Looking for a place to go Zombie Style

Since I'm on this whole, "Hey, I'm an (untalented) artist!" kick, I thought I should go all-out this year and finally do a 24-hour comic. It's something that I was kicking around with, since I know for a fact I'm capable of cranking out work in that time (well, maybe), and that I at least know that I'm able to work for 24 hours straight.
So there's this event, at http://www.24hourcomics.com/ that I will be getting in on this year. I'm going to start asking around, and I think it'll be fun to work while on display and taking jibes about how my art is so much worse than what others can do. Ideally, I'd like to find a place that is near the Baltimore area that would be okay with me living there for a 25-hour period. I'd basically need a table, a place to put my own chair, a place to eat once ever two hours or so, a bathroom with a sink, and maybe a place to plug in my computer, printer and scanner (I do like to be plugged in, and that way I'd be able to make a comic look right, ya know?).
So yeah, to those shops in the Towson, Cockeysville and Reisterstown area, I'll be talking to you. I know the idea of keeping a shop open for 24 hours is a little on the odd side, but we'll see about getting 3-4 artists there and making it into a cool slumber-party style event. Baltimore artists unite!

Collision Course

So the other day, I was tinkering with my convention schedule, and I started to note that I had enough budget space for another low-cost convention this summer. Being that Otakon is a local one for me, I was starting to put plans into motion to get a table there.
However, after a quick trip to http://www.otakon.com/default2.asp I found out that the dates are Aug. 4-6, which is the same at Wizard World Chicago (http://www.wizarduniverse.com/conventions/chicago.cfm), a convention that I've been looking forward to mostly to spend some time in the windy city, as well as see some relatives in that area. Since the old-school geeks are financially more friendly to my comics than the manga geeks, I've got to go to Chi-town. Don't get me wrong, manga geeks, I love y'all, but at least one in seven of you are giving me strike one because I'm not Japanese, and strike two because I don't have a manga-styled book out (yet).
So Otakon isn't in the cards this year. Maybe next year.
But that got me thinking about how Wizard seems to be doing whatever it can to sabotage it's conventions this year. They made a horrible call in moving the venue of WWLA - not only was the new location harder to get to, it was on the route of a freaking marathon.
WW Philly is always a fun one for me because of outside elements, like food and local friends. But from a business standpoint, it was a dud. There were the big two, and there were some good small press types. Basically, Points A and C on the comic book career map. But there was virtually no Point Bs there, and I need to be able to talk to Point Bs right now. Throw in dismal sales for anyone I've talked to, and the show was a dud. A tasty dud, but a dud none-the-less.
Otakon running up against Chicago has me worried. That makes it all but guaranteed that the magna-based industry will be absent from Chicago.
So maybe, just maybe, there'll be some focus in the Chicago area - that Wizard World will be the only game in town for entertainment.
http://www.lollapalooza.com/default.asp?fd=1
Damn.

You'd Rather?

Sometimes a photo is so much better when taken out of context. Observe:



Really, it's not even worth reading a story when you've already got a 1,000 words like THAT.

Being a Second Grade Artist, part two

So what does it mean to be a Second Grade Artist?
For me, it means nutting up and putting pencil to paper. It means drawing, even though I’ve said for years that I can’t. It means that I draw with exactly the same spirit I had in Second Grade - and I have a blast doing it.
Will I ever get hired by someone for artistic reasons? That’s really, really doubtful. I’ve always intended to make my living as a writer, so that’s okay. I’ll let people critique the hell out of my words. But I’m not showing off my art portfolio any time soon.

That was actually my biggest fear after launching DearPirate.com. Upon getting back from Philly, I watched the hit counts sky-rocket on my site. It was insane, absolutely nuts. I mean, they were looking at my art - why? Oh yeah, because I handed out fliers asking them to.
Since then, I’ve calmed down about the whole people looking at my art stuff. Really, honest. Look all you want now.

When I was updating the read cycle, it got me to thinking. One, is that I read a lot of webcomics. But two, I noticed some art trends in my reads. There’s some really good art, some really good bad art, and a lot of stuff in between. Occasionally I run across a strip with another category, really bad art. That doesn’t make the read cycle.

Really good art is easy to spot. Butternut Squash is one of the best examples of this - those two are budding stars that accidently got their stardom pruned by Speakeasy. That should have been Speakeasy’s top book, but instead, it got lost in the shuffle. And predictably, Speakeasy got lost in the shuffle because of it.
Spells & Whistles is another one of my examples of really good art. Again, that duo needs to be put under a contract, and soon. The whole remote control/Click rip-off is getting a little thin, but eventually the story should pick up again and catch were the art is.

A lot of the bigger strips, like PvP, Penny Arcade and Ctrl-Atl-Del fall into the middle grounds. They’re nice and all. They’re funny. They have huge audiences. But Kurtz almost never does any shading or backgrounds. The PA crew does a good job of both of those, but their anatomy is still a little too cartoonish to be in the really good category. CAD does a better job at anatomy, but the backgrounds often lack.

I want to put Questionable Content in the really good art category. It’s got good anatomy, good light and shadows, backgrounds, and expression. But it doesn’t have feet. Or changing panel sizes, or panel amounts. The subtle tricks of story telling just aren’t quite there. But the focus of that strip has always been the writing, which is why I check it on a nightly basis.

Then there’s that happy category of really good bad art.
First, check out In His Likeness. This strip started as four black dots, then slowly added a red dot with horns. Eventually, James Hatton keeps adding to his character selections, so there’s God’s cosplayer, and even Poseidon showing up. James is a Second Grade Artist. He undoubtably repeated the mantra over and over again, until he too got sick of it. He still won’t make any claims to being an artist now, but he’s learning and trying. And on top of that, he figured out a genius way to storytell at a second-grade level.

There’s always the guy going around with a version of the mantra saying "I can only draw stick figures." And naturally, if you’re at all inspired to start a comic starring stick figures, you might think it to be a great gimmick. Just know that the bar is set really, really well by Rich Burlew from The Order of the Stick. He’s up to 324 strips as I write this, and most of them elicit a chuckle at the least. It’s some solid characterization, which is amazing that he did that by keeping the cast looking and feeling more or less the same that whole time. Not that they don’t grow, but that you can compare No. 1 to No. 324, and the style is pretty much the same. If a character gets new boots or a new clasp on their cloak, there’ll at least be a joke about it. But he uses the sticks to their advantage - by not improving them.

A side note to stickmen - check out for Jonnie Allan’s Stykman. I’m endorsing this comic on concept alone. By the time I found it in Philly, it had already sold out. But it looks good, and it takes the stick figure to a very different place.
Another side note on stickmen - "The Preposterous Voyages of Ironhide Tom!" was something I snagged up at free comic book day. It’s about a stick-figure pirate, and it’s one of the best things I’ve read in years.

There are two other good bad art strips that I can think of off the top of my head, both using the same-panel gag at DayFree Press. Dinosaur Comics and Indytits both use the same panels over and over again. This is something that DearPirate uses to a lesser extent, but only because I’m still working on making more backgrounds for Pete.
Which is what I’m off to do now.

Mantra Breaking: Being a Second Grade Artist, part one

For those that know me as a comic book writer, and writer only, the past month has been quite a bit of change for me.
You see, I long banged the drum and sounded the trumpet of "I’m a writer, I can’t even draw stick figures." It was such an easy mantra. I could say it over and over, and it allowed me to be the best writer in the world not getting published. I had to develop a business model that relied completely on others being talented. Sure, I had to be good with my words, but it was another layer of selling that I had to do. In comics, it’s not just selling your book to the audience. It’s selling your book to the retailers and the distributors and the publishers. While I’m more than ready to bite down and be the publisher, I’ve always been having to sell my books to artists as well.
Because woe is me, I’m not an artist. I can’t draw anything.
Bull Hockey.
At some point, it just started to wear on me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with some great artists - Rob Zailo is one of those old-school guys that would have fit right at home in the old bullpen in Marvel’s golden age. And I’ve also worked with some artists that really didn’t do too much of that work thing, or that revising of pages when they were the wrong format/characters/skill level. It can be very, very frustrating.
But that whole time, I was sitting behind my mantra shield - I’m not an artist.
What the hell makes an artist? Talent is a big plus, but lets face it - everyone is an artist in kindergarten, and most kids still draw for fun in second grade. And eventually, people are going to be better at it than others. So what? Suddenly drawing isn’t as fun?
Really, it’s the anxiety factor. If you draw something and you’re over the age of 16, people are going to judge your art. It may be something personal to you, and it may just be a measure of your skills. But if you show it to someone with a critical eye, they are going to measure it. I am in particular a pretty harsh judge of art. I have to be. If you want to work on a comic with my name on it, then it’s got to have a certain level of skill. Which, to some, probably makes me a hypocrite. I know that Dear Pirate doesn’t have the best of art. Big deal.
Writing for comics is a maligned art. You can spend years working on the craft, developing and understanding comics as a story-telling medium. You can become the second coming of Alan Moore, and still, editors probably aren’t going to read your pitch. But if you have a hit TV series on the WB, and you’ve never, ever written a comic, you might be a celebrity in the industry in your first year of work. It’s annoying, but it’s reality.
I’m working on a deep and personal script right now, and I’m really not in the mood to sell it as a product to an artist. So I started sketching and photo-referencing. And every now and then, I started to doodle. And then a pirate idea that I had started to bleed into the personal project. Yeah, I wanted professional artists to collaborate with on the pirate one (still do, but it’s different than Dear Pirate). But I was doing a lot of research on buccaneers and privateers. Pirates were on the brain, and the doodles kept coming.
That’s when I came up with a little pirate guy, and the weird idea of a pirate advice column. I knew it was a funny idea, so instead of spending the next three months getting a minicomic ready for Baltimore Comic Con (even though yeah, there will be one ready), I got DearPirate.com up and running.

35 days to go, so my thoughts idle

For such a simple little notion, DearPirate.com is taking up quite a bit of my free time right now. I’m not getting in nearly as much Everquest time as I used to, and I’m also barely getting in my work on other dernwerks books (Issue three of Expert’s Guide is looking great, though).
Trying to not let things slip, there’s a certain pecking order, and paying work is the king of that list.

A lot of what I’ve been doing is building the infrastructure of the comic. It’s really taking in a lot of hits, and it’s a mild success right now. But I’m getting ready for much bigger numbers, really. With some software upgrades on my end, I’m getting ready to set up a storyline setting for DearPirate, which will run parallel to the Q&A strips. At least for summer, that is. But maybe I’ll get more of a backlog running there, and it’ll be something that I can run weekly for infinite, too. It’ll probably turn into something like a Monday update or a Tuesday. We shall see. The general idea is to get up to 10 strips a little faster than two months from now, which will allow it to be listed on a few other sites.

In the meantime, I’m going through the paperwork to have the comic listed on the two major webcomic voting sites. My numbers aren’t exactly grand, but on buzzComics, I’m the top-ranked humor comic about pirates. Wootage. I’ll get some vote buttons on the main page in the next few days.
Comic reviews? Eh, I’m finding enough to talk about without going to the well of my big company weekly reading. So 52 clues will be a little less frequent, and more digging into the fine points and broad strokes. Like the deck of cards theory (that there will be 52 players in the series, and each have a corresponding card) - I fully intend to dig more into that, as the meanings of cards have long been a fascination of mine.

I’m also slowly developing a super-secret spin-off of www.DearPirate.com, as well as a long-running idea I’ve had for about a year now. It’s 35 days until Comic-Con, where I’ll be making quite a few pitches. And as is the nature with any creative endeavor, I expect to get shot down on most if not all. It’s not about being pessimistic, it’s about being realistic. Which is why I have parallel goals for success at the con this year.

First goal - see more of San Diego than the Gaslamp Quarter and the convention center. Kendra and I are going to be down there for a whole week this time. Trips to SeaWorld and the beach are mandatory.

Second goal - promoting DearPirate.com. If it’s only equal in success from the Philly con, it’s awesome in a can. But given that San Diego is about four times the size, I’m honestly planning for four times the success.

Third goal - Raid that thar alley - The Artist Alley and Small Press Area from San Diego. If I come home with a half dozen kicking books and half of a half dozen new friends (not contacts, mind you - people that I would actually go drinking with or hang out playing geeky games with), that alone is a success.

Fourth goal - eating with the old friends. Business lunches, as I goofily call them. If it’s someone working with me on a book, then hell yeah, I’m buying them a lunch. Zailo, if you’re reading this - that Fish joint across the way, or Dicks, or something else?

Then there’s the slightly lame goal of "have fun." It’s the freaking nerd prom. How can you not be entertained by it?

Friday brain spill

Apparently I'm one of the few not going to MOCCA today. This is a show that I'm definately considering for next year in a maybe sort of way. I hear nothing but good things, but my brand of crazy might not be quite right for it.
It's the irony of Indy shows. They go on and on about wanting to dig up the unknown and the trendy, but are more likely to gravitate to the known unknowns and follow the trends set out for them. The Expert's Guide on How to Kill Things That Go Bump in the Night has had some tremendously bad shows at more indy-based fare, while it killed in the artist alleys of the mainstream shows. I've learned a lot from my first show (SPX), and maybe next year I'll give those top indy circuit shows another shot (That's SPX, MOCCA and APE taking the first tier).
At the same time, I know for a fact that I'll always be boothing the Baltimore Comic-Con, and next year I'll have a booth at Wizard World Philly (despite its regression into a regional show, I still love the town). I've been eying Mega-Con for a while, since Orlando is a nice enough place and I could fit in a day or two at Disney World. And I've got high hopes for the Chicago show, so if all goes well there, I'll go back there. Naturally, I'm always at San Diego. This year I'm toying with the thoughts of booking up a table for next year. Expert's Guide will be done and Dear Pirate will be a year old, plus I should have at least one other project done by then (potentially two).
The goal by 2007 is to have more than a 1,000 people associate my name with comic book writing. And so long as 20 of those types are editors that also throw in the word good in that association, then the hypotism is working.
Philly was a great show and all, and I've got a few pics from the floor (emphasis on few). Sure, it was small and yeah, there's still not enough comic power there. But all and all, I got in a lot of cheesesteak, got drunk, got to talk to some awesome peeps, both in the artist alley and in the major's booths.
I'll get up a detailed post on my thoughts amd pics about it sometime in the next four hours. Got to go bowling and get some lunch first, though.
Also, the 52 Clues is in desperate need of updates. Launching dearpirate.com has taken up a bit of my time, and I've been playing catch-up. Also, my read pile is still backed up from Philly. There was some good stuff in artist alley, which I'll definately get some good words in on. There was some sub-par stuff, too. For the most part, I didn't really buy too much of the junk. But when speed buying, yeah, some of it gets to sneak in.
Back after a roll.

incoming!

http://www.dernwerks.com/dearpirate