this is ja.lj

Oly was the exact opposite of Emerald City. Instead of a big, frenetic room soaked in howling 60Hz florescents, we got a nice, intimate nightclub with big windows and mostly natural light. It was very chill and I had more opportunities to visit with readers and fans than I usually do.

On the way down, I thought, "hey, I'm going to Olympia, I wonder if I'll run into Jackson Tegu from story-games.com?" And blam, there he was, on stage as the bass half of a drum-and-bass duo that did a short set to start off the con. Very sophisticated, and a nice touch. Had a good visit with Jackson after the set and sent him away with some goodies.

Aside from Mr. Tegu, the highlight of the show was meeting Terrence Nowicki, a fiercely goddamn talented political cartoonist -- he's sharp, funny, and his line art is badass. ( Check his stuff out )

There are more Nowicki cartoons at MCT Campus Syndicate.

My own sales were bigger than I anticipated -- 33 CGs and 7 Greeters, which is not bad at all for a $14 table. I don't know how many attendees there were, but I'd put it somewhere between 100 and 200, including exhibitors.

I wore the Maiden t-shirt from Monday's show and made at least a couple sales when people came over to talk to me about it. Lesson: dress in something that will start conversations.

Thanks to Chelsea and her team for a great show -- I'll definitely drop by again next year.

First, I'm horrendously indebted to Ron Chan, Paul Tobin, and Colleen Coover for squeezing me into Fort Periscope and then listening to my pull my own string over and over and over and over again. Thanks guys! I registered today for ECCC 2009 so I won't have to do the embarrassing couchsurfing thing next year.

Greeter sales were 46, exactly the same as at Stumptown. CG sales fell, though, to 174. The positive spin is that it's nice to see the relative share of Greeter rising as I figure out how to sell it. I sealed at least five G sales with a new pitch line: "It's like if Harry Potter were making minimum wage."

I met a few folks who'd purchased G's in the past from me and were keen to see the G3 continuance, so that's awesome. I also had one all-table sale. It was a good one, too. The guy was browsing all my offerings very slowly, and this normally indicates that I've got a nonbuying reader on my hands. Just as I was about to quote my price list at him—that's my usual move-along prompt—he asked softly, "How much for everything?"

Also had a goddamn near-stampede when three guys who'd picked up Restrooms and Matrimony at ECCC2007 heard the corner of my pitch and rushed over to grab up the rest of the set. That was unbelievable. It was like Altamont, though nobody died. LESSON: I'm starting to get a reputation, so a big, flashy, prominent presence will really help to move product. I had no flaming loo this time out, due to the space crunch.

Starwatching: sold a Matrimony and a Pirates to Gigi Edgley at the very end. I gladly would've comped her, but that didn't come through the usual vocal paralysis I get when I try to tell a Farscape actor how much I loved their show. When she had a bit of trouble locating the final dollar for me, and I was struggling to tell her that she didn't need to pay, her handler immediately swooped in and donated one. Nice perk, that.

Didn't see JMS, Jamie Bamber, Wil Wheaton, or any of the other celebs around. Bummer; I wanted to show JMS how I totally ripped the G3 cliffhanger from a Babylon 5 episode.

I did see synabetic and I yelled "STEVEN SAUNDERS" at him in my best theater voice, but he was being squired around by geekmachine and her sweetie (whose LJ handle I am not certain of) and he did not hear. Steve, I've got product for you! Send me your snail address and I'll set you up!

Moneywise, the ECCC gross was about 70% of the Stumptown gross. Since there were 4x as many people at ECCC than at Stumptown, this needs to be thought about:

1) The competition for the fan dollar was super intense. There are huge names at the show, limited edition prints, sketches to be had, stacks and stacks of collectable toys.... Especially early on Saturday, people were unwilling to commit money before seeing everything. I gave at least 100 business cards to people who were shortlisting stuff on a first pass through the floor.

2) spanambula and I were working the same table. Typically I get my own space and he sets up with Periscope, and we double our footprint. This time we were both in with the Scopers. At a con where we couldn't possibly pitch to everyone, a double presence would've helped immensely.

3) ECCC has a much less indie crowd, more a Spiderman and Batman kind of crowd. People were there to see their faves, not shop for new things from weird locals. Especially early on Saturday, the congoers would racewalk down the aisles with their eyes fixed at the level of the name placards that the con had taped to the front of the tables, looking for famous folks. Lesson: put funny jokes down there.

4) The limited frontage of my Saturday table made it difficult for folks to browse, so I couldn't pitch to as many people as I usually do. Plus, normally I lay all my CGs out flat so people can look at them without picking them up. Some people are reluctant to pick stuff up at a con; that's a tiny step towards committing to buy it. Having browsables out is a great way to get people over that hump. Only problem is that browsables consume an enormous amount of table space.

I had a full table for my stuff on Sunday and sales increased slightly from Saturday even though the Sunday crowd was at most half of the Saturday one. LESSON: register early, goddammit. Which I did today.

By APE, if all goes as planned, my browsables will overwhelm my space, so I'm going to have to build something that'll display browsables above the table -- there was a guy behind us with a very nice PVC pipe framework and curtains that turned his table into a puppet theater. Maybe I'll put something together like that for APE. Jumbo-size laminated CG gags and selected Greeter panels that fit together like a trailer might be the way to go there, with some kind of arcade-game marquee directly overhead. Maybe 12V xmas tree lights too. Call it the Comfort Cathedral or something.

So the spring con season is pretty much over. I'll be down in Olympia next month for the Oly comics fest, but I don't have to reprint or do anything new for that show, so it'll be very chill. I need a tiny vacation from comics. Not a long one, tho -- the G4 script needs to be finished, and from the sound of it I'll have three new projects debuting at APE -- G4, plus another Comfort Guide, plus a minicomic that spanambula and I have been talking about for awhile.

Speaking of artists -- thanks so much to spanambula, porkshanks and Kat the Greeter Artist for working on my stuff. I really really really love selling comics at conventions, and without you guys none of this would've happened at all.

264 CGs sold. Zombies was most popular, with 77. Office, surprisingly, was the runner-up with 61, beating out Pirates at 59. My unscientific observation is that people responded more to the office bit in the pitch than the zombie or pirate bit -- people might (finally) be tiring of pirates and zombies. I got the sense that some folks tuned me out as soon as they heard me say the Z word. I ended with straight-weird-straight in my pitch -- "we've got dos n' donts for office workers, pirates, weddings, zombies, restroom users, and the holidays."

46 Greeters sold. Final pitch: "This is my regular comic, it's like Dune in a Wal-Mart, the company breeds the ultimate employee and she turns on them and leads a revolution. It's a retail revenge fantasy." I got a huge bump on Sunday after tacking on the revenge fantasy bit. Disaffected retail workers go with indie comics like shells with peanuts.

Three big / neatest stories from the show:

a) First Greeter sale was to a guy who told me that his grandmother invented the greeter job as a work project for disabled folks. "To Tricia, thanks for inventing my comic!" I signed her copies.

b) I got invited to pitch stories to a really interesting webisode series. Very intriguing proposal. Shouldn't say more because these things are always very fragile, and I've never even written for TV anyway. But yeah, intriguing.

c) Late in the day on Sunday, I met some intense and cool folks who were really really interested in my stuff -- way more curious than your normal purchaser. They'd already CGed up at spanambula's table, but they also dug the Greeter pitch and shelled out for the set of those from me. Then they got into the questions, about what my role in the work was, and I explained that I was just the writer and publisher, they said "oh, you guys work as a team, that's fine!" as if I hadn't just disqualified myself from something.

I finally worked out that they were editors who were scouting for illustrators for their honest-to-God Real Bigass Fiction Publishing House That You've Heard Of, and they were totally taken with the CG art.

Book editors???? At my table? I tried to be cool as I totally busted out my 2005-vintage elevator pitch for The World of Deeds. ("It's Treasure Island meets Heart of Darkness!") That didn't seem to rock their world, tho I should follow up in email, because maybe Greeter did. But my long-term idea about backdooring into the book biz suddenly seemed.... feasible.

Onward to Emerald City.

After last week's marathon to make G3 perfect in every evil little picky pre-press detail, ( I got real interested in Photoshop automation, and I thought I'd share: )

holy crap. G3 has been uploaded to the valiant printing subcontractor.

( obligatory panel )

...

what do normal people do to pass the time, exactly?

A little bit of relettering, a little bit of proofing, a little bit of proof-fixing, and we go to press on Thursday night.

( no way )

Way.

And just because of a throwaway line I dropped in the script for the first page, Kat put an Iron Maiden logo on Tim's shirt in about FORTY PANELS. I am humbled by her photoshop badassitude; doing a wrinkly distortion like that over and over and over again would have driven me to the crack pipe.

This making comics thing is like building an airplane. There are many many tiny details to be mastered, because any of them can seriously embarrass you.

This is how I track them all for Greeter. (Warning: that is possibly the most boring link in the universe, but I'm in a sharing mood, so here you go.) And those are just the assembly details -- what we have to do after all the art and lettering and so forth are done so that our printer will print us something that's not shredder bait.

The previous wiki node is a lot fatter than it was before last night, due to the latest inevitable last-minute crisis. This crisis requires a quick backgrounder to understand fully:

When you're making stuff that will be printed and then cut to some custom size, you're not supposed to put any really meaningful content -- like lettering -- near the edge of the page. This is because you can't tell exactly where the paper will get cut and you don't want to lose anything critical. The exact size of this paper DMZ differs from printer to printer, but I laid everything out assuming we'd need about 1/4" of it.

Alas, our printer appears to have little confidence in the precision of their equipment* and they have changed their layout recommendations. They now ask for a monstrous 3/4" of DMZ on the vertical edges and 5/16" on the horizontal edges. This, I discovered last night. What this means is that any lettering that's close to the edge has to be at least shuffled or at most rewritten to fit into the new smaller area. So last night I had to start relettering everything that was close to the edge. Gah. This is gonna push us out at least a day.
Making Stumptown with G3 will need some luck and some hustle and no more surprises.

I have often posted here about how nice it is to work on creator-owned stuff. I have to admit, though, that here at Greeter HQ we are focused on more than glorious revolution and establishment-smashing.

We have to play in the marketplace too. We compete with every comic out there. We don't want to be some niche thing that only ten weird people read. This means that we must selectively embrace the conventions of the genre.

In comics, that means skin.

I want to assure our readers that we looked deep inside ourselves before committing to this path and that we hope that they don't feel like we've betrayed their trust. But regardless of how that little inner conversation shakes out, the fact remains that Greeter #3 will have not one but two nude scenes.

The first takes its cue from Eastern Promises. ( Here, our dashing Alien Store Captain is letting his Viggo Mortensen fly while improvising his way out of a situation that's gone a bit... pear-shaped. )

Fact One: I grew up in a place without showtunes. My only exposure to Broadway was via Mad Magazine's showtune parodies. I loved 'em. I can still remember the first verse of My Favorite Thugs.

Dum-dum DeCarlo, who comes from Miami,
Wally the Weasel and Light-Fingered Sammy,
Perry the Pusher who's crazy from drugs--
The are a few of my favorite thugs!

Fact Two: The wonderful, marvelous, lovely thing about being creator-owned is that you answer only to your own tastes and impulses, and not to those of some checkbook-wielding megalomaniac.

Fact Three: The not-so-great thing about being creator-owned is that sometimes your impulses are ... questionable.

( The awful cumulation of all of these facts -- 391K jpg )

Thanks, people, for being my zombie guinea pigs. I liked how that gag sounded when I wrote it down, but I wasn't sure if Kiss and Michael Jackson were still relevant, so I needed some discriminating eyes on it. And yes, Devo would be an awesome zombie dance band.

Also, thanks very kindly to cool artist spanambula for rushing me the gag so I could test-market it.

Tonight I did some more Comfort Guide / Greeter crossover work -- we need something to put on our G3 inside back cover and we don't get enough mail yet to warrant a letter column (tho we're getting there!) So, I figured, why not ( advertise? )

Got some good Greeter work saved off this weekend.

My goal was to finish all the screen art for G3 -- there are a lot of computer screens in the thing, and we don't want them to be blank. Since I am not the fastest Illustrator user in the world, I decided that all the screens on P22 were getting the same art. On P22, the store is having a bit of a conniption fit as it deals with a problem that is not in its standard operating manual. Hopefully this repetition evokes computer system panic rather than creative team laziness.

But despite that bit of laziness, the screen art was still crazy painstaking work. It was like something Mr. Miyagi would have made the Karate Kid do, if the Karate Kid needed to learn Illustrator to be bully-proof.

( Here is the seemingly-modest sum total of my Saturday output: )

The scene: I have been bashing on Illustrator for the last thirty minutes, trying to solve a complicated (to me anyway) pattern distort problem.

johnzo: aha! isolation mode is very helpful here.
kat: illio jedi
johnzo: naw, the jedi always have the option of whipping out their lightsabers and carving up whatever's frustrating them.
kat: but that would be the dark side
kat: jedi mind tricks fool silly adobe programs into complying
kat: you will lay the pattern flat
kat: i will lay the pattern flat
kat: you are not interested in making millions of meaningless paths
kat: i am not interested in making millions of meaningless paths

Okay, back in the letterin' saddle, but first a little blogging.

One of the tragedies of this job is that sometimes you have to cover up very beautiful artwork.

( Like, for instance on this page: )

Kat really knocked that page out of the park. One of our goals for Greeter is to make it a repeat pleasure, to bury lots of neat little details in it that will keep people coming back. This Kindersleyized cubicle panel is very true to that.

Unfortunately, I had previously written a *ton* of words for the cubicle panel. (the scripting is handled before the artwork.) On this page, the Store Manager is about to make an apology, and he is not the kind of person who can come at that directly. He needs to preamble, to edge into it. He needs to set the stage. So I cut down the SM's dialog pretty ruthlessly. I think his speech is better now--more efficient, while still a bit ambling:

( And I managed to leave most of the tent cube intact, so win there! )

I don't get to caucus because I am not one of you.

What I get instead is a weekend at home with Adobe Illustrator. Aside from a short break to watch Hockey Night in Canada tonight, I am not leaving my chair until G3 is fully SFXed.

( And progress is being made! )

Never mind all my earlier carping; SFXing tonight was fun, in a cozy working-in-the-home-office kinda way.

I had homemade curry, a warm dog at my feet, J. Geils on the iTunes, and the ( luckiest swimming pool in America. )

(For those who don't know, in comics, SFX are the big splashy BIFF POW BLAM words that stand in for sound.)

I hate doing SFX.

It is so much easier to write and place dialog. The words come one after another, as God intended, and are arranged in straight lines with a round shape enclosing them and a little tail pointing at the speaker's mouth.

For SFX you have some choices to make. You've got a godzillion typefaces multiplied by all the combinations of all the effects that Adobe can think up, multiplied by colour and placement and many other goddamn things. There are too many options. It's like Ron Paul is president of my MacBook and his freedom is paralyzing me.

Next issue, I'm doing all the SFX on a nice vintage Blickensderfer.

Greeter 3: Empress of Customer Service
Page 16, panel 2:



(please excuse the red and green lines--those are part of our page template.)

Midge had her first post-surgery appointment today. The pressure in her good eye is under control with medication, so that's very good news. We still haven't gotten the lab reports back from her histology -- those may point to the original cause of all this -- so there are still developments to come. Thanks again so much to all the people who've given us love n' support.

In other news, I've finished the G3 script and Kat has approved it. It's a full 24 pages this time, and it's absolutely crammed with stuff. There are flamethrowers, aliens, prophecy, rebellion, hubris, romance, a musical number, and (in a first for us) a nude scene. Here's a taste:

PAGE 8, PANEL 3
We're in telepathic hallucination land now, so this panel must be dressed up somehow to represent that. If there were a tie-in between this panel's boundaries and the boundaries of the telepathic “voice” balloons, that would be sweet. In the panel itself, Lacey, dressed eee-vil--think of a leather version of the Wicked Stepmother from Snow White--sits atop an iron throne that looks like it's been constructed of stilled lightning bolts. The only other forms in the panel are the shadowy figures who grovel and simper around her throne. When drawing these, think of those sad plaster casts of Pompeii, the people trying in vain to shield themselves from Vesuvius's rain of fire. Heavy metal!
SNOOT (telepathic): She will remake the company in her own image.
SNOOT (telepathic): We will not be immune to this remaking.

I'm in a weird place between creative obligations right now. What shall we do, to fill the empty spaces?

Greeter 2: Descent to the Depths of the Hyperstore is now available for your workday enjoyment.

Wait for your boss to be distracted, and then go for it.

(For getting-up-to-speed purposes, Greeters 0 and 1 are also available at www.greetercomics.com.)