at long last, a beginning

Peggy
October 9, 2015

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

Peggy
October 7, 2015

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.

Peggy
October 5, 2015

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

Peggy
October 5, 2015

Contemplating what makes a good comic convention.

Peggy
October 5, 2015

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

Peggy
October 4, 2015

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.

Peggy
October 3, 2015

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

Peggy
October 1, 2015

“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.)

Rainfurrest 2015

Peggy
September 28, 2015

This year, I’d decided to take a break from furry cons. I wanted to see the shape of the hole they left behind, and decide if I wanted to keep coming. And I wanted to expand more into comic cons.

Well. The weekend before last, I realized a major part of what I was missing. The dances. I was at SPX’s dance, which was about half of one small function room in the hotel, and some people spinning pretty poppy stuff. The people DJing mostly just played songs rather than mixing and fooling around. There were probably never more than about two or three dozen people ever dancing at once in a fairly dark room.

And I thought of the dances I’ve been to at furry cons. And I felt profoundly spoiled. To me, the dance at a con should be an event. I’m used to huge dance floors that fill up a ballroom, full of a couple hundred people in outlandish costumes ranging from full fursuits to street clothes. And a lot of those fursuits are full of blinking lights and EL wire, plus people playing with all kinds of glow toys out on the edges. And DJs who can put together a really good mix on the fly of mostly electronic music that keeps the crowd bouncing, and lots of colored lights making things exciting. In short, I’m used to raves. And comic cons just don’t deliver that.

So despite having spent the last weekend behind a table selling stuff, despite still recovering from an exhausting five-hour flight home and a cold on top of that, I went to Rainfurrest.

Amara drove up from Portland and crashed at my place; we drove to the con on Friday and Saturday afternoon and came back around 3AM both nights. It was great. I showed up on a panel, and got to dance for something like five hours total. I probably would have danced more but by a couple hours into the Saturday dance, I was feeling really exhausted from both the dancing and from my body being busy dealing with the cold. So I spent a chunk of Saturday evening lounging on a chair outside the dance; a couple friends showed up, one of whom had had Too Much Weed and was “melting”. For a while she just kinda hid in the space between the chair I was in and the pillar I was next to; I was glad to give her the social shelter of my own general taciturness. People came and went; I think at the peak of that phase of the evening there were maybe ten people loosely clustered around me, talking, trading silly drawings, and generally being social and happy. It was pretty nice and I wish I’d had enough energy to be more social myself.

Sunday, Amara and I both opted to skip the con. I knew I was tired enough that I’d probably have a bad time if I went. She’d been thinking of hitting it, but didn’t want to stay too long. So we puttered around my place a bit. She showed me what she’s been doing with the dragon costume she’s slowly working on for me, and I showed her how easy it was to set up the sewable LEDs and sewable Arduino I’d picked up. She left with those in her bag, excited to work on the head and hopefully finish it in time for Halloween. I spent the rest of the day playing Bloodborne, experimenting with a new character that’s a strength/arcane build rather than the skill/bloodtinge I’ve almost finished the game with. I killed Father Gascione in a mere six or so attempts, and went on to the Blood-Starved Beast, which I couldn’t quite kill but was doing fairly well with in general.

Last night, I think my body finally cleared out the cold. I feel a ton better now. I got up and showered, and pondered LED stuff. Stuffed that into my bag and went out for some lunch, then realized I’d left the Arduino back on the desk. Oops. Had everything else ready to sit under a tree and play with programming some LEDs to have some basic patterns that I feel would fit well with a Peganthyrus outfit, but that was not to be. So I worked on That Page of Rita instead. Did one more panel. I have two more panels to do in that row, and a handful more left around the edges, plus the ones some friends said they’d do. I think once I’ve finished this row I may just post the damn thing and create some excitement about the comic for myself again, which will hopefully help me power through the last few bits. I’m really ready to be done with that story.

Anyway. The shadow of the tree I sat under to draw has moved enough that the sun’s in my eyes; I think it’s time to move on. Maybe go home and work on the LEDs.

stickers

Peggy
September 25, 2015

Recently, I decided to try an experiment. I bought a bunch of stickers from Moo. Just simple rectangular ones, with an assortment of my art on them (and my URL of course) – nothing fancy. My plan was to put them on my table at cons and sell them; I’d also give one or two away with every purchase, or to fans who already have everything I have on offer.

I bought 200 for about $66 with shipping. I just counted: I sold or gave away 77 of them at SPX. Mostly gave them away; I made like $20 off of them according to Square. That’s pretty good for something I’d mostly gotten for promotional purposes. I think I’ll be getting another shipment of a wider selection soon. Probably after APE and Geek Girl Con. Unless I completely run out at one of those.

In the long run I may even replace my business cards with these things. One for free to everyone, pay for more.

(And while I was running numbers, I added everything up for SPX. I’m about $300 in the red – but am pretty sure I’d be in the black if I hadn’t run out of stuff to sell by the end of the first day. Definitely applying for next year.)