, back to comedy, back to bug-eyed bewilderment in The World Outside The Wall. Just in case it’s been so long (and IT HAS BEEN SO LONG) that you’ve forgotten where we left off, I suggest you pop over here and catch up. Go back and reread the first five pages, or better still… start at the top of SK5 and catch up all the way — that you can — online!

Otherwise, should his current predicament be fresh in your brain, I’ll see you back here in five days. Cheers!

So much to write, and so little tim

Okay now — the place is closed. That’s new, huh?

And yes, “the BOSS”. Not Bruce Springsteen, but a terrier, one of those big & menacing kinds. TIntin’s “Snowy” on steroids. I took a gamble with the words speaking the image here, but it does read kind of like telepathy, right? A big circle around the wee beastie and the balloon anchor pointing to the dialogue, yeah, that’s telepathy, I’m sure of it. Saw it on tv once! Adding the shadow to the type was my way to do a further mix’em-up… basically it should read as a troubled man thinking he’s having a conversation with a dog who’s in charge. You decide if it was successful!

Conceptually, I had to get something to move Pargimus along from his station here, and I figured it wouldn’t be something normal. What Parge takes as a “sign” versus what the rest of us do in life, well, I have a lot of leeway.

And let’s not talk about my inking. Egads, man, sometimes simpler is better.

Cheers all — see you in five days!

This page is unnecessarily gloomy. Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

And so we see: the scene hasn’t changed much for poor old Pargimus. Still seated at the base of the stairs from the Blackwater Mental Hospital (I think I called it). Of course, things have grown up and his hair has grown down, but for whatever reason, he’s still hanging around the place. It’s almost as if he doesn’t have anything better to do than obsess about the institutions of his youth, no matter how decrepit or out-of-date or irrelevant. Weird, huh?

Interesting historical sidebar (not): there are versions of Tales Of October out there with only the first three short stories, meaning “without this one”. “Welcome To The City (Reprise)” took longer to finish than I originally intended, so the initial comic was first printed without this “conclusion” (I like quotes; deal with it) and instead with two pages of an unfinished Odd-Job Rod story in the back… probably in order to be ready-for-sale for some comic convention I attended years back. A poorly-informed halfwit could consider those first printings a “collector’s item”… assuming anyone besides myself gave half a damn.

Whoops, sliding from self-mockery into self-pity land; better steer a course for higher, drier ground! Full speed ahead!! TOOOOOT!!!

(Er, whatnow?) See you in five days, ye crusty landlubber!

So here we go: the final short story in Tales Of October #1, called “Welcome To The City (Reprise)”. No title — it would have been too abrupt. I was looking to keep this story tied with the end of “Fun & Games” a little, to show that it’s all supposed to occur in the same Canadian suburb: Quitoclam.

Now, yes, Quitoclam is fictional, but only barely; it’s blatantly modeled on the small Canadian suburb I grew up in, which for the faintest stretch of privacy, I’ll leave unnamed. A real trait of the real suburb, though, is the comparatively high level of undeveloped natural areas (”high level” compared to most American suburbs from my experience). Many parks, a number of ravines, just large sections of woods. Of course, this better describes the area of twenty years ago. Nowadays there still are some parks but the rest of it has been developed like crazy. “Ay, oh, way to go, Ohio…”

The view at the top of the page invokes a very specific wooded corridor near my childhood home, where the power lines reach down from one plateau into a more-developed urban corridor and then back up the mountains on the other side. Not much point to it, except it’s a view I know well… and seemed appropriate to represent Pargimus’ supposed “high-altitude” observations.

What’s supposed to be the streetlights on the bottom half of the page is my poor inking choice de jour. Live and loin.

For those of you just joining in, I’ve been posting these short stories for the last couple months here on salvagerkain.com while I’ve been busy being a new dad. Once again, the plan is to resume postings of Salvager Kain #6 (already in progress!) as of May 29, 2010. Thanks for your patience and I hope you enjoy this last little tale.

Ah, some nice Dave-Sim-inspired lettering. Big and effective and built right into the art! This is the kind of thing I would do all day, if someone would pay me. Seriously. I’m here. I live and love to letter. This isn’t a creepy come-on. Write me.

So the final joke is here: it’s dull in Quitoclam (a familiar thread to these stories, you might have noticed?) and for most folks, you have to make your own fun. Maybe you try and rob a place that doesn’t carry cash, or get lit and hassle a mall employee, or try to make forced moves on a juvenile in a dark corner of a parking lot. Fun fun fun! Hey, I didn’t say this was War and Peace. Bite me. Then write me.

Panel 3, hm, that’s bad art. Panel 4 too. It’s funny, when I remember rushing the art as I drew it, I see it here as still rushed, only preserved in ink and apparently online as well. Oh and hey, what’s with all the background zig-zags? Looks like all of this is taking place within the mouth of some big fish. OH SNAP I JUST GAVE THE SURPRISE ENDING AWAY… right.

Okay, that’s the end of that. Coming next time: the start of the fourth short story to Tales Of October #1, titled “Welcome To The City (Reprise)”. Starring Pargimus again! We’ll get to see just how far he’s come since leaving the institution. See you in five days!

Whoops, I lied, it’s just Quitoclam’s best & brightest doing a parking lot sweep.

Panel 3 works for me. Travis’ best look to date, rendered well enough. Have I mentioned I have a hard time inking hair?

And for more art analysis: nice division between foreground and background for panel 1 (even if that’s nowhere close to the right proportions for a cop car). And panel 4’s driveaway-mad-while-leaving-those-guys-behind, yeah, I’m buying it, even if it’s all a little bright. I might not be able to ink very well, but at least I think I’ve got a handle on showing the space this all takes place in, who’s standing where, etc.

Yes, that’s supposed to be a Canadian cop.

So Kathryn’s been spared something that could have been pretty nasty — yay! All the same, I get the feeling that, even if she’s not some glamazon hottie, crap like this is just an average night for dear Kathryn. Did you ever know someone who just seems to get the raw end of the deal every time? That’s Kathryn… part of her, at least.

One more page to go, and then we’re on to the last short story in Tales Of October #1, “Welcome To The City (Reprise)”. Thanks for reading… I hope you’ll be back for more!

Ah, now THIS… that’s fun to look at. Possibly my first rain scene? This is what I get wistful about in terms of black & white art. I still remember inking the squiggles in that first panel, and feeling like I was actually standing above that parking lot.

Also probably haven’t mentioned this yet, but the art for Tales Of October was all done dialogue-free, just full pages of art with a general idea of what was going to need to go where. I think I did this because I was sick of painting out word balloons every time I wanted a solo panel of art, for some standalone promotional thing? Possibly also because I drew this in my old-timey Exit-At-The-Axis size page, 8 1/2/” x 12 3/4″ as opposed to the more-standard 10″ x 15″ page… and I wasn’t sure how tiny I’d need to make the words to get them all in. Lettering it all separately and shrinking it down in P-Shop is a partial convenience.

Creepy Travis with his grabby-grabby in panel 3 would look creepier if he weren’t so pudgy… again, a Travis-designed shortcoming; see the previous commentary on page 1-15. And Kathryn would have looked more like a seventeen-year-old if I’d taken the time to draw her like that, here… oh well. “You just don’t LOOK seventeen,” indeed.

Tune in next time as Kathryn sees the glowing visage of a manifestation of the Eleven-Faced Avalokitesvara Heart Dharani Sutra, right there in the parking lot!

See you in five days!

What do I say about this one? The plot moveth on. Taking advantage of a page “turn” to leap the story forward, something I don’t always remember to do in a six-page short story. I’m pleased with how well I represented the game store to look (spatially) like the one I worked in.

Disappointed, as usual, with the way I inked this. A nice amount of detail to things, sure, but if I can’t ink it right, what good is it? Eh. Travis could have been better designed… this is a bit of a cop-out character model for me. At least it’s not based on me, at any age .

Alright, that’s it for this page. Sorry, it’s just not sparking any memory fires. Catch you again in five days!