Dear Ron,

Do you mind if I call you Ron? Great. Ron, I believe it's safe to say you've won the race. You've served so many that the sign can't even hold it anymore. You've changed all of them to the abstract "Lots", or whatever. You've served every one on earth, with the notable exception of anybody outside of a 1st world country, or army base. Maybe you were double dipping, eh Ron? But I digress.

My point is that you've done it. That assumes of course that there's a race to serve people reconstituted saw-dust. And if there is, well god damn Ron, you are the gold medal.

I appreciate that you keep trying to evolve Ron, I really do. It's a constant source of amusement when I'm standing on the corner, waiting to cross the street, and a bus passes me with an advertisement of yours. The happy "M" is dancing in the background, while the visual narrative tells a story about your new salads, or wraps, or some other ridiculous thing you've created to be healthy. But that's the funny thing Ron... you're trying to be healthier than YOURSELF.

You've acheived the ultimate in self-loathing expression. You literally have two components of your corporate structure battling against one another. One section is trying to find some healthy alternative to the hard-eyed punks on the other side of the office building. The ones that are trying to figure out a new way to melt even MORE cheese into the products. Even the breakfast products....

Especially the breakfast products.

Like a schizophrenic drunk, your company rages against itself, attempting to fatten the world, while simultaneously trying to create an alternative. It's hilarious. You spend an amount of money that can't even be properly tracked to market food to people who don't even need other options. It would be in their best interests to never eat at your establishments ever again. Awesome.

Tell me something Ron, have you ever considered turning some of this raw power toward the issue of starvation? I think there's maybe millions of people going hungry. Millions. Ron. Millions.

Now I'm not saying that it's entirely up to you to feed the world, lord knows that a lot of this should be resting on us: the 1st world. But we're busy Ron. We're busy screaming into each other's faces about the Nazi-fication of healthcare, while simultaneously calling it communism. We have so many people to over-medicate, over-tax, and under-educate. We have oil to smear across hundreds of square miles, or burn off in our cars, while scientists debate global warming until they stroke out. There's miners in caves, hurricanes to dodge, Rappers to deify, STDS, burning beds, Economic suicide, mosques, bibles, gays, 1 inch TVs, Rockstars and Movie Gods. There's a lot of shit going on Ron.

And you've already beat everybody there ever was to beat. So save us Ron. Save the hungry, and the homeless. The Hurricane Battered, the blown-up, the godless, sexless, faith-less. You're the only one who can do it Ron. We need you, we need your magic.

Crom

It's night time in British Columbia, and the only illumination is the sickly blue tint coming from my screen. I am in wait for an event of familial leanings, and the hunger is still on me.

My caravan from the dry land of Alberta into the great Canadian rain forest spells the end of the development phase for Panda Girls. It's been nearly five years that Axe and I began our long journey toward professional writing skill, and self-discipline. Any number of people who hear about PG now look at me with a slightly disgusted stare, and arched eyebrow.

"Where was this fucking thing four years ago, Crom?" And they are right to ask the question.

It's half joke, and half truth when Axe and I whisper one of our old refrains to one another: Ambition is the enemy of success. While the saying isn't a catch-all by any means, it does have a poignant time and place. In developing PG originally, it was the mutant genetic experiment we tampered with to learn our craft. Ideas and concepts were being born from it at a constant rate, and we were mediocre midwives to them. In the chaos of it all, our concept grew too fat, too hard to understand, and we were too green to discover a way to reduce. But the crucible of time and dispelled ignorance will be to its benefit.

As I'm typing this, Axe has returned to Ontario, having spent the last 2 weeks in Calgary with me, working on the comic. The scripts are done, the pages broken, and all that remains is the specific layout of beats, translated into imagery. Some of it is done, and some will be done in the next week over ichat. The kidding around is over. Panda Girls has been knocking on our door for a long time, but in the last week, it kicked the door in, and we owe it money.

Over the next few weeks, Axe and I will be posting updates to the comic's production as he completes rough pages, and begins the process of pushing out completed pages. At the same time I will be cleaning up our scripts; tightening the copy, trimming the fat, and posting them up on the PG section of the site (which we also have to setup).

This started a long time ago, but now it's here.

Staring into the grim face of a blank page labeled "Draft 5" made my weekend into a marathon of profane self-abuse. Axe and I have entered into making the Panda Girls comic a real live boy, with expediency.

We spent a lot of nights in coffee shops, and a lot of mornings in front of hot word processors, trying to figure out the PG Story. In the end we ventured down a road that was far too long, and far too dangerous for what our original intent had been. and coming back to it some two years down the road, we have a very different view of things. We just want to make a comic with a simple, cool story. Oh, and we want hot chicks draped all over everything.

Hot chicks sell, if you've been asleep for 70,000 years and hadn't noticed.

And yet, here I am writing draft after draft of the comic treatment. I wonder at times whether we're over complicating things again, but then I find myself thinking of the clarity of our "simple" story. The fact remains that simplicity, and elegence, are the hardest fruit to cultivate. So I go on with my drafts, trying to shed the wasteful, unnecessary exposition, to align the characters with their intended meanings, and still have hot chicks draped over everything.

This time we aren't going to stumble over our own ignorance and misspent passion. We need to produce our comic. So I glare down the sight lines, and sharpen my pencil. And I look for draft 6 on the horizon of a better tomorrow.

Dear Magazine Telemarketer,

I have something that is criticically important to tell you. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but the medium that you are using to generate ad sales, and subsequently feed your family, is dying.

About 25 years ago, Egon Spengler made the pronouncement that "Print is Dead". Now Ol' Egon was a little bit ahead of the curve, and making calls that probably couldn't be backed up for a few more decades, but all in all he was right. And if anybody with stock in a newspaper is reading this, they would agree.

That's a big friggin' problem Magazine Telemarketer. Because your own product is nothing more than a corollary of the print industry. You're highly specialized. You address issues that effect a niche market. You seek out specific high-profile members of the caste you believe will bolster flagging sales, and have them pen trite, over-wrought garbage for you.

But we can save it Magazine Telemarketer. We can be heroes.

It's not that people don't want magazines. It's that your magazine doesn't provide for them the thrill they so wantonly crave. We need blood and guts MT, we need tits and fire. And I'm not talking about the parochial titillations of Playboy, or the buttoned down, sexually repressed, sadly gentrified offerings like Maxim. No. We need to see beyond.

We need to steal people's identities and print them on page 2. We need to blackmail important people in our magazines. We need still photos of mid-western housewives mid-coitus. When someone picks up our magazine, they need to know that their own mother could be shown somewhere in the inky-scented pages. Or that by reading the articles on page 10, they are expressly giving consent to be the prey in a Man-Hunt performed by a pack of drunk, PCP crazed House Wives with Uzis.

Our pages will be filled with the digits to CIA slush-fund Swiss Bank Accounts; our pages have Nuclear Launch Codes. And when a man or a woman walks up to their local Hotdog/News stand, and stares at the rack of flimsy gardening mags, or Men's Health, their eyes will lock onto our Gold Lamé cover, and their hands will start to shake. Without reason or understanding they will press the hot, sweaty ten dollar bill into the hands of the man behind the register, and they'll never return to their tiny, dim office. Because when they read a magazine like ours, they're making a choice.

And when you you're making those kinds of call, you're up in the High Country.

 Yours,

 Crom

 A stylized sketch paint.