It started when I showed up in NYC with fifty grand and nothing to do.

Or it started when I was three years old and was improvising Sesame Street for my family. My first performance memory. Also the first time I felt what it was like to lose an audience. But that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, I thought it started when I opened the store. So we’ll go back to that.

Jigsaw NYC was a store in the East Village of Manhattan dedicated to small press comics and affordable artwork. I sunk all my money and a goodly amount of my credit card limit into running a place that could host art openings and book releases and generally have really great parties in my living room and sell whatever stuff was lying around.

As part of the weekly operations of the store, I sent out emails to subscribers talking about new products and upcoming events. It didn’t take long before this task started to grate on me. To make it more entertaining for myself, I invented characters who could do some of the writing for me. The emails turned into random conversations between fictional entities.

One of those characters was an automatic email-generating program called MBot3000. The story was, essentially, that the program had become sentient, and was depressed because it couldn’t leave the computer. It started using the emails to berate me for keeping it prisoner, and demanded I build it a robot body. At some point, I decided it would be funny if I actually built one. I got some foamcore and some random parts from the hardware store and I did a few sketches and after a while, I had a cute little robot puppet for Mbot to inhabit. I did some test videos and played around a bit with voices, finally hitting on something that is more or less my own voice on helium. After much deliberation, Josephine Stewart came up with the appropriate M name. Milton the Robot was born.

Meanwhile, I thought it would be cool if I got an old capsule vending machine and put tiny comics and artwork in it. Outside my bedroom window there was a piece of wood with peeling paint, and the place where the paint had fallen away looked like a silhouette to me, sort of a weird cylindrical head shape with a pointy nose and goggles. So I made a tiny comic starring this strange character, “Doktor Kranium vs the Hideous Invisible Beast with Black Lipstick.”

Flash forward. After a couple years of running Jigsaw NYC, I recognized that it wasn’t ultimately going to be successful. I needed more space for less money. I needed to be somewhere that didn’t already have tons of art galleries and comic shops. I needed to not spend all day every day sitting alone on a couch reading comics. I decided to move the shop to Durham, NC, and see what happened.

What happened was Jigsaw Comics. The space I moved into already had art and events, so I was able to focus my attention on comic books. I quadrupled my space, increased the selection, and actually did okay. As part of the business plan for the new location, I decided that I would not just let my fictional characters write emails, but that I would let them run the entire store. Every email, everything on the website, it would all indicate that Dr. Kranium was actually the owner, and that he had built Milton to act as store manager. I built a puppet for Dr. Kranium, bought a cheap digital camcorder, and started to make the occasional video as a promotional tool for the shop.

The Jigsaw Video Thing may have started as odd viral advertising, but it wasn’t very good at it. Once I started producing these weird little puppet shows and editing them together, I suddenly remembered my childhood, I remembered that growing up I just assumed I would work for Jim Henson when I grew up. I remembered that when he died, I somehow lost all desire to do puppetry, and focused on acting instead. I’d done comics, illustration, animation, video, writing, music, all to varying degrees of success, but suddenly with Jigsaw I discovered a single pursuit that combined all of it. I was hooked.

After a year, a confluence of events led me to allow the comic shop to drift away. Financially, everything was actually doing pretty well, well on the road to success. But the space was not long for the earth, I would have had to move again, and frankly I just didn’t want to do it anymore. The puppet shows were taking up more and more of my time. It took years to finally realize it, but the puppets won out in the end.

After the second year of Jigsaw, the whole franchise got transported to New York for a quick weekend shoot (where I teamed up with Ovenfresh Productions to create five original episodes for the incredibly short-lived AT&T Tech Channel, which essentially went belly-up while we were filming), and then landed in Charlottesville. A new set was built, new equipment was acquired, a new Milton puppet got built, and… I’m sick of reminiscing, frankly. I mean, sure, I suppose it’s somewhat important to have some facts in place for the truly curious, but really, the puppets are in charge, here. You know way more than you need to already. Go watch the videos again. Ima go make tea.