Twin: a fragment

A picture of my character Twin, a sentient black hole who likes to shape (her) event horizon into a vaguely femme monster-thing.

Lots and lots of barely-visible art brushes are layered to create the subtle texture of (her) body.

This has context but you ain’t getting it.

upgradin’ the brand

 

mailing-labelsI am sick of writing my return addresses on the packages I send out. And I am also sick of printing return labels with my own printer. So I am making some spiffy stickers to use instead. I’m getting them printed at Moo, who’s having a sale on stickers right now; the circular images on the left are going into their circular stickers, and will be mixed and matched with the rectangular stickers with the actual address text on the right.

One of these days I should really make some image stickers to sell at cons/slip into late packages/hand to fans who bring a friend to my table/etc. But not today. Today I’m gonna shower, then putter out to a cafe in Cap Hill, work on Rita, then go to pole dance class.

Books!

Rita 2 is here and it looks fine.

It took me a little while to actually feel any emotions about this fact. I felt oddly empty about this accomplishment. In part because I’d just had this exchange on DA’s forums:

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It’s just another step on the path. I’m not even done with volume 2; I need to ship out about half of the 400 books now cluttering up my studio. And when that’s done I’ve got to finish drawing volume 3, hope it doesn’t turn into volumes 3 and 4, and kickstart, print and ship that one. Maybe when that’s over I’ll feel finished. Maybe I won’t until I put out the omnibus.

I will probably express some happiness tonight at the cartoonist meetup, though. And at the release party we’ve been talking about maybe having at Phoenix. I dunno. There’s an emotion hanging over my right shoulder, just outside my peripheral vision, and I can’t catch sight of it no matter how I twist and turn. I’ll have to lay in wait and catch it unawares, I guess.

I should buy a postage printer.

shelvin’

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Yesterday I got the second printing of Rita 1. All 600 books.

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This morning, I put them all into the shelves I store my merch on. These shelves are now pretty much completely full.

I am kinda worried about what happens when 400 copies of book 2 arrive. It’ll go down to about 200 once I ship them out, and removing the two boxes full of first-edition copies of book 1 that were sold to backers of the second Kickstarter should help – but I am pretty sure my studio will be annoyingly full of boxes for a few days. Ah well. That’ll motivate me to deal with the shipping sooner, I guess.

Some comics-making friends of mine are talking about sharing a warehouse downtown, both to store our various books in and to have a place to work that is Not Our Homes. I will be delighted to have this happen, as it will mean I can have my closet back!


What else. The other day I sent a photo and brief bio to a tumblr called “We Are Comics”, whose aim is to make a statement about the perception of the old superhero guard that comics are By Men And For Men. Here’s the photo. If you can identify all that stuff then you are cool.

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Most people seemed to just go with holding up signs (or word balloons) that said “I Am Comics” but I felt like being more elaborate. So I raided my library for stuff that was Important to me as a kid growing up, and threw my own books in the pile as well. All SF and fantasy and strange worlds; screw the corporate-owned superdudes.

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Then I was all, hey, I need to put these comics away so I have my studio back, but before I finish I think I’ll have lunch with an old friend I haven’t visited in a while.

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Oh yeah. Still as utterly amazing as it was when I was five.

Anyway. Now I should take a shower and maybe get some drawing done before Nick comes over. We might go hang at a friend’s boardgame night, or we might just chill around the apartment, because he’s driving me to a con in upstate WA tomorrow. And then there’s the Glitch Mob show on Sunday evening, which I’m also dragging him to. BASS! DANCE! WHEEE!

exciting new mistakes

So over the course of the past few months, I made a $6000 mistake.

When I was putting book 2 of Rita together, I somehow managed to completely leave out one page in the middle of chapter 10. Which is the one where the timelines involved are constantly weaving up and down, creating a strong rhythm; there’s no way I could get away with a page missing in the middle of that, even if the story still made sense without it. See where the red/orange/yellow stream turns up over the blue? That page. That page was missing.

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When I realized this, I was aghast. This was a serious fuckup that basically meant I would have to throw this first print run away unless I wanted to have an errata sheet inserted into it or something, which would also be ugly. And I take pride in the fact that these books are really pretty objects that I think are worth instantiating into atoms instead of endlessly duplicating as data.

I went to the first place this could have happened, and it was entirely my fault.

I dithered about it over the weekend, and decided, yeah, I’m gonna eat this cost. I have the savings to do it; I’m basically not going to make a profit off of book 2 until I make the second print run. I’m going to have them dispose of most of the first run and only ship one box of them with the second run, which I will keep around as a reminder of this super dumb-ass thing I did.

And for the rest of my publishing career, I will hopefully remember this weekend and always check over my proofs both for making sure all the weird printing tricks come out correctly, and making sure I haven’t put half the damn book together upside down and out of sequence or something moronic like that.

Nick was visiting while this happened, and he kinda gave me shit for this. Justifiably so, it’s a pretty bonehead mistake, and for an amount of money that would have been really scary a few years ago. But he did allow that he’s never seen me make the same mistake twice – and volunteer to be a pair of eyes looking for this kind of dumbassery on the next book, as well.

Anyway. I’ll be spending the next week dealing with this, I think. Rita book 2 has taken too long already, even without this fuckup, and I just want to get it in everyone’s hands ASAP.