I’m going through the unshipped orders in my online store and packing the ones I can actually ship.

Which is to say, I’m packing one Tarot deck. Because every other order involved a copy of Rita book 2, which is still at the printers. That should be getting shipped later this week, so I’ll finally have a timeline on fulfilling all these other orders, and the Kickstarter stuff!

I also poked my publisher about getting another lot of my deck again, and signed the contract to print the second edition of Rita 1, so my store should actually be, you know. Open. In a month or two.

Man I am gonna be so damn happy when I get to the point where I can seduce someone else into handling this end of things.

Today I spent a lot of time wrestling with the Kindle Comics Creator, trying to pour Rita into a format that could be sold on the world’s largest bookstore. It was a lengthy process, full of terrible image overcompression, bloated output files, manual twiddling of command-line programs, and annoyance.

This was the best I managed. At that point I’d been fucking with it for about three hours; I threw up my hands and went to sprawl in the living room and read some of the stuff I got at Emerald City Comic-Con.

These are a couple of books by my animation school buddy Gabe, collecting stories from his strip/series Life In The Analog Age. It’s about growing up as a nerdy kid in the seventies.

When I was done with that, I’d destressed from all that swearing at the computer I’d done earlier. And I finally got off my butt and threw book 1 of Rita into Comixology Submit, as well as checked out how it looks on ComicsFix, a new online comics retailer I’ve been invited to be on.

I am pretty sure I will feel like I “didn’t get anything done” when I look back on today, but honestly? I got some stuff done. It’s just that it wasn’t drawing the next page of Rita. And I might get some of that done tonight while at SICAGA, too.

I dunno. Still a bit cranky and out of sorts. Well, going outside and having some beer and socialization will probably help a lot.

Oh yeah. I can feel my body getting back into shape. Having the chin-up bar over the bathroom door has been great; after doing a few attempts every day for a month or so I can now actually get myself off the ground more than once when I try. Many casual repetitions and not giving a fuck when I fail is a good thing. And off course there’s pole class. I just finished the once-a-week intro class, and now I’m starting to hit the drop-in classes twice a week, which is going to definitely DO SOMETHING to my body. I will be perpetually aching a little bit for the next few months, but I will welcome it because it’s the kind of aching that says I’m becoming more flexible and stronger.

And I will be especially glad when all this work means that I can put on a skin-tight light-up dragon costume and dance all night every night at this year’s Rainfurrest.

After about a decade of using “Lackwit gadabout. Unnaturally-colored hair. Draws.” as my short bio around the web, I now pretty much completely own a Google search for this term.

I should just go all the way someday, buy “lackwitgadabout.com” and point it to my server. I’m pretty proud of this utterly meaningless achievement I didn’t even know I was striving for.

(I always said I got the term from a sample on an Orbital track – ‘Are We Here?’ on ‘Snivilisation’ – but upon checking it turns out the dialogue in question has an old man talking about a “disgusting, long-haired, work shy, dirty lay-about who ought to be in the bloody army!”. I suppose I got the term out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel instead or somesuch. Either that or the world has altered around me just to annoy me. Again. Occam’s Razor suggests that I’m probably just misremembering though. At any rate, I have always thought that living the sort of life to have an old man say that about you is the RIGHT THING and I heartily recommend it if you can manage it.)

I keep on coming back to these two panels from McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Especially that footnote.

I’ve got the respect of a small group of my peers, and some of that small group have shiny shiny awards on their mantlepieces. And I got financially lucky. I don’t fear the footnote as much as I used to. But it’s still there in the back of my head.

And I just realized I’m seven or eight years older than Scott was when he drew this.

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.

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.