[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 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.

Alright, so:

What we’re looking at here is an introduction, from someone’s point of view — entering Quitoclam. Or, rather, re-entering… (just wait for page 1-04).

I’ve probably written more short stories / plot scribbles / thoughts / etc about Tales Of October (and the larger narrative it leads into, called Foolproof)… altogether more comprehensive character & story notes for this than any other story I’ve done. From a purely notes-standpoint, it still tops everything with Johnny Shallow in Exit At The Axis and Fool’s Errand. (Of course, if it were a contest of finished comics pages, EATA & FE would win at a count of 241 to 24).

So what’s that say? That I have a great idea I’m sitting on, and someday it’ll be an awesome novel, graphic or otherwise? I doubt that very much… but as evidence it does support a special love I must have for this story that came out of my teenage years, spent growing up in the Vancouver suburb called Coquitlam.

For all the work I’ve put into this story world over the years, though, very little of it exists as actual comics. Lots (and I mean LOTS) of sketchbook doodles or single panels of comic art exist… but really, nothing in a proper sequence, nothing more than at most a single page or two. So, when I sat down to formally start telling the first chapter for the work, it seemed important to me to do as proper of an introduction to the world as I’ve ever done for a story. Salvager Kain has a strong narrator’s voice at the get-go; Exit At The Axis just launches into Johnny’s life; for this, I wanted folks to journey into the world just like my main character was:

On a train, late at night, with a couple of hostile passengers correction officers.