So I did a convention this weekend.
I made a modest profit; I probably would have made a decent profit if I’d had Tarot decks and Rita 2 at the table.
Various happiness-inducing events included:
* Every time I saw Rita peeking slyly at me from the edge of someone’s con book, thanks to Brandon Graham’s decision to draw a cover full of creator-owned characters who were at the con. (There’s a key posted here.) This basically meant that there was no way this con could suck.
* Finally getting to meet Lo. Who does a blueish comic about robots and their robot problems. We’ve kinda been an intermittent mutual appreciation society on a few webcomics boards for a couple years; she was the first person to show up at my table. I went out Friday night with her, her husband, and their friend, got stinking drunk and had an awesome time.
We did an Exquisite Corpse after we were all thoroughly drunk, which is about the right time to do it.
* Hanging with Dana Simpson the whole con. She asked me if I had room to share like two days before, and I said yes. Our table personalities synch up pretty well; there was a lot of giggling and amusement. And scritches because we are both fucking furries.
* The side effects of hanging with Dana. The effects of her winning the Universal talent search were really starting to show this year; because of her, I ended up chatting with folks from Andrews McMeel, the National Cartoonist Society, and various Big Syndicated Strippers. I now have a card from a VP at A-McM after mentioning that I’m hoping to find someone to publish the Rita omnibus, and I mean, my work is probably not a good fit for them, but sheeiit! Who knows? More people at that level knowing about my work means more chances to not have to wrangle the omnibus myself.
* Having some folks from 2000AD make the trek out to the furthest northern hinterlands of the Artist Alley to see me. 2000 fucking AD. I mean that and Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant are basically the places my inner 12-year-old boy would kill to get into.
* Various fans of Rita coming up to tell me how much they love it. I got to have a conversation about the way I’m trying to portray different hive-minds in the comic, ffs. That’s winning right there.
* Chatting with Phil Foglio and trading notes on some of the local cons. He says he hits Norwescon like every four years, giving the field time to go fallow in between, and I think I may start doing the same.
* Giving Jeff Smith a copy of Rita 1 while getting him to sign my giant B&W collections of RASL and having him go “oooh” at his quick flick through it.
* Meeting some new folks doing SF comics and feeling that “hey this is definitely My People” vibe that resulted in book-trading and trading of prints of our Glados fan-art as well.
* Sending off some cover tests to a major comics publisher on Friday morning, getting very enthusiastic initial responses that evening, and having some chatty emails this morning about my con with my contact there.
And then on Sunday morning, something happened. My animation school buddy Gabe was at the show, in what he was calling “the Dungeon”. Perhaps a diagram is in order.
This is the official con map, with the overall traffic flow overlaid. Last year I was in the Triangle of Solitude, and it sucked ass. I think I saw more people passing my table at Rainfurrest, which is like 1/30th the size. You do not want to be there if you’re a solo creator. You probably don’t want to be in the Desert of Back Issues to the right of the fan, either. I haven’t been there and I don’t want to experiment.
Only the most intrepid of con-goers, or the ones specifically looking for YOU, are going to make it through the skybridge, across the Desert of Back Issues, and down to the Dungeon. And when they do they’ve probably spent all their impulse money already. You’re not getting many new fans, which is a lot of what you’re at a comics con for. You are basically fucked.
Gabe posted this to his daily sketchblog on Sunday morning, and it got me thinking. Over the four years I’ve been doing ECCC (only two selling), I’ve seen people a little ahead of me migrate from the hinterlands to the halcyon lands of the first hall you enter. And I see how much traffic is passing them by when I wander in there to get something from a creator I like who’s in there. I was doing a lot better this year by moving to the Alley and asking to be close to a straight line from the central entrance; could I get in there?
Well, yes. I could. By doing what I saw other solo creators doing: ganging up and getting a couple of corner booths, or even a whole island, and becoming a destination. Plus the pricey convention center internet suddenly becomes affordable when you split it eight ways, so no more fighting overloaded cel towers to take credit cards or tweet con photos.
I grabbed the early sign-up sheet and did some quick calculations. If I could get four to six other people together, I could make it cost only slightly more per person than my lonely alley table, with more space for everyone. I put out the call in person and on Twitter, and in a couple hours I had four yesses and three maybes from people I know are pros at this. Enough to make me drop about $2k on two corner booths, and a requested placement of either in the rich fields of the triple-digit booths, or in the center of the second hall. I think in a couple of years ECCC will be as hard to get into as SDCC, and as huge – and as lucrative for the folks who manage to get grandfathered in. Which I am right in the window of opportunity for.
So hopefully next year there will be a decent-sized Collapsar booth (or whatever we call it, that was what I put on the form) with me and my buddies, right there near the front of the con. We will have tons more foot traffic, and some amount of synergy of bringing in the fans of all these people and their various connections. Not a ton – the only thing really unifying this group is “Peggy knows them” – but it’s not like, say, Topatoco or Periscope has much more unifying them than that.
I think I may have just accidentally a comics collective.