Welcome back to your irregularly scheduled Spark Comic.

Let's not kid ourselves. As a whole, 2016 was a AWFUL year. We coincidentally had widespread celebrity deaths, human decency went on the endangered species list, and Trump was somehow elected the US President. However, despite all this, I found myself personally having an absolutely WONDERFUL year. So many amazing things happened to me personally in 2016. For me, 2016 began with some great things happening in my personal life in January. While it was followed by February, which was the lowest and most boring point of my year, it soon picked up in the form of surprise freelance gigs, personal growth, and, of course, An/Other getting as unexpectedly popular as it did to the point that I’m still getting people asking me about it and was recently invited to speak at Sheridan College about it at the start of 2017. I was unemployed for all of 2016, besides Freelance, and while the frustration of that set in, I see that it was necessary for all the non-stop work I subjected to myself over both my degrees. Granted, I still worked on plenty of things, but not having a deadline looming over my head and plenty of free time to breathe and reflect I feel has really helped me become a better person and artist. Added to that, I helped a friend successfully apply for an architecture program, had an amazing time at Anime North and was a finalist in their AMV contest, learned a lot of new skills, met and made friends with new people including a local creator who’s work I’ve admired, reached 100 Spark Comics, helped another friend run a school Pokemon Card Tournament that she made to teach kids math, did Freelance Photography, helped a bunch of other people do many other things over the year, and, near the end of 2016, finally landed a job as a Makerspace Technician at the Royal Ontario Museum, which I started this January. Overall, 2016 was an amazing year for me personally. Yes, it was bad for many other reasons, but I had a great time and that’s good enough for me.

Speaking of bad things in 2016 that are currently relevant, in January, I launched my new blog CiviSpark, a Blog for Social Change, where I plan to post educational content explaining political systems as well as researched editorials on social, political, and media topics. Yesterday, I posted my editorial, Trumped-Up Media, which analyzes the issues between the Media and (I hate saying this) President Donald Trump leading up to the election. I spent a LOT of time doing research for it. I want to use this blog to further research politics, which Spark Comics readers know I’m no stranger to, and improve my writing whilst giving commentary to such issues using actual research and academic citations in ways I’m not seeing done lately. If any of that interests you, I’d recommend checking it out and would love to hear some feedback. Next I plan to make content that explains how Canada’s Political System works, so look out for that at some point in the next few months.

You might notice this website is slightly different. I held up posting new comics lately because my friend, web designer Tyler Freedman, helped me overhauling the fundamental structure of the Spark Comics website to not only provide a smoother browsing experience but also make it easy for me to publish new content. I implemented the changes recently so let me know if you find any links I missed that might have broken in the process. If you’re looking for a Web Designer or Programmer, I’d highly recommend checking out Tyler. He does great work.

I hope everyone reading this is doing okay. 2017 may be a bit of a scary year, but let’s try to make the most of it and attempt to make this world a better place.

See you next comic!