If it makes you (and all the other people sobbing in my inbox) feel any better, I feel just as bad- and the character I used in these pages is evidence towards that fact. That character is, or was, called Pitch.

Pitch was an idea for a short animation which I came up with just before the time I started work as a storyboard artist at Rainmaker. I’d come up with it in the 6 month gap between graduating and finding a job, and as I wasn’t sure if I would get one inside the last year I had to spend in Vancouver I figured making another short might be a good way to use the time. As things went, however, that didn’t happen, and time has moved on, and now with this discovery of the very real physical limitations of my body the possibility of animating that short, or indeed any short, while working on the comics that make my income has dwindled and dwindled into almost nothing. The extreme enthusiasm I had for that particular story, too, has faded, and while I love the character and part of me will keep him forever I have to accept that the short I had planned for him will, very likely, not happen.

That well has run dry, and it would be unfair to force myself to reverse that natural progression of events. The least I could do for Pitch was to have him explain one of the ground rules for the comic, and one of the issues that concerns and compels me to keep drawing despite how hard it can be or how much it can hurt. If I am lucky I will be able to keep drawing for a very long while longer, but none of us can tell what will happen in the next five minutes, never mind the next twenty years. Acting on the ideas we have now and doing our best to fulfill them is more important than we can ever know; if I hadn’t made the decision to just go for it and start this whacky story with a dapper tellyhead/adorable child duo I have no idea where I would be now. The kindness and joy it has brought back to me from other people is immeasurable, and so while Pitch was important, it’s also important to be able to let him go, and focus on what I can and truly want to do.