Hello [again.]
My name is Tim Demeter. Once upon a time I made comics.
On the creative side, I wrote and illustrated 400-some pages of a heist book called Reckless Life. Reckless Life never got published but it got a few nibbles from publishers that don't exist anymore and more importantly it enjoyed a great run on the now defunct anthology site Graphic Smash in the early days of organized webcomics. (We miss ya, Joey.) RL never turned into the fortune and glory project that I hoped it would but it directly led me to working in editorial/digital project development for Rebellion/2000AD. Yes, for two and a half years I got to work in comics full-time. Everyone said I'd never pull that off. I did. I helped create the very first comic-based app for the Apple app store (Yes, years before Marvel/Comixology did it on iPad.) I got to work with personal heroes and creators just starting out who have moved onto big things and won Eisners. I was a speaker at San Diego Comicon. Twice. I was named the 8th most influential person in digital comics by a website that no longer exists. Was that all the world's best feeling? Yes. Comicon 2007 was better than my wedding day and it's not close.
That was 13 years ago, so what happened next? I took some time off from the creative grind to recharge. I'd earned it after those 400-some pages (which were often inked at 2am.) Besides, I wanted to focus my energy on my awesome new editorial gig in the big leagues. So I did. Maybe too much. My creative break stretched from weeks to months to years. I met a girl. The recession hit and Rebellion re-focused on video games and 2000AD, leaving our little comics on mobile project without development budget and languishing, ultimately resulting in our division getting shut down and forgotten. I got a new day job back in marketing. Married that girl. Changed jobs. Bought a house. Changed jobs again. Did house stuff. Changed jobs again. Helped my wife launch a successful business of her own. Changed jobs again. Divorced my wife. Sold the house. Moved back into an apartment. Yadda yadda yadda. Thirteen years. Lucky me.
Over this time I wasted a lot of time looking for personal fulfillment helping others with their projects and ignoring my own. That sounds really selfish and narcissistic but there's something, at least for me, about using my voice that feeds my soul in a way being a contributor to someone else's dream never can. I had a few false starts on new projects, most notably a story inspired by the Wisconsin State Fair about carnies. I've been working on that one so long I'm well into "guy who's never going to finish that novel" territory. In fairness to myself, I was ROLLING on it two years ago, before my personal life imploded. After that it stopped being just a story and turned into an outlet for my personal stuff, which I was grafting onto the existing themes. It took a while but I eventually realized I was asking too much of one story. I actually had three stories going on: that original carnival story, a pretty on the nose allegory of what I'd been through personally, and a completely out of left field critique on capitalism, reboot storytelling and the sorts of digital media that are my day job. In the immortal words of Sarah Lynn:
So with that knowledge in hand, I decided to write THREE stories:
Rigged, the story of Bo the carny. Rigged will be a prose/comic/design/animation hybrid like it's short-lived predecessor, Rustpunks.
Reckless Life (A continuation, not a reboot.) Reckless Life will be a straight-up black and white (with spot color) comic. Just like the old days.
Untitled Tim Demeter Sci-Fi Project. Untitled will be a prose novella (series?) with painted pulp-inspired covers.
Each project will be edited by a different person/team so there will be some differences in voice and direction. I'm excited and if I get writer's block on one I can just jump to the other. Thanks in advance to the respective editors, Jackie, Dan/Terry and Tea. (They are not editing my blog posts so don't blame them for my comma misuse.)
So that brings us to Quixotronic.
What to do with these three projects? Back before I was running Reckless Life on Graphic Smash I had an anthology site all my own called Misfit Media.
It was just me and some friends doing our thing and putting it on the internet so if anyone wanted to check it out, they could. That no-pressure idea appealed to me again and I decided to start a new anthology site, namely this one, to house all three of my new projects. At the same time, my friends and I were talking about starting a zine or a podcast or something. I thought, why not mush all that together? And now here we are. Twenty years after launching Misfit-Media, I'm doing it again. There's not much of a mission statement here aside from: here is stuff made by people I like. These people are:
Andy Turner: DJ of WMSE's Zero Hour, teacher and journalist
Kyle Davis: Librarian, bibliophile, expert on all things comics and wrestling
Ryan King: Musician, Artist, DJ, Writer
Wendy Norton: Musician, Animator, Artist, DJ
and me.
You can expect reviews and articles, comics, music, stories, playlists, videos and whatever else. If there's any common theme here it's in the name:
quix·ot·ic
adjective
exceedingly idealistic; unrealistic and impractical.
tron
Greek: a suffix referring to a device, tool, or instrument; more generally, used in the names of any kind of chamber or apparatus used in experiments
Enjoy our impractical experiments.
Welcome to Quixotronic.