Since the beginning, I've been asked if I'll ever be offering Thieves & Kings posters. And since the beginning, I've told people, "Wow! Heck, I'd love to! But at the moment I don't have the several thousand dollars to spare I'd need to do a poster run, and anyway, I'd have real trouble deciding which painting to blow up and print. So..." 

It was all very confusing. -And when this comic book guy gets confused, he buries himself in work, because that way he can say, "See, I'm hard at work! I've no time to deal with these confusing issues!"

So, since the beginning, nothing has happened. And that stinks, because when I was a kid, the walls of my bedroom were always filled with big color pictures. Pictures of space ships and dragons, and flattened box covers from toys I'd been particularly fond of. And pencil crayoned drawings I'd do when I had a specific image in mind, but couldn't find anything corresponding in the poster stores. (Come to think of it, this desire to have images that nobody made available was probably one of the things which drove me into the arts in the first place...)

-One of the most amazing things I ever saw was a Bakka, the science fiction bookstore here in Toronto, where my old room mate, Tara Tallan, still works. When they ran their old location on hot and dusty Queen Street, where all the the greatest stuff in the world could once be found, Bakka had this enormous collage on the wall behind the cash register made from a hundred or so book covers stapled up to a cork board. Bakka was always a shop I stopped in on my frequent visits to Queen Street, and nothing looked more amazing to my 14 year old eyes than that big display. I wondered sometimes how large it would be if it had been made from the original artwork. I didn't know then, but I now realize that most of those paintings were huge when they first stood on their easels or lay taped down to the drafting boards where their respective artists painted; each measuring several feet across! When I consider how many covers there were in the whole book store...A few thousand square feet of small and carefully applied brushstrokes, all tightly reduced and packed away on those shelves. There should be a convention where all the book cover artists in the world show up and lie their paintings down in a magnificent patchwork. People could be given a set of binoculars with the price of admission, and we would all look down from a second floor gallery and breathe at once in amazement and awe.

Queen Street is a nifty place. A carnival of the alternative. As well as Bakka, there is the Silver Snail, which still holds its space today, shoulder to shoulder with other retail outfits. -And there was the Dragon Lady comic shop, which does not. There is a variety of music clubs where local bands perform, and music stores, selling everything from guitars to cds. (Steve's Music sold me my first harmonica.) There's a section of sidewalk where chalk artists draw for money and threadbare musicians hack out tunes, and where tee shirts and jewelry are sold from the backs of vans. While the street has a somewhat worn face, it's still attractive.

-A face aged well, with character gained.

Another of my favorite shops is Active Surpus, where you can buy lenses and gears and electronics paraphernalia of every imaginable sort; for many years they had a big mechanical gorilla standing guard on the sidewalk. -Amechanical gorilla of exactly the same variety one might see at a carnival. Tacky and hairy with a big rubber snarl. Grafix Art Supplies was also one of my frequent stops, (a store now replaced!); they sold me my first airbrush. I also should have bought my first Docs on Queen Street. (Thirty bucks cheaper than the department store where I ended up buying them. Back when Docs were still cool and I still cared about that sort of thing.) Queen Street, for a good, long time was the place to be. To a lesser degree these days, itstill is, but times are changing...

Bakka, like the Dragon Lady, has moved away, many blocks distant to a spot on Yonge Street which, while it sees there a good deal more foot traffic, it is a brand of foot traffic which is busier and less ready to stop in and mull over used science fiction. Yonge Street also has more cars and and the sidewalks are narrower. It's a shame how htese things go... 

What's happening, and what has happened before in other parts of the city, is that when people ralize where all the nifty alternative stuff lives, (stuff which, at first, only poor artists and anarchists know about, the begrudged who are outwardly despised, but secretly respected), that's where the money tends to drift. 'Cool' is a marketable commodity to which all sorts of people are drawn, although many of whom would rather shop at a 'Gap' than at a used leather goods store, or who would rather drink at a Starbucks than beer in a music club. And so the expensive boutiques have begun to pop up, while the odd and weird businesses which could only afford the more run down, lower rent shop fronts quietly vanish; the very businesses which first made Queen Street interesting. The change is slow and creeping, but it isn't stopping. It seems inevitable that we will eventually be left with something ritzy and superficial and expensive; a street where you'll not be able to buy air brushes, harmonicas or mechanical gorillas with rubber snarls. And where you certainly won't see any collages made from science fiction book covers. Heck. That's already just a memory.

Pardon me while I reminisce fondly for a moment.

Ah well. That's the cycle of life, I suppose. I'm sure there will be a new place where all the nifty stuff collects one day. That's how it seems to happen.
 
 

But posters! (Wow. Pardon the twisty side-track there...) With new times also comes new technology. It is now possible to make rich and beautiful production quality poters one at a time, for a reasonable cost. And that means the main problems I had with poster making have been eleiminated. There is now no longer the need to gamble a few thousand dollars on printing something not everybody might be interested in. People can now get whatever image they want in a variety of sizes. -Not the best consolation prize for seeing Bakka and the mechanical gorilla swept from Queen Street, but hey. I'll take it. It's another way to offer something different which nobody else on the planet can. I'm the guy with the T&K posters! At one time, I might have set up a stall on Queen. But I'll settle for mail order.