Friday - December 10, 2004:

So it's back to the grind. I do have several more reviews to do thanks to a post over at Comixpedia, but they'll have to wait a couple of weeks until the guys dig through a little more of the plot.  Or should I say they'll be digging around for a plot. Remember, it's never too late to submit your own comic for review. I'm enjoying this.

I did a bit of fumbling for plot myself this week. I've been wanting to work on this site's namesake for several months now and this week offered a couple of free days to do so. I forced myself out of the house to the local library where clients couldn't call and e-mail couldn't reach me (That last bit's a lie. Our public library has network access points all over the place.). I sat in the midst of the business section, surrounded by lawyers, accountants and a token businessman. I caught a couple of them staring at my odd collection of books, maps and drawings. I tried staring back, but they were reading nothing but business directories and financial reports. The maps were much more interesting, much more interesting. You see, I struck gold. I've been trying to track the voyages of a third-rate Canadian explorer and one voyage in particular. I need everything I can get my hands on: course, ship name and tonnage, passenger list, timelines, all of it. I've searched on and off for the info. for years, never hoping to find more than a couple of officer names, some dates and a ship name. Well I stumbled onto a map. It had nothing to do with the voyage but depicted a detailed area near my ship's destination. Something was familiar about the map though. It was done by a Frenchman, but the place names were all Portuguese and upside down in relation to the pictures. Stranger still, there was something familiar about the map. I remembered seeing one very similar before. I rushed home and dug out the atlas of old maps that had first inspired me to tell the story. I must have flipped through the book five hundred times always passing over the page with the upside down Portuguese and the crowd of people crowding out the place-names. It was the same map, but with a very different painting. A few more minutes of furious research confirmed my suspicion. Those crudely drawn people were my passengers and my captain and, and... I can't reveal any more. I love designing new characters, scenes, and dialogue but this story, Journey Into History, is better than anything I could have made up. it's better than most of what I've read in history books, and I've read loads. Their story has been a very quiet obsession of mine since 1994 when I stumbled onto just  the very edges of it. And I have this year to tell it.

I keep thinking that I might not have the artistic chops to do this one right though. That's part of the reason I've dragged my feet on the project for so long. That's why the original Journey Into History strips were set almost five hundred years later. That's why it took me thirty pages to get a character to even step foot on the edge of this little historical gem. I've actually thought, "I can't screw the story up if I never get around to telling it." But now I've got their faces. I've got their clothing. I have all of the dates and it all fits. I've even got drawings of a couple of the boats involved and more than a dozen names. There are brawls and bits of terror and mystery and just a touch of sex. There is magic and myth and, and...

When I first started working on More Fun at Graphic Smash, T. Campbell and I had a brief exchange of emails. Ok, I still hear from him every week about the week's typo, but in those first few exchanges, it came out that I was a history teacher. I think I made some reference to Rip and Terri, me being a former history teacher and all. He wondered what a history teacher might do with the medium. I think I'm almost ready to show him and anyone else who's willing to take a peek. Starting next week, I'll begin rolling out some sketches and maybe an old map or two, teasers really, more to keep me rolling along than readers. I can't get over that painting though. There they were. I'd been struggling with clothing and faces that very morning and there they were, smiling, full-length portaits, more than a dozen, telling me, screaming at me really, to get the bloody thing started already!

-Bob Stevenson