Welcome to TKI!

I’m excited about Kneeces Ink! (As excited as I can get.) The Girl from the Gulf is our first publication. It's intended to run for twelve issues. Issue two, we hope, will be coming out sometime in August. Eventually, maybe we'll do another Kickstarter for a trade paperback of all twelve issues. We also plan to have Buying the Farm launched as a web comic in the next few days. (More on that in the next post.) It’ll be B&W because we think it looks great that way. It should update to the tune of two pages a week. You can get Girl From the Gulf here, of course.  Last weekend we finally got all of the backer rewards packaged and sent out from the Kickstarter. (And thanks again to all those who supported that endeavor.) Not so bad, really. Then a friend called and said, “you did stamp ‘do not bend’ on them, right?” In a panicky moment, I pictured sinister mailmen with hands like bear traps twisting delicate parcels into triangular paper footballs and nose-thumping them into tiny mailboxes. My imagination tends toward awful things. Maybe that won't happen.

It goes to show that I’m much better at big-picture than details. Good things should spontaneously happen without snags. The thousands of little things that need to be done, shouldn’t exist, or at least shouldn’t interfere, or, even better, should be somebody else’s problem.

Here’s what I think about making books: While you’re writing or drawing, it feels like the most important thing, and when you get finished you feel good for a few minutes, until it hits you that there’s one more big thing that you forgot—getting it in front of somebody else. Oddly enough, no one's waiting to snatch a story from your hand and yell “hold the presses!” the way I’ve seen it done in old movies. (Ever seen His Girl Friday? Movies wrecked my expectations of almost everything.) Making something worthwhile is indeed only the first small step. Then the worthwhile thing has to meet with various approvals, fit into a decided and very particular format, be gotten out (and all that that implies), and somehow, inconceivably, generate income. It’s tough. It requires three heads.

Printing presses (the media in general) and business have always been a dysfunctional marriage. I was hoping that TKI (The Kneeces Ink) could make it even more so. One side of it constitutionally guaranteed, the other not. Who’s actually bringing home the bacon in that relationship? [This paragraph should have been edited because I have no idea what I’m talking about.]

Thus, we open The Kneeces Ink (TKI). Nepotism? Well maybe, but that’s only because the kids want to keep the old man busy. I keep pointing to The Kneece’s Ink and telling my sons, someday all of this will be yours. They keep saying, but it already is.  We’re kicking it off with a couple of stories written by me and drawn by extraordinarily talented artists, Ambrose Hoilman and Jason Clarke. That doesn’t mean that we rule out doing other people’s work in the future.

The stories, so far, are about people who are trying to be good, trying to do the right thing but having trouble doing so. A broad theme to be sure, but maybe that’s the beginning of an editorial policy. Part of the trouble us humans have is figuring out what the right thing is. The other part of the trouble is doing it, and nobody wants to do the wrong thing thinking that it’s the right thing. I think that’s an issue many share, fear of doing the wrong thing. It’s complicated. The sanguine belief that most people want to do the right thing stubbornly persists. At least, I hope so. [Vague, Mr. Kneece. Right thing? For instance, what? Spirits of past English teachers haunt me. Hey, maybe I want to be vague.] Check the stories out. I’m going to try to update the blog once a week. I haven’t decided which day yet. I can’t guaranteed that what I have to say will be as vague, incoherent, and off-the-wall as what you've read so far, but I’ll do my best.