Oh man well it looks like all this snow has cancelled my comics class. Or rather, I’ve heard from 75% of the class that they can’t make it. Looks like we’ll be NIGHT-SCHOOLIN it before too long. So instead of using the fact that I’m nearly awake to actually work on some comics, I’m just posting stuff. Ha! Take that, comics! Here’s a funny picture from last night:

That look is as close as I can get to approximating the utter desolation of adulthood. KIDS TAKE NOTE: enjoy your simple times while you have them, the freedom you think lies ahead does not exist! Look on my face and take heed!

Okay enough of that, let’s look at some harpies with gun-boobies instead. NOW THAT’S ADULTHOOD!

My friend Richard Wright has tried again and again to get me hired by his various movie and commercial projects over the years, and I love him for his tireless efforts, which have been universally rebuffed. The spread above is for GENTLEMAN BRONCOS, the recent Jared/Jerusha Hess movie starring Jemaine Clement as Dr. Ronald Chevalier. Richard, who was art director on the movie, asked me to do some sketches for these gun-harpies, which are part of a montage where you see Dr. Chevalier’s own weird drawings and paintings. It is pretty hard to try and draw beneath your level–i.e., make it look more stilted/childish than it already does. So much of drawing for me is trying to avoid that stuff, it’s hard to shift your muscles in the other direction. I suspect that a better cartoonist could do it better, or maybe one with a less rigid approach than my own.

I used to try and draw pretty much-on full-on sketches for comics in my sketchbook, but then I realized that most of the time I used up my interest in drawing it by doing it the first time. Weird, huh? But my current practice of super-tiny thumbnails isn’t the best either, so maybe I’ll end up with some hybrid version one day.

I need to take some sort of master class in drawing women, I’m the worst at it. They are showing up more and more in my diary comics too, not to mention my upcoming memoir comics. Hmm.

Oh, the things we go through in the name of true, pure, senses-shattering beauty.

So if you guys have not been following my Twitter feed, you may not know that last Thursday I, at long last, after great GREAT trepidation, went under the knife and had my two front teeth cut out. They’re the same teeth I knocked out originally when I was thirteen, and which then the dentist crammed back into my head. After the root canals, they told me they’d turn black and fall out (OMG!) in around 7 years, but today I’m 35 years old, and more than 22 years have gone by. Apparently the teeth had become fused to the bone over the years, so instead of dramatically turning black and falling out, they just turned a sort of muddy brown over the years, and little pieces would break off now and then.

Either way, it turned out that, while they were indeed fused to the bone, they were being “resorbed” by my body, meaning my body was eating them slowly away, and soon they’d just break off and fall out. I really can’t think of anything more terrifying to me–after all this time, including the entirety of my teenage years and adulthood, of being afraid of my teeth falling out, it’s a pretty powerful fear for me. So I agreed that we should cut these badboys out and start putting something in their place, rather than wait for the worst weekend ever to occur, or one to break off while I was kissing a girl or eating peanut brittle or something.

This is what they looked like a few weeks before the surgery:

(that photo’s by my man Dylan Chorneau, he’s kind of amazing)

So it happened. The night before me, Dylan, Piemaker and Anida met for a last toast to my poor old little brown beans, splashing a little Jameson’s over them one more time. The next morning my friend Kate very kindly took me to the oral surgeon’s office, whose receptionist you can tell a direct lie to and she’ll choose to believe you because she can tell you would argue her forever otherwise (the lie was whether or not I’d had a cup of coffee that morning: I had). A few minutes later I was waking up high as all get-out, blood all over my mouth, and with something massive inside of my mouth. It was the appliance that my actual dentist The Roz (Dr. Gordon Roznik, D.M.D.) had made for me, essentially a retainer with two big ole teeth on the front.

You have to remember that I’ve had these undersized weak teeth–I don’t know if I’ve ever bit confidently into an apple in my adult life–forever, so the idea of something being normal-sized in that space was pretty weird. So at first I guess I thought it was normal for my mouth to not be closing all the way–strangely, before I busted them out I had some big ole buck teeth, so I just assumed it was back to that. Remember I was high as heck on Thursday.

But by Friday my face was hurting like crazy, and I could tell the appliance wasn’t fitting right. I also was getting more and more concerned throughout the weekend about this pain in my face–I can definitely be pretty whiny, but I’m not bad with handling pain, especially when taking these massive 800mg Motrin’s every 6 hours. But the pain didn’t seem to be lessening at all. I really hadn’t had any instruction from the surgeon as to what to expect, so I felt kind of lost–I would take my appliance out and peer at the horrifying wounds and just sort of wonder if that was how they were supposed to look.

That’s why I love The Roz so much–on Monday morning I trooped down to his office, ostensibly to follow up on the fit of my appliance. But while I was in the chair I asked The Roz to check out my wounds–sure enough, I had the dry socket! TIMES TWO! Without hesitation The Roz was cleaning those badboys out, before I even had a chance to grab something to keep from screaming, then packing some sort of numbing medicine stuff in there to promote healing, then handing me a bottle of special rinse and patiently answering all the questions I was wincing out at him. Time elapsed–maybe 4 minutes. Charge = $0. The other guy cut my teeth out for $900 and all I got was a handout telling me to rinse with salt water and apply ice!

Not only that, but The Roz hooked up my appliance too, although he had to shave some of my crooked teeth down to get everything to fit, and now my fake teeth are so sharp I could bite your finger off. But when I left his office I was feeling 1000% better than when I walked in. It’s not just The Roz either, it’s his whole staff, everyone is just super friendly and relaxed and trying to figure out how to help you, from the hygienists to the receptionists. I feel like a star when I walk in there, it’s amazing. We’re talking about THE DENTIST here, you know? But I love The Roz, he’s the best, and that’s saying something for a guy with more than his share of dental fright (me). Check out what I look like now, I’m giddy:

Okay that’s all I have to say–isn’t it plenty? I’m working on a short comic about all this to post next month, so you’ll get the update then. In the meantime, if you live anywhere near Charlotte and are looking for the baddest-assed dentist possible, please accept my highest possible recommendation for Dr. Gordon Roznik. Don’t worry, he doesn’t go by “The Roz,” that’s just what me and the Piemaker (another patient) call him. The staff crack up every time too–”the Roz told me to check and see if I have enough insurance left for a deep cleaning.” Anyway, love The Roz. I had to take down the video I had up here–I couldn’t figure out how to keep it from playing by itself all the time, it was driving me nuts.

Continued from Part 02

Oh man, SPX Day 2 (my trip Day 3)! We were seasoned veterans by this time, we got up early and went down to the hotel restaurant to enjoy the sumptuous breakfast buffet. GOOD GRAVY! There were dudes chopping roast beef for you, two different dudes ready to make you omelets, all sorts of meat, cheeses, a waffle iron, shrimp and crab (for breakfast??) and a million other things. And they didn’t taste bad either, it was not bad more or less.

WAIT DID I FORGET to mention it came with your choice of a Mimosa or Bloody Mary? So we toasted each other again and packed our malnourished bellies with victuals. Then nearly fainted when we got to the register: $26 apiece! But listen, but listen: you can’t put a price on how good we felt going into the show. I don’t think I even got hungry again until like 4 or something.

Colleen AF Venable came by with one of the Lumberjack mini’s she’d made, which have a little illo by me in. Not only did this earn me a comp copy, but a comp felt beard! Check out how good I looked–I would have worn this thing all day, but it kept steaming up my glasses.

I think I made more actual bucks on the Saturday of the show, but it was a near thing. I got more custom from other cartoonists on Sunday, so I was actually pretty busy most of the day. I doodled in sketchbooks, especially Alvin Buenaventura’s incredible book (starts with R.Crumb!!), and Rickey Purdin’s Watchmen-themed book, which I did my best sketch in. I’ll link that piece up once Old Slowcoach posts the new pages. Supposedly the rest of SPX was super icy, but once again we lucked up–our little corner was perfectly comfy. But yeah–whenever I’d walk around, the temperature was like 15 degrees cooler. I was talking to Lamar Abrams and nearly fell asleep–Lamar had to slap me back awake, screaming “NEVER LEAVE A MAN BEHIND NEVER LEAV–” Anyway, you get the idea.

I did the only real buying of the weekend on Sunday, and only quickly — we were busy at our table, and I knew the longer I walked around the more money I’d spend. The most amazing thing I got was something I bought weeks ago from Ken Dahl/Gabby Schulz and which I picked up at SPX: his original page from Julia Wertz’s “I Missed Saw You” Craig’s List personals anthology. Dang! I can’t find a link to that either! It’s pretty amazing though. Also purchased was one of John Allison’s Scary Go Round books, the new Driven By Lemons by Josh Cotter, Masterpiece Comics by Bob Sikoryak, and Monsters by Gabby.

Did I say John Allison? This dude is a tie with Steve Wolfhard for “favorite new friend” at SPX; he was a scream. Just a sweet dude with a bottomless arsenal of quips and witticisms, all delivered in a voice better suited to a public country club reading of an Agatha Christie novel than a grubby indie comics convention. Ladies ladies ladies: if you want to become one of John’s “brides,” space is limited, apply now!

After the show closed and we had some dinner, we repaired back to our room for the final night of hotel partying. We thought we’d take it easy, but of course a bunch of awesome people showed up. For my part, it was great to see Joe and Becca Lambert, Alexis Frederick-Frost, and JP Coovert, even if it was only for like half-an-hour before they split again (there was nowhere to sit!). I love these guys, I want to go to CCS super-bad, but that money simply does not exist. Next convention I go to, my mission will be to love these guys better.

Anyway, once we GOT RID of the CCS guys and endured another noise complaint, our party receded to the small group above, and we pulled out the cards to play some “shush” -style cards. David Malki is a good guy to have in your hotel party, he’s aggressive without being aggressive, he can get things done. Phil McAndrew, while a peerlessly excellent fellow, has a voice like Great Neptune himself, and is such a fun guy he couldn’t help ratcheting up the volume all the time, bringing on our shushes. I’m just letting you know for whenever you’re planning your own hotel party for the future. Although listen: I got dibs on these guys. This is my team.

Monday morning there was delicious breakfast and then it was off to get my tire fixed. I wish I’d taken a picture of the woman behind the counter at “Just Tires”; she looked like she was pushing 60 but was all gooed up with makeup and had a sandy blonde wig that would have made Lady Godiva jealous. She clucked and told me that I needed four new tires or I would never get back to North Carolina, but I was too wily for her captive salesmanship. Plus I am the sort of person who will simply wish his tires to stay together for 7 hours of 70 mph highway driving in the rain.

But look, it worked! Optimism = its own reward, my friends.

Part 01
Part 02
Flickr photoset

CONTINUED FROM HERE 

So the next morning we dragged out of bed and down to the convention center, where we wisely decided not to eat breakfast until like 4pm or so. By “wisely” I mean “super-stupidly”, at least in my case. My little skinny body starts eating itself 20 minutes after my last meal, and having the residue of a previous night’s party in there doesn’t help. But anyway.

Guys let me tell you: Scott Campbell is a joy to sit next to at a convention. I don’t want to turn this into a Scott C. lovefest or anything, but hey would that be so bad? I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say a bad thing about anyone, he’s just uniformly sweet to every single person in the world, it’s incredible. Being around him, you just want to be sweet too, y’know? Like “how can I let this dumb stuff bother me when Scott is over there grinning like a lunatic and calling everyone ‘my bro’?”

And all sorts of people would come up to our table to meet him, from hot ladies to giggling schoolgirls to worshipping video game types to people with ideas for how Scott could make them money–he treated every one of them as if they were the only person at the convention, as if it were the first time someone had complimented his work. My favorite time was when this beauuuuuuuutiful girl named “Ariel” (when I signed a sketch to her she said “like the Disney Princess” and I was quick to point out that I was no authority on Disney Princesses), went up to Scott and said “Hi I’m Ariel I basically Internet-stalk you.” Without hesitation Scott says “Oh awesome, that’s great my bro!” I love him.

It didn’t hurt that so many people would come up to meet him and have to wait sometimes, allowing me to proselytize them to my own dark ends. I’m sure that about 1/3 of the money I made at SPX is directly related to Scott. Do I feel guilty? No way my bro, no way.

After a semi-delicious but fully fun dinner, we just barely missed the Ignatz Awards, but were just in time for all the merrymaking afterwards. Drink tickets are the best tickets, my friends, oh yes. Me and Scott and Kate hooked up with new bro David Huyck, forming the nucleus of another adventuresome evening. Our buddy Jah Furry told us about some legendary hotel suite party, which sounded pretty exciting, like it must be the big fancy brother of our own previous night’s hotel room party. But it was not–as soon as we showed up, we were immediately shushed, like “Hi, my name is Dusti*SSSHHHHHHHH!!*” Super lame, but as the rest of our group bailed, me and Matt Wiegle were just having delicious beverages poured by Jah/Jeff, and it would have been lame to bail with our new drinks. So we hung out for a little bit, enduring shushes every time the conversation hit half the decibel level of a ladyfart. Heidi MacDonald was there and I chatted with her for a little about con gossip, and then we beat feet as soon as we could. Guess what was going on back in our room, shushless?

Super good night, for sure. Chris Duffy introduced me to Bob Sikoryak, he of Masterpiece Comics fame, and in my late-night state I’m afraid I might have gushed a little bit (a lot) about his comics. He’s probably the best comics technician working today, and I’m super psyched to read his book. The Saturday night party did draw two noise complaints, which isn’t so bad considering that at one point there were probably between 20 and 25 people in the room, including Heidi, who snuck out of the shush party in disguise:

Around 2am, Kate announced she was going to take “a little nap”, and curled up on the bed where she lay unmoving for the next two hours of party. She is like Rip Van Beaton for sure, let me tell you, because that party got loud. But the cool thing about it was that–again–the group was so good that you could go to sleep there and not worry about anything. No one was macking on anyone, no one was stealing anything, it was just a bunch of good friends happy to see each other and meet more new good friends. Definitely the vibe of the show if you ask me; and if you’ve read to the bottom of this, then you basically have. Haw! Tricked you!

Okay, just one more installment to go for tomorrow, and then all doneski. I’ll be trying to whip up a related comic this weekend, but we’ll see how that goes. Past experience says I’ll be late. SO WHAT?!

Complete Flickr photoset
Report Part 01

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

Okay so where did I leave off yesterday? Oh that’s right. So I think I sold my first copy of DHARBIN! #2 around noon or so, which made me feel less emasculated. Everyone kept asking about Joe Lambert’s comics! I mean, sure, they’re brilliant and amazing and everything, but color is so EASY, right? Black and white is HARDER, right? Right??

Anyway, at noon-thirty I went off about twenty feet or so to be on my first ever non-HeroesCon panel. The subject was… well I’m not sure to tell you the truth. Originally it was sold to me as tracking the kind of “out” throughline from Jack Kirby to Bronze Age dudes up to today’s alternative cartoonists, but it kept changing. Regardless, and as I told anyone who would listen: I don’t know anything about that stuff and really had no place on the panel. The panel was moderated by Robin McConnell of the Inkstuds podcast, and my fellow panelists were (pictured above from left) Dash Shaw, Frank Santoro, and Robert Dayton.

I’m a big fan of Dash’s comics, and Frank Santoro is a straight-up smart dude in whatever he does (and I’m sure Robert’s great too, but I’d never met him). And Robin’s super nice. But this panel was a mess. Frank just started out talking about how wild Kirby comics were, and then some Steranko, and then everyone seemed to agree that Mazzucchelli ripped Toth off (maybe, who knows). I could never really tell what the point of anything was, and the one or two times I opened my mouth I said I thought most 70’s Kirby stories were terribly written and just lame stories, unless you were high. Whoa! That ended up being the controversy of the evening for me, although a pleasant one in the end. But I had a good time either way–I like all these guys, and who cares if the 70’s Jack Kirby comics have crappy stories? They still look great.

I came out of the panel and found TCAF packed with peeps, so I spent most of the afternoon doing so-so sales. Not TCAF’s fault–let’s face it, no one knows who I am. Especially in Canada. But I’m coming for you, new readers: one by one I will convince you all. Anyway, it was crowded and I sold some books and bought a bunch more. I never think of as cartooning as a money-making thing–until I do something “serious”, like a book that will stay in print and I can earn royalties from, I probably won’t–which makes it easy to relax and not worry too much about sales. As far as I’m concerned, everything at this point is practice. I made a lot of mistakes before and during TCAF, but I have been studiously jotting them down–by SPX I will be superhuman.

Where was I? Okay so after the show closed for the day we did one of my favorite things you can do in Toronto–just walked down the street and picked a place out and ate there. There are restaurants and brewhouses and teeny eateries all over the place, and they all seem to have fascinating food on the menu. I don’t think a single time during the weekend did anyone have a clear idea of where we were going, but we always found something delicious.

In the middle of dinner, who happened by but Chris Pitzer, leading Josh Cotter, Tom Scioli, Jim Rugg, and a person I’d never met who might be named Bill.  I hope so–Bill’s a good name.  [UPDATE: It's "Dave." Still not a bad name.] Anyway, we shamed them into sitting with us and tipped back more delicious beers–that’s when I made the mistake of bringing up my earlier Kirby comments.  Jim had been at the panel, and had made some points I liked, so I brought it up.  But whoa! I think I accidentally offended Tom, who is a cool dude and a big Kirby guy.  Does any of this make sense?  Hopefully we smoothed it over later, because I like Tom and he definitely knows what he’s talking about. 

And I LOVE Jim Rugg.  He’s got a big brain and an interesting take on things, and I always love to hear the direction he comes from.  He also made me blush all the way to my toes after dinner, when walking down the street he told me, “Whatever it is you think you’re practicing or getting ready for, you’re there and it’s time to start taking yourself seriously.”  That’s actually a pretty liberal paraphrase, probably halfway between what he said and what I wanted to hear, but I loved it.  I am hoping that later in life, when I am filthy rich, I will point back to this moment (in the very few interviews I’ll grant) as the turning point between being an aspiring cartoonist and just being a regular old cartoonist.  Thanks Jim Rugg you RIP!

I wasn’t sure what picture from my Flickr set to use next, but I have to give it up at this point to Naseem Hrab possibly my new favorite Torontonian. After dinner we ended up at Chip Zdarsky’s party at a bar called Pilot, where pretty much everyone was. I met people I’d loved for ages like Jay Stephens, but then we started talking to some girls and that was it for chatting with cartoonists. I think Jay would understand. The girls were led by the lovely Naseem, mightly lady-love of also-mighty Kean Soo, and they invited us to some Korean-style karaoke. Wow did this night just get perfect or what?! So off we went, and in a trice ended up in a giant room crammed with people singing karaoke. Man that was so much fun.

The discovery of the night was Derek Kirk Kim, who is a total karaoke stud. This is speaking as a karaoke stud, mind you–the dude has moves. In fact, pretty much everyone did–the song choices were uncommonly terrible, and the mikes moved freely around the room, with people collaborating when they weren’t sure. I did the “Ghostbusters” theme with someone, then “Lust For Life” with Kean, and later on me and Scott C. NAILED “Sister Christian,” which was probably the highlight of the night for me.

The great thing about hanging with Scott is that he’s like the most fun, positive dude in the world. The bad thing is that all the women in the world want to talk to him–he’s like delicious heroin to them or something. But he’s so loveable–how can you get mad at a guy like that? Also kudos to poor Joe Lambert, who was pretty tired but who we kept dragging along: “I think we can make last call at this place if we hurry–that’s okay, right Joe?”

Speaking of last call, I’m sleepy. Tomorrow the last installment, including my first ever original art sale, more night-time fun-times, trauma at the airport, and more! Excelsior!

See a ton of pictures in my Flickr set, with way less words!

Well Good Gravy, after all my excitement and lack of sleep getting ready for it, TCAF is not only been and gone, but two days gone–heckfire, it’s already Wednesday! As you can see in the photo above (which I swiped from my man Chris Pitzer’s Flickr stream), I came to Toronto ready to conquer it. But in the end, it was I who was slain by sweet Toronto. All my villages were razed; even unto the foundations thereof.

But I will get to the coolness of Toronto in due course, make no mistake. Let us begin at the start of the beginning:

Barely in time for TCAF (the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, for those of you who don’t know [hi Mom!]), I finished stapling and folding 120 copies of DHARBIN! #2, the second iteration of my heavily self-referential minicomic. Unlike the first one, this one is good, so you can imagine my excitement in traveling to Canada armed with a book I was actually proud of. Just with the time I saved apologizing to each and every person who bought one, I could be halfway through drawing #3, but instead I spent all that time just relaxing and having fun. OOP–It’s time for the LOST finale. I’ll be back in a little bit.

WHOA! That was some season finale. WHOA! Okay so anyway.

I’ve been to Toronto a couple of times, and both times were AWESOME! But I think this time was the awesomest of them all. What is it about this city? I suspect that I spent all my time in fancy regions of town or something–the idea that all of Toronto is as cool as the parts I was in is mind-melting. I love my home city of Charlotte, but Toronto is like the clean friendly smallishness of Charlotte, except with a ton of culture and stuff to do like New York City. And even better, a ton of people from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds. A TON. I kept preventing myself from commenting on it; I’m always accidentally backing into racially charged conversations, OR just outright making fun of something like a jackass and then bending over backwards to apologize. TO AN ENTIRE NATION.

So I was psyched. But on the plane out of Charlotte I went into such a paroxysm of fear upon takeoff that I was exhausted by the time we got to NYC. But then running into Adrian Tomine–who immediately distanced himself–in LaGuardia, followed by Paul Pope and Jimmy Aquino, all of whom were on my flight, made me straighten up and act manly.

Once into town I immediately forgot all about meeting Pitzer to catch the shuttle bus, and caught it all by myself. Fortunately we somehow bumped into each other on the streets of Toronto while both hunting the Toronto Reference Library–both of us like to get our bearings before we get too adventurey. We had lunch at some Italian place, where we struck up an incredible conversation with two older ladies, both Toronto residents, although one was a native Kiwi (”not New Zealander,” she told me) and the other British. We pretty much talked to them for two solid hours, and it was a great relaxed re-intro to the city for us. THEY WERE SO NICE! I wish I could meet them in every city I travel to.

Good God I’m going into too much detail here. It’s still Friday afternoon. I’ll try to speed it up.

After meeting up at The Beguiling, which is about a well-stocked store as you could hope for if you’re into comics, although their superhero section looked kinda anemic. I say “looked”–I didn’t really. Superhero comics are not my bag either, Beguiling! Oh crap I wrote that first sentence all wrong. Man that LOST finale was so good it’s addled my grammar. At any rate, after dinner we met Pope and Jimmy and Mike Dawson and Awesome Marcus Ninja writer and artist Joel Buxton and Shane Heron and had some brewskis down the street. I have to say that one of the only low points of the weekend was not getting to see Paul more–this was really the only time we got to hang out. Oh wait there was a party. But we never got to really get down like in the old days. Plenty of time on the next go-round, but I like that dude.

But who I DID get to spend a lot of time with was Scott Campbell, who me and Mike met up with and headed over to a party at Ryan North’s house with. L’party (that’s how they say party in Canada) was pretty chill, and Ryan’s house is perfect. I met a ton of people there, including Kate Beaton, who I struggled to not embarass myself in front of all weekend, and Chip Zdarsky, who I’m pretty sure I didn’t embarass myself in front of. Oh! And also Roberta Carraro, which was a real blast from the past–not only a blast, but she and Chip were married? ZAP! Color me mystified!  ***NOTE: while hunting the link for Ryan North, I read my first ever (maybe) Dinosaur Comic.  And I LOL-ed!

Okay but let’s get to the convention already. But should I call it a convention? What’s the difference? I’m not sure, but let’s say “festival” instead, which is I think how organizer Christopher Butcher would prefer it. Regardless of what you call it:

What are you kidding me? Totally packed. The Toronto Reference Library is the coolest library of all time, five floors wrapped around a big courtyardy-atriumy thing. Plus I kept imagining Knives Chau and Ramona Flowers jumping around in a great big battle above the convention festival. I had the best seat in the place too–with Scott Campbell and Graham Annable on one side, and Joe Lambert, Chuck McBuck, and Alexis Frederick-Frost on the other; plus a little Alec Longstreth/Greg Means for dessert. AND a little scenic pool behind us, complete with babbling brook sound effects! I’m pretty sure that’s the difference between a convention and a festival. Vive La Difference!

One thing TCAF did NOT have going for it was people wanting to give me money, at least not on the first day. The show opened at ten, but I don’t think I sold my first book until after noon. Although I did give a lot away to buddies I knew or people whose work I just plain loved. I told myself I would be really tough and make everyone pay, but when they pulled their money out I just couldn’t take it. Ray Fenwick walked up and I practically threw one at him–I love that dude. He actually put me at ease in a weird way–I have a hard time meeting people whose stuff I like sometimes, but he started talking so much smack that I was like “okay I know how to do this” and relaxed and smacked back. I was so relieved too–I’m not very good at these quick con interactions, despite my work and kind of ridiculous exposure to bigtime comics types.

Oh man it’s almost midnight. Okay I’d better wrap up this first part. Tomorrow: panel with Frank Santoro, macking on pretty girls, and wild karaoke!  See all the pictures over in my Flickr set!

Wow, it’s Christmas. 

When I was a kid this was like the focal point of my existence:  thinking about Christmas, wondering what I’d get for Christmas, judging my Christmas against reports of my friends’ various Christmas’s, etc.  On December 26th the year would turn into a tragically, infinitely long timeline, with the next Christmas somewhere invisible over the horizon.  How could a young imagination ever know how little time 364 days really was?

I have spent a lot of my life thinking about self-control, self-improvement, self-involvement and other ways to use your mind to subtly alter the quality of life. I would do my best to forget that there even was such a thing at Christmas, hoping that suddenly I’d wake up and it would be November–high season for Christmas anticipation!  But just a casual glance at a Sears Roebuck catalog, which my mother got for some reason (she would NEVER buy something that wasn’t deeply discounted) would start my Christmas longing up afresh.  One year I carefully laid out on graph paper my dream BMX bicycle, with annotations for all the accoutrements–including disc wheel covers, personalized license plate, pedal flair thingies, etc.–and casually left it lying in various places around the house.  Such as:  the kitchen table, on top of all the telephones at different times, in the driver’s seat of my mom’s car…  Something about Christmas inspired impossible dreams of avarice in me.

And I have to say that my family was really good at Christmas.  My mother missed no opportunity to remind us of how poor we were, et cetera and so forth, and how this Christmas would be particularly dismal, and so on.  But every year there would dozens of gifts under the tree.  Most of them wouldn’t be exactly ”brand-new”, but my mom was a pro at cleverly boxing things for maximum impact, making sure a certain yard-sale-acquired toy had all of its accessories, etc.

Today, as adults, we have an unspoken tradition (as I bet many families do) of making somewhat tedious but not unpleasant small-talk about each gift for about 3 minutes after it is opened and vocally appreciated by the recipient:

GIFTEE:  “Oh, this is exactly the same color as that pillowcase I like so much.  It’s PERFECT!”

GIFTER:  “Well I’d heard you say that Miss Simpson at church was loving hers, and of course I know how you love that pillowcase!”

Besides being (I think) very classy of us, it has the secondary benefit of really stretching out the time it takes to open presents.  This surely must hearken back to our habits back when I was a kid.  There were five Harbin sons and daughters (there still are), although there were 8 years between me and my next older sibling, so my younger sister and I were kind of the stars.  In order to make the gifts “last” longer, we would cycle through the entire family–seven people!!–as we opened gifts, so each person would be in the spotlight for a little bit, and everyone else would coo and ahh and make polite noises. 

Now this all sounds polite, but it surely was not.  I mean, speaking from a 7-year-old’s perspective, nothing could make less sense than looking at a big stack of presents–it’s here man Christmas is here it’s really happening!!!–and NOT opening them right away, immediately, as fast as you can. 

One Christmas in particular, I must have really been making a nuisance of myself, whining and puling and just generally finding it grossly insulting that the other 6 people in the family should have timed their own Christmas’s to rudely coincide with my own.

My father is not generally a harsh or cruel man, and rarely punished us.  I only make this assertion because I told this story to a friend the other day, and they looked a little concerned, as if I’d revealed some buried memory of child abuse or something.  Not so!  But on this particular Christmas I’m describing, after I’d really made myself insufferable, he did something which I will remember until I die, and one of the better lessons I’ve learned in life.

My dad stopped everything.  He shut down Christmas and said, “Okay everybody look at Dusty.  We’re going to let Dusty open all his presents.  Pile up all your presents, Dusty.”  I already had of course, and while I was confused, I was still too greedy to realize how I was being tricked.  “Okay go ahead and open them all up while we watch.  Everybody watch Dusty open up his presents.”  I mean, SRSLY?  It’s funny how well I can remember my own reactions to this–I really remember being confused but delighted, like I imagined sweepstakes winners felt when confronted at their doors by those giant checks:  “I’ve never won anything in my life!!!” 

But I sure did open those presents.  And the family still made those noises of appreciation, and my older sister took photos of everything as usual, and then I was done.  No more presents.  I remember looking around, poking under other boxes–maybe I’d missed one?  “Okay, now it’s your turn, Shawna.”  And Christmas went on without me.

Now again:  this sounds very cruel in retrospect.  But when you’re wrangling 5 kids, and one of them is ruining it for the other 4, you have to make hard choices.  When I’d realized my awful mistake, the waterworks began, and I ended up getting sent to my room–on Christmas morning–to play with my suddenly very uninteresting pile of toys. 

If anticipating Christmas is hard, then listening to Christmas go on without you is really rough.  But to this day, I am a tireless and energetic slower-downer of Christmas morning.  No gift goes without its due, and each person gets plenty of time to open, appreciate, and discuss that gift.  “Come to think of it, I think this goes with my blue pillowcase, too!” 

And maybe weirdly, to this day that’s one of my favorite Christmas memories–after that I really appreciated Christmas.  While I’m sure I still thought of it as a time to rack up new loot, and still made lengthy and pain-staking Christmas diagrams for my mother to find, if nothing else my dad taught me that Christmas was about more that just getting presents–it was about being with my family.  This is the kind of lesson that dads are good at teaching, and I hope that one day I’ll be able to teach my own children the same thing.

But it sucks that I’m blogging on Christmas morning instead of opening gifts with my family.

Slowly I am running out of things to say about SPX, which was a full week ago now, but which is still very much on my mind. Partly because I’m working on a little strip featuring some of the highlights of the weekend, so obviously that is keeping it fresh.

But before I ask you to look at MY pictorial recollections, I invite you to whet your whistles with some people who actually know what the heck they’re doing. While at SPX I only got four new entries for my themed sketchbook, which is ridiculous considering the wealth of great cartoonists that were in the room. However, they were four really good entries. I’d tell you more about them, but WORDS FAIL ME: why not see for yourself instead via the glory of my Flickr site. If this is the first time you’ve heard of this themed sketchbook, then you should just start at the beginning and read the whole thing.

You can skip all this yada-yada below if you like and skip right to the photos on my Flickr site (along with all the yada-yada anyway).

Me and J. Chris Campbell of Wide Awake Press drove up to Richmond, where we stayed with our very hospitalitatious chum Rob Ullman for the night. Then the three of us drove up to the wild metropolis of Bethesda, Maryland!

I had with me my first minicomic (DHARBIN #1) and a print of the much-viewd (thank you!) “26 Cartoonists” strip I did a few months ago.

Lessons I learned:

1) Don’t make a minicomic with a giant oval on the front which you MUST draw on for each copy. This slowed me down like crazy, as I had to stop and sketch on every single one. Not to mention that, sans sketch, it’s a pretty dull cover, which means that people aren’t really likely to pick the book up and discover the more interesting interior. Plus if you sell some to a store, you have to draw on ALL of them, which is also hard.

2) Price everything higher, so that you can wholesale it to dealers and still make a profit. I priced my mini at $2.25, forgetting (despite long experience as a retailer) the wholesale market. Future iterations will be an even $5.

3) Prepare better, as in making signs, being ready for stuff, pre-sketching on stuff, having little things to sell cheap for impulse buys.

4) Thank Chris Pitzer more profusely for being such an excellent host, tablemate, and not the least, publisher. You can thank him in my stead by going to the AdHouse Books site and buying SKYSCRAPERS OF THE MIDWEST before the first print sells out. I finished it last week, and it was AWESOME.

All in all it was a great show, and I’m excited about all the on-the-job training i got as a young cartoonist. I will be beginning tomorrow on new stuff for DHARBIN #2!

But don’t forget to view all those photos, yo!