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.

I’ve been talking to some friends who are not as organized about their con stuff this con. Here, then, is a list of my Con Stuff.

1. A super big suitcase. With wheels. It’s about as big as two of the little wheely ones that fit in an overhead bin. I put pretty much everything I need at my table in it – merch, prints, print books, business cards, fliers, my table sign (and my little price signs), my book display easels, some tape, my pencil case, my tablecloths, everything. I also put my clothes in it, and my little bag of bathroom stuff.

Tablecloths: I have three of these. One goes on the table. Another one gets thrown on top of everything when I leave for the night. The third one, well, it’s a spare. Right now, for instance it’s covering Dana’s stuff, because she’s still on the way to the con from Tacoma. They’re actually just colorful sarongs I got; depending on my mood that spare could become part of what I wear while dancing!

My pencil case: Contains pens and pencils, duh. It also has a Square reader in it and an X-acto knife. The knife comes in handy for chopping up paper when I need to make a new price sign, or for opening the plastic wrap on a Tarot deck so I can sign it. Also there are a few metallic Sharpies in there for signing purposes; the title page of Rita is black so I can’t use a normal pen!

The prints live in a messenger bag of their own that I can check. By pulling them out when I fly, I can save myself a $75 fee for a bag that’s heavier than 50 pounds. All the prints are in several of the cardboard folders the paper came in; I also have my little table sign in there. It’s all wrapped up in one of those tablecloths, tied with string, so it doesn’t shift much in transit.

Clothes: I lay them flat on top of each other, then roll them up into a bundle. It’s more compact and a lot less work than folding them all when I pack to travel to the con and back. They get hung in the hotel room when I get in.

Bathroom stuff: Nail scissors and files and whatnot, because I inevitably break a nail somewhere in transit and probably get a hangnail too. This is in a little bag of its own; I take it out and throw it in the hotel bathroom.

Everything but the clothes and the pencil case stay in the suitcase when I come home! Including unsold merch. All I have to do when I pack for a con is pull the suitcase out of the closet, throw some more books and Tarot decks in, maybe make some more prints, and I’m done.

2. My big sign. It’s got Rita on it at almost life size. Came with a little folding stand; it goes behind me at the table. Sadly it is too long to fit in the con bag. It lives in the cheap little bag it came in.

The sign’s bag has an airport lost and found tag on it from the last time I accidentally put it down when I was checking in to my flight to a con and forgot to pick it back up. Seeing it there reminds me to avoid the hassle and embarrassment of doing that again.

After seeing how many people the Peter S. Beagle quote on Dana’s new sign pulled in so far this con, I am thinking about making a new one with the lovely quote Phil Foglio gave me..

3. My computer bag. Laptop, travel Wacom, stylus, power brick with a Plug Bug added so I can charge both the Mac and a USB-powered device from one socket. Usually these days what I charge with that is a little USB battery I got that has two outlets on it; I’ll plug my phone and my tablet into it at night and charge all my shit at once. Also Kleenex and some pens and the tape I use to tuck my junk when I’m wearing something tight and some fliers for Rita. And a couple of carabiners on it so I can hook some stuff to it – my hat (which I’ve sewn a D-ring into for this purpose), my coat (two D-rings), and most importantly my water bottle. If you’re gonna sit at a table all day YOU NEED A WATER BOTTLE.

The extra battery is a lifesaver. It lets me make sure I can take credit cards all day, even if I’m running the phone’s battery down providing internet for my computer and/or tweeting like crazy during slow times.

THAT IS IT. The computer bag lives by the front door because I go out and about with it all the time; the big bag and the sign live in the closet between cons. And on the studio floor for about a week after I get home from a con because I’m too damn wiped out to unpack just yet.

If you want to have a ton of prints on display you’ll need to haul more. I find that I like a super minimal setup – I kinda want to be an oasis of calm in the intense visual clutter of a con floor.

Feeling an urge to write a post about my con setup. Over a few years i've honed it to something super minimal that I think works really well. Super tired right now though after a good first day of ECCC.

So I’m packing my stuff for Emerald City Comic Con (table cc-09 in the Artist Alley if you’re going, stop by and say hi!) and I have realized that book 1 of Rita is damn close to being out of print. I’ve got a box and a half of it set aside for backers of book 2, and I’ve got, like, about 20 copies besides that. And my own personal copy sitting on my bookshelf.

This is annoying in the short run, but in the long run I feel like it’s good place to be in! I printed about three times as many books as I got backers for in the initial Kickstarter, and I’ve sold just about all of them over the past year and a half. That makes me pretty happy. Especially given that I figure I’ll sell my entire remaining stock at ECCC. (I’d also better double-check how many people are getting book 1 from the Kickstarter for book 2, and make sure I’ve got that many books in the boxes marked ‘reserved for KS backers’.)

I’ve marked it as ‘sold out’ on my store, and just did a count of unshipped orders – I’ve got all of one copy on reserve right now, so that’s good. Now to double-check the KS2 backer stock. And start deciding how big a run the second printing will be!

(There is a part of me that wishes I’d done a bigger initial print run, but at the time, 400 books seemed like an impossibly huge number that I’d never move. Even with about 140 of them going out to the initial Kickstarter backers.)

Okay yeah I have enough books to cover all the KS2 backers, plus a small margin of error because I know there were a few people who pledged at a ‘sponsorship’ level and wanted book 1 as well. I’m taking 29 books to the con, and that’s it. Good thing I printed up a new batch of fliers. Sadly I won’t have any Tarot decks either, as I haven’t seen the new box of those LS was sending – hopefully it slipped through the cracks on their end, rather than getting lost in the mail. I’ve been putting off dropping them a line about that; I finally did just now.

As self-publishing problems go, this is pretty much the best kind. It’s a hell of a lot better than “I will have five thousand copies of my first book filling up my garage for the rest of my life”.

edit: pondered the print run, sent off a couple requests for quotes at 600/800/1000. My logic? I’ve sold about 300 copies of Rita 1 in the year after the initial KS; I’m still definitely in new fan acquisition mode and feel confident I can expect this kind of sales for a few years more. And if my sales keep increasing, I should be running out about in the middle of the KS for Rita 3. We’ll see how ECCC goes; if I sell out of what I have than I’ll definitely feel like going higher.

Ever since I started dancing, I’ve developed a new habit:when I’m in the bathroom doing something else, I’ll put a leg up on the counter and use it as a half-assed barre. It’s a long one with two sinks, so I’ve got the space to do it. Start brushing my teeth on the left-hand sink, move to the right-hand sink for half of it so I can get my other leg up, then rinse and spit.

I bet I couldn’t get away with this if I was sharing the bathroom with another adult.

Also try filling your bong with warm water. You’ll cough a lot less!

So there’s this teaser trailer for a ‘Peanuts’ movie that has the comics/animation Internet abuzz. Because everyone grew up with it, and nostalgia is usually about replicating the exact same inputs to trigger memories of happy times.

Me? I don’t have an intense emotional attachment to ‘Peanuts’. I think I kinda want to see this when it comes out. Blue Sky has often been striving for a ‘painted children’s book come to life’ feel, in my eyes, and most of this feels like “Mary Blair painted over every single frame of a moving version of Schulz’ drawings”.

I mean, here’s their first, “Ice Age”. Sadly only a kind of smeary copy of it. But look at how absurdly graphic their shapes are. That sloth with the flat triangle head. The majestic planes of the sabretooth. And there were some shots in that movie that just looked like shimmering, stylized gouache paintings of their majestic Arctic vistas. It was simple cartoony shapes, with a very stylized hand rendering them.

What else have they been up to, anyway. “Ice Age” came out when I was still in animation school, and I pretty much quit seeing All The Animated Movies when I got into the industry. Three more Ice Ages, Robots, an adaptation of Horton Hears A Who, two Rios, and Epic. Wow, “Epic”. That is the least specific name for a film ever.

And also pretty straightforward rendering, at least in the trailers. Dunno.

I think I am definitely interested in seeing ‘Peanuts’. I like that kind of highly abstracted rendering aesthetic applied to 3D animation. If they pull back from this painterly look to a more modeled look as seen in ‘Epic’, I’ll be more meh about it.

(And thinking of this also reminded me there is that Mr Peabody movie out now, which… oh my god, I think I need to see this, this is going to be a two-hour long head massage for the parts of me that like Asterix and Bill & Ted and, well, of course, Mr. Peabody.)