The new Cintiq 21UX -- the digial canvas -- is here and installed in the studio, and I'm stumbling into it like a child picking up a brush for the first time.

In talking with my wife about it, I compared it to learning a new medium: I go into with all my skills as a draftsmen...but am presented with a new type of canvas I've never worked with before: The angles are weird, the feel of it is weird, the scale and scope and sights of it are weird. But it's good...and exciting to be drawing digitally.

Sheldon, as you know, will be staying a traditional, hand-drawn strip...archival inks on acid-free paper. But Drive will become an all-digital strip. So keep an eye out on Saturdays for a strip that's drawn without paper.

As suggested by Fleen's editor Gary Tyrell, I won't tell you when the first, all-digital Drive shows up: It'll be more fun to see if I can make it "pass" for ink-on-paper. :)

But rest assured, it'll be a few weeks until I'm up to speed on this thing. The phase I'm currently in could best be described as "grandfather setting up a DVD player for the first time" phase. I need to fly up to Seattle and watch Scotty draw on his for a few hours.

Courtesy of the blog Drawn, I came across this excellent short "Time & Again" by Jacques Khouri. It's so rare that I find sequential art (comics) successfully (and interestingly) incorporated into sequential film (movies) -- but this does it beautifully.

It's filled with melancholy, but whaddya gonna do...artists are nothing if not filled with melancholy. :)

time & again from jacques khouri on Vimeo.