Oh man, holy mackerel, SPX was amazing, my best experience ever at a convention as a cartoonist.  Also a great kickoff for my new “full-time” cartoonist status, a real confidence-builder.  Speaking of which, I’m super behind on that this week, not only from recovering from SPX, but last night I hosted Liz Baillie, MK Reed, and Gabby Schulz, who stayed in my house en route to Asheville as part of their Punchbuggy Tour. Super fun, those guys, we had a good time talking and making breakfast, and they were very kind about the fact that my dog kept sneaking into their bags and noshing on their noshables. 

Anyway, I say all that just to point out that I’m going to break my SPX report up into three chunks–I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on, plus stuff for Heroes, answering email, and more.  One of the side effects of an amazing SPX is a bajillion new readers and emails and Facebook requests and Twitter followers. And a lot of blushing! But I love it, don’t let me fool you.

Anyway! So I left about 3 hours later than planned on Friday, which means that I rolled into the DC area just as rush hour was beginning. Dummy. But I finally got to the hotel, got hotel room supplies (hotel food/drinks are wildly expensive, and I’m on a budget these days), and met up with my superbro Scott Campbell. I love that guy so much. THEN the two of us met up with Kate Beaton–I love her too! The weekend was already off to a good start, so much loving and laughing! We were all going to drive over to the Nerdlinger Awards, along with new friends Meredith Gran and Steve Wolfhard, but destiny was keeping us at the hotel!  Good thing too, cos as it turns out I had run over two nails en route to DC on my bald tires, so we would have surely ended up on the side of the freeway putting my half-flat spare on. But regardless, Steve showed up late and it turned out there was no way we could get there in time, as it was about an hour away.

Which sucked because our fivesome was composed of two past recipients/present awarders (Nerdlinger recipients choose the next year’s recipients), and three present recipients! Kate had picked Meredith for an award, although I’m not sure what it was, and I had picked Steve. Holy cow, if you haven’t read Cat Rackham, it is so amazing, super nuanced, just a well-made, well-conceived little comic. Anyway, so we didn’t go to the Nerdlingers. But:

We did have a brief modern dance party in the hotel bar, beginning with this little number, then progressing through a medley of favorites, including Kate’s own “The Shower”, and my “Washing My Hands In The Public Restroom But There Are No Paper Towels”, which dance was created by Matt Fraction way back in the day. We met up with a bunch of friendly people, including past buds Jeff Newelt and Brian Heater, and together we retired to our hotel room for the first of three nights of hotel room parties.

I haven’t been to a lot of hotel room parties; I’d always assumed that they’d be too crowded, too insular, too weird for me. And they probably would be, truthfully. But the quality of the cast throughout the weekend was SO INCREDIBLE there was never a chance for anything to get lame! It was just a bunch of new and old friends relaxing and ripping it up, to the chagrin of the rest of the hotel (judging by the noise complaints we received).

Here I am enjoying the party, while Kate looks on. You can’t imagine how hard it is to hold that face for an entire hotel-room party, but I am a trooper, oh yes, a veritable Spartan. Katie ended up missing Liz and MK (they were all supposed to share a room), because of the Nerdlinger thing, so Scott and I welcomed her to our bro-nest, gallantly giving her one bed and arranging ourselves in the other. Guess how many of us were snorers? NONE! I know, I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before, so pleasant, I slept all the way until it was time to stop sleeping, which was too early considering our 4am party breakup. Why do you think the party broke up, I wonder?

Anyway. You can click on any of those pics to go to the Flickr photoset, where I’ll be adding more pictures over the next couple of days (there’s like 8 or something now.

Part 02

This Friday is SPX, one of my favorite indie shows of the year, second only to TCAF. I’ll be appearing for the second time as a cartoonist, as opposed to a conventioneer or a retailer.  SPX is also great because a TON of my comics friends will be there, so it will for sure be a vast party, spreading all across the Marriott hotel lobbies, conference rooms, bars, and out into the streets, the cartoonist-littered streets. 

THINGS THAT WILL BE HAPPENING:

I will have two new books, sort of–one is all mine, a teeny minicomic version of my “8 Different Ways To Get Nutted” comic, printed in full color. Did you know that printing in full color is super expensive? Well it is. I need to get a publisher for these things, because WHOA NELLIE.

Oh but that’s not the half of it! SPX will also see the debut of Papercutter #11 from Tugboat Press, which I have a one-page strip in. Do you like copyright infringement? Well then you’re gonna love this strip! Papercutter #11 also includes longer (better? sniff) strips by Amy Adoyzie, Jon Sukarangsan, and Lisa Eisenberg. So what I’m saying is, you need to buy this thing.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yes, the Nerdlingers! Last year I was awarded a Nerdlinger Award (For “Greatest Gentleman/Greatest Smile in Indie Comics”, natch!) and so this year I get to award someone else one. I won’t say who yet, but they’re super awesome, I thought really hard about it. Double sweet–I got to design the actual award label (the award is a label affixed to a bottle of REAL BEER), which was fun–I need to do more lettering design, I love it, I could do that stuff all day no problem. Here’s some early versions from my sketchbook, but the final looks a little better:

Those badboys will be given out Friday night at Atomic Books in Baltimore, and I will be there. I believe some different people are reading their comics there as well? You can find out more right here (scroll down a little).

I think that’s all for now–I’m super excited. I’ll maybe have a t-shirt too, but we’ll have to see on that one. I’ll be set up with my bro Scott Campbell at table D-1, right next to Partyka bros Matt Wiegle and Shawn Cheng, and pretty close to AdHouse bros Chris Pitzer, Lamar Abrams, and Josh Cotter. This will for sure be a brodown of legend, and all of us will be accepting free drinks all weekend with no hassle. Bring it on!

It’s not really a new strip, but just a really old one–I think maybe 3 or 4 years ago?–I did way back before I started really doing comics more seriously. But I still love it!  I dusted it off and added the color–I feel terrible today so I stayed home from work, and have wasted pretty much the whole day on this, but it looks good, am I right? YOU KNOW THAT I AM RIGHT!! Check out the whole strip here–I’ll be doing some other old strips over the next couple of weeks, as I get ready for SPX–a longer post on that coming up, lots of stuff to announce.  Okay!

So yesterday was my 35th birthday, and last night I did a poetry reading at Snug Harbor in honor of this auspicious occasion.  The turnout was good, I think they told me about 70 people? Which is not as good as in the old days, but pretty surprising considering I really only publicized it through Facebook and some light word-of-mouth. Plus a lot of the people I thought for sure would be there were not — so double super flattering for the ones that did. 

The last time I did this was in 97 or 98 or so, I can never remember.  I had expected to be really out of practice and clumsy, but it may be that I was doing it wrong before, and so by being out of practice at doing it wrong, I did it right? You know? Either way, everything worked, people had a good time, laughed or clapped in the right places.  But I did completely forget to thank Elizabeth Steinfels of Hong Kong Vintage, who with pretty much zero notice organized me a little kiddie desk and chair and a pulpit; not to mention carting all that there and back.  So nice. 

Anyway, lots of sweet stuff said by some of my favorite people, and it was a good night. I stayed up late talking with a pretty girl, and then true to form woke up at 8.30 this morning CLICK! and couldn’t get back to sleep. Whoa, is this too much information?  Sorry guys I’m still groggy and got paid last night to talk about myself, I guess the rush hasn’t worn off yet.

A COUPLE OF THINGS I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT:

1) A week or two ago I saw INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.  Do you know this movie?  Quentin Tarantino?  I liked it, it was fun, there are parts of it that are pretty amazing. 

BUT–the story was completely weird, filled with strange holes and dangling plotlines.  SPOILERS BELOW–There are three or four stories going on, like in a lot of Tarantino’s movies, but in this one they don’t seem to really converge at all; at best they sort of get near each other briefly, like seeing the opposing lanes of a highway flit in and out of view.  Characters are introduced and we get whole backstories and flashback sequences and all sorts of tidbits about them, and then they’re promptly snuffed out, with no discernible consequence to the larger plot.

And the end, what was the deal with that?  All the storylines converge in this theatre, and pretty much everybody dies? For no reason?  I get it that war is hell and everything, and showing the gritty, seamy underbelly of things is part of Tarantino’s schtick.  But listen: if you’re going to rewrite the end of World War II, the bloodiest conflict in mankind’s history; if you get to rearrange everything just how you like it, including a completely gratuitous execution of Hitler, Goebbels, and the entire German High Command…

Well, you could make it make sense, couldn’t you?  Just saying.  Soon I’ll be starting my first longform narrative, and I’m thinking about storytelling a lot, so maybe I’m being hypercritical. And I did enjoy the movie, except for all the talking talking talking all the time, usually just before all the talkers kill each other and a new scene starts, where the new talkers try to figure out what the old talkers were talking about…

Oh, and the Mike Myers cameo completely pretty much ruined any chance of taking the thing seriously. There are plenty of old British dudes who wouldn’t need thousands of dollars of makeup to fill that role in a way that didn’t complete rob the movie of half its gravitas, its sense of being important–especially after the INCREDIBLE opening scene, just an amazing start to the movie.

2) Battlestar Galactica. More SPOILER ALERT: the spoiler is that this show sucks. Holy Cow, it’s like a total breakdown, whoever’s in charge is insane.  How in the world did they make that little story take 4-5 seasons? Not to mention a couple of TV movie things thrown in there?  Here’s the story:

a) People make these Cylon robots, which rebel, evolve, and then rebel again, effectively destroying the human race except for a relatively small number of survivors.

b) Those survivors try to find a new home, because they get tired of flying around in a bunch of dingy spaceships pretty quick.

c) Some of the survivors are actually Cylons, but

d) It doesn’t matter, because at the last minute Starbuck magically remembers the coordinates of “Earth” and they teleport there.

e) Oh, and everyone decides to get rid of all their technology, fly their spaceships into the sun, and walk off with bindles into the mountains.

You can argue some of that.  A lot of people think the writing, acting, and music on the show were really great, really groundbreaking, exceptional stuff.  I don’t; I think it was terrible.  I think the only thing worse than the acting was the ridiculous story.  ESPECIALLY because it was obvious by the end that they just kind of wandered up to this point, and that the entire previous series was just a bunch of misdirection and plot reversals standing in for real drama.  There should be a Battlestar Galactica drinking game, where each time there’s a countdown–”okay we’ll wait just ten more seconds and then we’re outta here“–you take a drink.  You would die of cirrhosis before you ever finished the series.

SO ANYWAY.

I think what I’ve REALLY been thinking about lately is the low standards we set for things — I work in comics, and the same thing happens there.  People will talk about a story being really true-to-life and gritty and all that, really “adult”, but leave out the part where the star of the story wears a bodysuit and has a ring which lets him do anything he can imagine! Oh but it doesn’t work on the color yellow. 

Why do we accept things that aren’t good?  Or a better question, leaving out the subjective “good”: why do we take our escapist fiction, our “fun” tv shows, and try to pretend that they’re groundbreaking? Why not just be happy with our guilty pleasures and not worry about whether or not they’re genius?  It’s like if the editors of America’s Funniest Home Videos started trying to really get amazing with the cuts in their montages.  Why not just accept that Green Lantern is just a fun little thing and leave it?  Because if you look at BSG as a cool sci-fi show with a bunch of space battles and intergalactic intrigue, it’s fine.  But once you try to hang a bunch of spiritual mumbo-jumbo and karmic crapola on top of that framework, once you try to get heavy…

well I just don’t think that framework is strong enough to support all that pathos.  It’s not that BSG–or Green Lantern, or whatever–shouldn’t aspire to greatness.  But they need better, stronger, more adult underpinnings if they want to throw all that heavy weight on the girders.

Hm, even as I type that I can see problems with that argument.  But today is Labor Day, and yesterday was my birthday, and I’m already tired of talking about this.  I think I’m just grumpy because The Wire is so amazing, so well-made, well-crafted, that most other things just seems shabby in comparison.  One more season left!

What are you kidding me? This story is all done, and just in time–I’m terrible at drawing women anyway. You know what I’m good at drawing? Me–future strips are going to have more me in them, because those panels take like 30 seconds to do, it’s great. Anything with color or hummingbirds or trees or women takes forever, just forever. Forget it!

Okay, I have a ton of stuff to do today to get ready for my poetry reading (and 35th birthday!) tomorrow, thus the early posting and short chitty-chat. I’ll think of something really funny to say next week to make up for it (no I won’t). For now, enjoy the last of this 7-part story!