I kinda feel like this is my first time really DOING Emerald City Comic-Con. Last year’s appearance in a terribly-placed booth was the dry run. This time I’ve done a few other convention center cons, I’ve got a much better location with actual foot traffic.
This year? I’m sitting with Dana again. She’s having people from a big-time book publisher stop by to talk to her, going out and drinking with the National Cartoonist Society. She’s pretty big time now. And part of me wants to compare myself to her, even though she’s been grinding on this “making comics” thing a hell of a lot longer than I have. She’s way out in front of me because she’s been doing this longer. Honestly there’s a part of me that’s definitely envious, even as I’m mostly delighted to see her getting this far along. This part of me also can’t see the work she put in. Just the results.
And yet. Here I am with Rita as part of the massive set of creator-owned characters on the conbook’s cover. Folks with 2000AD trekking all the way across the con to shoot the shit with me. Sending off some cover tests for a mid-list genre comics publisher on Friday morning and having pretty glowing initial reactions in my inbox at the end of the day. I’m not on the same path as her; she’s a stripper, I do graphic novels (and occasionally take my clothes off on stage). And given that I’ve only been spending five years on this comics thing – hell, three years, if I discount Absinthe* and the time spent working on the Tarot deck and moving – I think I’m doing pretty fucking good. And that’s not counting some other things that kinda started this winter that I’ve been too damn slow to really get on. Plus I’m sitting there trading wisecracks with a big time stripper all day long and drawing scurrilous things to amuse each other between fans.
I’m not holding my breath or anything, but I continue to think there’s a decent chance there’ll be someone ready to publish and distribute the final Rita omnibus for me. Which, given how utterly obscure and unpublishable I felt when I started Rita, is a pretty amazing situation to find myself in.
Anyway I have been sitting in a chair for like pretty much ten hours today talking and talking and selling books and whatnot and I am all out of the talky-talks and I am going to have to get up and do it tomorrow and I am just gonna order an internet pizza and be all uncharismatic for the rest of the night now. Enough introspection.
not that I really can in some ways, I learnt a LOT working on that with Nick – but it was also a piece aimed solely at the furry audience, which is pretty damn limiting.