Apparently today is National Coming Out Day?
Hi, I'm a queer transwoman. I'm also poly, and prone to spanking and role-play in the bedroom.
None of this is probably new to you.
another con weekend
So thanks to Dana sharing her table in the Geek Girl Con dealer’s room, I got to sell some comics today.
I came within about $30 of selling more today than I did in all of APE. And I got in late. And my travel/lodging so far is $20 for an Uber because it was raining this morning when I got moving. It’ll probably be about $40 all told, as I’m bringing in some more books tomorrow and don’t want to hump them on a bus. I ran out of Rita 2, as I just went with what was in my con suitcase from APE this morning.
Definitely applying to GGC for next year.
This is the last of four cons in a row. I really need to never do this to myself again. Next weekend I’m just gonna sit at home and play Bloodborne; maybe I’ll finally manage to kill Mergo’s Wet Nurse, which will mean I’m something like one boss away from the end of the game. JUST IN TIME FOR THE DLC.
at long last, a beginning
This morning, I opened up Illustrator.
And I opened up the template I’d made at my table at APE. And I opened up a script. And the experimental drawings.
And I roughed out the first page of Drowning City.
It’s a real thing, now. At some point in the next few days I’ll start painting that page. Or I might rough out most of the rest of the chapter first. I’m not sure.
Can I make it live up to what I want it to be? I think so. I’ve learnt a lot since initially coming up with it back in 1995. I feel like my outline is solid, and I’m confident I can fill in the gaps now.
Right now, though, I should go get something to eat. I didn’t bother with breakfast and I have a bit of a headache.
(Other things I should do: get at least a basic skeleton of the website for Drowning City together, brainstorm some sample story outlines for Parallax. But not right now.)
decryption complete
After four and a half years of work, I’ve finished “Decrypting Rita”. I was originally going to trickle out the final chapter over the entire month, but this morning I woke up and decided to post the whole thing at once.
You can start reading from the beginning here, or you can read the last two chapters here and here. There’s a discussion thread for the ending here, along with some acknowledgements and whatnot.
A Kickstarter for book 3 will happen as soon as I have the energy to do it, unless someone hooks me up with a publisher willing to take a chance on an omnibus. A girl can dream.
I’m feeling pretty good about my comics, despite a poor showing at APE this weekend. Rita is done (well okay like 10 more panels plus a last editing pass). My script for chapter 1 of Drowning City looks good. So do my roughs for chapter 2 of Absinthe.
And doing Rita proved that I can do Serious Comics by myself. That’s really powerful. Working alone, I can get kind words from folks with multiple major awards on their shelves. A lot of my creative intent with Rita was to do something more accessible than “furry porn”; I’m not quite sure I got that right what with it being such a byzantine storyline, but I’ve certainly stepped well outside the furry ghetto with it!
Right now, it looks like I’ll be drawing pages of Absinthe before I start on Drowning City; I still have some prep work left for the latter, while the former has full roughs that’re just one edit pass away from starting to draw. If you’d like to see those roughs, I just posted them to Patreon.
So I guess… things are getting back to normal, despite me still processing my mother’s death.
Protected: Absinthe chapter 2 roughs
Contemplating what makes a good comic convention.
I am sitting in a hotel room in San Jose, contemplating the con I came down here for after awakening from a dream of Cthulhoid entities draining many of the better characteristics from my friends in the furry scene.
APE was too big. I want to give it a little slack for just having moved from San Francisco to San Jose and needing to attract a local audience. But to be honest, it was too big last year. The number of people I saw passing by my booth never really approached feeling like a bustling con.
I want to contrast it to SPX, since that’s fresh in my memory and I did much better than I normally do – I sold out of my usual pile of Rita 1 on the first day, while not even selling a dozen copies of it over APE.
In terms of vendors, one thing I realized was super unusual about SPX was its tight focus. There was nobody with a wall of unlicensed prints of Marvel and DC characters. Nobody with a bunch of still images. Every single table had comics on it. In most comics shows I go to these days, there’s a dilution from “people selling comics” to “people selling art”. (And to “corporations promoting their movies” but we’ll stay away from that issue.) I was across from a couple of people selling prints of super flat, cute art. I saw one person at APE whose booth was filled entirely with drawings of corporate superheros crying, all drawn in the style of a FunkoPop figure, all in pretty much the same pose.
Seriously, their whole booth was this. There was also someone with a print wall of corporate characters as Minions. I wish I was making that up, but I am not.
That person also had several people in front of their booth when I passed by, so I guess that shit sells, but geez. That is like the Platonic ideal of an SDCC artist alley booth. What’s that doing at the “Alternative Press Expo”? It’s spreading the money thinner, and increasing the cultural footprint of stuff owned by Warners and Disney. I’d say maybe a quarter to two fifths of the booths at APE were selling prints, rather than comics, with a lot of them having no small amount of corporate stuff.
If APE was stripped down to about, oh, two-thirds of its size, by removing everyone not selling comics, with the same attendance, I think it’d be a much healthier show. Of course all the people who were disinvited by doing this would bitch a blue streak! But really I think it needs to be stripped down to about two-thirds of its size anyway to better distribute the amount of money its attendees are willing to spend.
(I am, of course, biased. There is a part of me that wants to go to every single person with a wall of prints and say WHERE IS YOUR COMIC WHAT IS ALL THIS OTHER CRAP. Especially when they are someone doing flat art; seriously I am pretty much the only person I have ever seen with a flat, no-lines sign who actually has a comic for sale instead of a lot of standalone drawings. I really want to go shake those people because I want to read more comics that make my eyes happy.)
Anyway. I didn’t make enough money at APE to even pay my hotel, much less my other expenses. I don’t think I’ll be back for a few years until I hear it’s got a much better ratio of attendees to booths.
(There are also rumors that Disney is going to start cracking down on people selling unlicensed Marvel stuff at the big cons, which might have an overall cascade effect on the entire comic convention scene. It’d be nice. But I’m not going to hold my breath.)
But let’s contemplate some numbers and see if they match my intuition: ~200 exhibitors at APE2015; no attendance numbers yet. The only numbers I can find is 6100 in 2013. Although interestingly enough, SPX2015 had about 200 exhibitors as well, and the only attendance numbers I can find are “over 3000” in 2012. I’m pretty sure they had more in 2015, the place was pretty damn full, but I wish I had some actual numbers to compare. Because holy shit SPX sure is doing something right and I would love to see more non-megacons doing the same thing.
(Actually I think it would be pretty interesting to see what happens if a medium-sized comic con made the explicit rule of “no megacorp character stuff”. If your table has that stuff you’ll be asked to take it down. If you’ve got nothing but you’ll be asked to leave, with no refund. Again, I have an obvious bias here, what with having all of two prints of corporate properties in my body of largely original work.)
My verdict on APE: show there if you can drive in and stay at a friend’s place.
the dream of my mother driving while dead
Well. That sure was a dream about my mother.
There was something about being in a remote wooded area with Jennie and playing some sort of game that involved breathplay. I was all, hey make sure there are scissors handy before I stick this noose on me, okay?
And then I was in a car with my mother driving around familiar parts of New Orleans. She was wearing one of the dark blue dresses I think she had for pretty much my entire life and used for slouching around the house. We talked some. And I was basically saying, I love you and I miss you, but you hanging around is just not helping me at all. I cried a lot. She was also really not driving very well; she was kind of worried when I pointed out that she was endangering me with all this bumping over curbs and nearly hitting phone poles and not paying attention to the other traffic.
And then we were on the Interstate and took a wrong turn and ended up jumping a ramp over the Superdome. I got to look down and see it passing below us. We stuck the landing, too. I do not know why the highways in dream New Orleans contain a ramp you can jump the Superdome with, but apparently they do. A moment after I was kind of annoyed we hadn’t had the sense to get out after landing and commemorate this rare occurrence with a photo.
Then I woke up, crying a lot.
I remember that not long after my father died, my mother told me she dreamed of riding a roller coaster with him. Somehow this puts me in mind of that.
Fuck mortality. I miss her.
Completion.
I just uploaded the remainder of Decrypting Rita to my site. On November 3, the last page will go online.
It will be four and a half years since I drew the first pages with no real idea of where the story was going beyond a vague idea that it might be cool to do something with multiple stories running on the page at once. Over the course of this comic, I have printed two books (and will be running the Kickstarter for the third soon). I have gone from doing tables in the artist’s alley at local cons to flying all over the country to break even at cons, and to getting together a group that holds down two corner booths at a megacon. I have acquired glowing quotes from one of my long-time idols and a couple of big names in modern SF. I lost my mother.
It’s been a long trip. I learnt a lot.
I wonder what I’ll learn during my next project.
I am not completely done with drawing the comic. I may do a second pass on the last chapter and add a few subtle things. I also need to fill in a few gaps in That Spread, either by getting art from friends who volunteered to do something, or by drawing something myself. But it’s finally done enough for me to post it.
I guess I’ll have something to tell the stuffed elephant on my bookshelf when I get home. Because that’s the closest thing to calling my mother with this news I have any more. And that makes me feel like all the hard work I’ve put into this project over the past few years doesn’t mean a damn thing. Have I said “fuck mortality” lately? Because fuck mortality.
I should go get some food. I’ve been sitting behind a convention table all day, with no food since breakfast.
bong
“Is that what I think it is?” asked my landlord, pointing to the bong that’s been sitting in my sink ever since the downstem broke while stuck inside of it.
Then we had a conversation about how Oregon just legalized it. No hassle at all. I love living in a legal state.
(He was here to check out the broken front window blind and the broken dishwasher. Both are gonna be replaced soon; the blind may be done while I’m at APE, which would be pretty rad.)