Hi. Welcome to my new Work Diary.

If you come by often you might have noticed a few things changing on the front page, and a new URL for Sequential starting a few months back.

I've been feeling the need to clean up things around the site for a while, just lacked the time till the past few months. But rather than fussing with moving 4 years worth of posts I've left the old pages where they are [posts from June 2002 to Aug 2006], and this week finally just started anew.

To bring you up to date: This spring, after completing work on REVOLUTION on the PLANET OF THE APES for Mr Comics, I'm proud to say I received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts and began work on two graphic novels that will be my primary projects for 2006 & 2007.

My Grant project is a Novel Called Dream Life, a story about 5 friends who's lives come to a fulcrum point in the scrub forests of southern Ontario one late summer weekend.

No art for this yet; Work on the script progresses steadily. The story is one I've been developing for years really but finally all the notes, scenes and bits of ideas are being stitched together into a usable shape that I'll start drawing layouts for this winter.

Mean while, while that keeps my word processor busy, my drafting table is home to artwork for a novel I'm collaborating on with Toronto independent author and publisher, Jim Munroe.

Titled Therefore Repent! This 150ish page story takes place in the Wicker Park area of Chicago IL a short time after the rapture has snatched the good Catholics of the Red States off the face of the earth, and left the rest of the population to ponder their fate, and the apparent return of Practical Magic to daily life.

Following the adventures of Mummy and Raven, aka Kate and Bruce from Jim's last text novel An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, the story I'm working continues one begun in this short comic 24pg story written by Jim and drawn by Michel Lacombe.

In the traditions of The Book of Revelations, Therefore Repent! is a dark fantasy tale, but Jim also says he's always been a fan of the kookier parts of the bible ;). Expect healthy doses of magic realism, some demons, taking animals, angels, mummies and ravens made of ash.

I'm posting a lot of the work in progress over here on my Flickr site. You can follow the link Bellow the spilt ink logo to go to that page anytime. Check in every few weeks to see the latest.

Speaking of spilt ink, I've been working on that page a bit too, and will be posting new PDF files of old Zines there soon too.

Here and there an interesting Illustration gig shows up - most of the really interesting ones don't pay sadly, but I have a lot of fun doing drawing for a few publications. Currently I often have work in kitchen sink magazine, here are the two latest I've done for this fine SF Indy publication.


I spend a little bit of spare time these days playing with sound.

I've begun to post Pod casts of my efforts under the banner of a Radio show, CH ZERO that I used to produce at CIUT 89.5 fm in Toronto in the 90's. You can plug this feed URL into your Itunes or Juice to download the show, or just download it here.

Ok, well, that's all for now, have a look around the site, let me know what you think, say boo!

Best
Max

Labels: News