After looking more at Modbooks, I decided that the hardware’s still too beta for me. Looking through their forums, there are a lot of problems being reported, and that’s just not cool if you’re spending $3K on a new lappy. No early adoption for me, at that price.

I started trolling PC Tablet sites, looking for good deals. The one I was looking at, the Fujitsu T4220 Is currently being sold by Western Michigan University for about $1600, and I thought seriously about using Paul’s academic account to get one. But, I thought, let me check eBay first.

So I go on to eBay, and what do I find? An auction ending in two days, with a reasonable starting bid, and — get this — the seller lives in Ann Arbor. Rock on, I thought, and put in a bid, expecting to get sniped at the last minute like (literally) the last ten eBay auctions I’ve chased.

I won it, at my minimum bid of $600! $1K saved! This morning I drove out to Ann Arbor, and met the seller, a very nice guy who turned out to be both a surgeon and a hockey player who, after our meeting, was going home to build an ice-rink in his back yard. He let me power up the machine and showed me all the doodads and how to work it, and I left with my faith in eBay restored.

So I get it home and power it up and start playing with it, and holy crap, this thing is the tool of my DREAMS. I have been waiting for a machine that can do what this thing does for — I am not exaggerating here — twenty-five years, ever since I saw this episode of Reading Rainbow when I was in the third grade (fast forward to 5:30 for the scene I mean). Yes, that one goofy television program made me think that doing art on the computer was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and when my parents got me a C64 for Christmas two years later, my head literally exploded. (no, really. you should see the home movies. blood and grey matter all over the ornaments. but I digress.) However, it took twenty years for someone to invent a consumer-grade tool capable of doing what I wanted it to do — and five more years for me to be able to afford one, even used. But now I have one, and I may just sleep with it under my pillow. It’s that awesome.

I cannot WAIT to get some proper software on this shiny new toy and start really seeing what it can do. I’m going to get a wee-tiny USB keyboard so I can do p’shop shortcuts while I use it, and a better Wacom pen for it, but that’s about all I need to get going.

Does this mean that I’ll probably stop producing original pieces of art on paper? I dunno. I had originally planned to keep all the original Clockwork Game art and sell it at the end, but my originals are so scabbed up with white paint and patch-paper and fingerprints that I don’t think I could really charge all that much for them. They look pretty grotty. I love having the originals all in one book so that I can feel them and run my fingers over them, but working digitally will allow me to go so much faster it’s not even funny. We shall see.

Now on to other business: Does anyone have a LEGIT copy of Photoshop CS2 or CS3 they’d sell to me? If you’re looking to upgrade to CS4, this’d be a way to get a little more money towards it. Let me know. Also? Manga Studio 3.