Desk
My camera has spontaneously started working again so here is a picture of my workspace in its current iteration.
This is Benign Kingdom Spring 2012.
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Rice Boy books
This is a cruddy photo of what the book looks like with its little jacket on and all. Without the jacket, it’s the same as the print on demand version– images of the Matchwoods in day (front) and night (back). I’m very happy with the cover design, and pleased that I came up with something that no publisher would probably ever have let me do.
The wordless cover bothers people at conventions, though, so I made the jacket to have a title, blurbs, and flashier images. I guess I will see if it works this weekend at TCAF.
Very proud of these things. The preorders are going out the door as quickly as I can draw in them and pack them up, which is not very quickly. I’m very happy about how well these are doing already, and about how much more sustainable this will be than having them printed on demand. I am a serious-business self publisher now and it will be a little easier to pay my rent.
If you don’t follow me elsewhere on the internet, perhaps you are not aware that I just put up a new short story.
work work work
Where I am working, until I move. Trying to be more diurnal lately; It feels like I get a lot done when I work until 3 in the morning, but it turns out I don’t. Easier to be distracted at night. Above; working on the next short story. And up on the wall are images of Cat Rackham, the Bottle Woman by Dylan Meconis, and Bone.
Can’t keep up with this thing daily, apparently. I’ll be putting up more LOTR stuff soon; I have been engrossed lately in Real Comics Work.
Self-Publishing
4300 pounds of books, 2000 copies of Rice Boy. More physical labor than I have done in a very long time. I am not going to do anything for the rest of the day.
Starting to send out Kickstarter preorders this week, then putting the books for sale on the site after SPX.
C2E2 Words & Pictures
I really love Chicago. I didn’t do as well at this show as I’d hoped, and it was rife with the sorts of problems a first-year show might be expected to have (fortunately most of them invisible on the attendees’ end). But it will probably be an excuse for me to go to Chicago next year, and the convention will probably go much better next year.
Anyway I stayed with Spike and Matt and their ugly dog, along with Dave and Abby and Kel.
Her handsome apartment-
And the show floor, with everyone setting up on Friday…
Oh, it’s one of THOSE conventions:
I was in the Webcomics Pavilion area, which occupied three little aisles towards the back. Very cool that particular attention is being given to webcomics, though I got the sense that we missed out on a lot of traffic because we were all together in one area, and off towards the edge of the floor.
My half-table all set up for the first day:
I shared it with Dave Shabet. I was going to share it with Dave McGuire but he got sick and could not make it! He is feeling better now though. So many Daves.
Saw Erika!
Met KC! And we enacted a comic book trade-
Across the way were Chris and another David. I read a whole bunch of Chris’ comic the Book of Biff during the convention, and good lord but it is hilarious.
And here’s a Frank and a Becky, who recently released a very handsome book called Tigerbuttah. They shared a table with Spike who had her new fourth book of Templar, Arizona (I got caught up on Templar on the flight home and will say again that it is one of my favorite things being published online right now. You should really read it).
And hangout times.
Here’s some handsome originals Dave drew during the show-
Some drawings for some nice people-
And at the end we all got tattoos.
One Thousand Books
The Rice Boy books are here and they are big and heavy and numerous. Sent some up to Toronto for TCAF, and preorders will be next week’s project… and may take longer than that.
Doing a signing tomorrow, in Asheville, at Comic Envy!
Vattu Vattu Vattu
Just filled my fourth notebook of Vattu notes and vis-dev stuff. Including two more books full of page thumbnails, that’s around 1000 pages I have filled working out this story. Towards the beginning of this process I was trying to do all of my planning/writing on the computer, but paper remains the easiest way for me to think. So now I’m going over everything by hand and then doing later drafts of each structure and scene in Scrivener.
I am proud of this in a way but it is kind of an invisible accomplishment that won’t matter until the whole comic is done.
Heroes Con 2010!
Last weekend I went to Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC, the biggest and best comic convention around my area. Heroes 2009 was the first big comic show I ever exhibited at, in fact, so this marks one year of going to conventions! I hope to keep doing it for a while. And now I have a bit more experience and am confident in my assessment of this as a really excellent show, representing a wide variety of material very well, run by nice people who are honestly passionate about comics. Loved it.
Early on Friday I saw a Calabash and a T-O-E, wow wow wow–
These two were very nice and had such lovely handmade costumes! It is the first time I’ve seen anybody dressed as any of my characters so it was pretty mind-blowing and pretty much made the show for me.
I was flanked for the duration of the show by Paul
and Anthony
…charming gentlemen both. We of the webcomics universe were smartly arranged all together in a big central island, so I had the pleasure of talking to and commiserating with a bunch of webcomics pals; Joel, Kate, Meredith, Rich, Chris, David, Brad, Danielle, and Erika among them. It’s exciting to be a part of this webcomics thing; I think they (we?) are making some of the most interesting independent work out there right now. This is the future, guys. I am becoming more and more of an evangelist about online self-publishing.
Here’s a look down Webcomics Way:
And here is a T-Rex. Anthony draws a mean T-Rex, I tell you what-
And here is the first Spider-Man I have drawn in nearly a decade, for someone’s sketchbook-
And here is a colossus I drew for Joe’s sketchbook-
On Sunday there was a nice little after party at Heroes aren’t Hard to Find, the comic shop which hosts the show– a really nice shop, too! I got the first book of Lone Wolf and Cub (mostly because it was small and I am moving soon and trying to get rid of books) and read it on the way home and it blew my mind, it is so good.
So! A fine comic convention and worth attending if you’re in the area next June. Thanks to Shelton and Dustin and the many other people that put this thing together!
Sunday night! https://www.twitch.tv/evandahm/