Blógünder Schlock

Two things:

First, you can find great write-ups on some of the panels I sat on at fleen.com. Gary Tyrell practically transcribed Webcomics 103: Making Money. Here’s Part One and Part Two. Other Blank Label Comic cartoonists can be heard from in the transcriptions of Webcomics 102, and Webcomics 101. Oh, and the Blank Label Comics panel got mentioned in his Friday Recap.

Second, the Melonpool Quickcast that played as an introduction to the Blank Label Comics panel is now available here on YouTube. Yours truly appears in the flesh, delivering scatological humor with aplomb. The last five seconds appear to have been truncated, but that’s okay since the giant robot didn’t really say anything funny the second time around.

I’ve been meaning to plug the excellent RPG work of Robert J. Defendi for, like, EVER. I keep meaning to, and then keep not doing it. I played a demo back in February, and I blogged it, but then I posted an auction and it slipped below the fold.

Well, his d20-compatible game “Echoes of Heaven” just got reviewed by Andrew Branstad of RPG Now, and he really liked it. The review is here.

Upshot… Bob, who is a Writers of the Future winner, doesn’t bother thinking small. The setting and campaigns take the idea of a war in heaven and make it playable, in heaven and on the ground. Branstad gave it four out of five stars. Having played the demo, I recommend it to you.

I know, I know… not all of you are looking for an RPG to play.That’s fine. Mostly I’d just like to congratulate my friend Bob “Mountain of Love” Defendi on his first staff review — a glowing one at that. If you ARE looking for something new to play, you can find all Bob’s stuff at Final Redoubt Press.

There are a few cool things I’d like to link you to in the aftermath of Comic-Con International 2006. First and foremost, a huge plug goes out to my friends at Udon Studios. I knew they were behind the Street Fighter comic books, and the new Exalted comic books, but I didn’t realize they had a fan site with exclusive merchandise.

Not only are the Udon folks fantastic artists (their creative services team does contract work for DC, Marvel, and numerous RPG projects), they’re also good people who are fun to hang around. If you’ve never looked over their stuff before, now’s the time to check ‘em out.

Next, there’s an auction up — the Blank Label Comics 2006 San Diego Comic-Jam, pencilled, inked, and signed by seven of the nine BLC cartoonists. This is truly a one-of-a-kind item, because we don’t get together all that often.

The Blank Label Comics booth was right next door to Billy West and Hatchling Studios. Mr. West is the voice behind Fry, Farnsworth, and Zoidberg in Futurama, and told us he’ll be going back into the studio for Season Five sometime this next week. He also voiced a very amusing little animated short for Hatchling called “Endurance Challenge: Mordred’s Isle.” If you like RPGs, and think Reality Television needs a good send-up, check out the short for free at the link above.

Finally: during one of my panels I promised a link to the survey tool I used back in 2005. It’s called Perseus Survey Solutions Express, and unfortunately they’re no longer accepting new user registrations. The good news is that Robert Khoo’s suggestion, “Survey Monkey,” is still around for your free-of-charge usage. The free offering doesn’t scale past 100 responses, but the professional subscription is only $20 per month, which beats the Perseus pricing hands-down.

One final note: As evidenced by my return to the blogundering, I made it back from San Diego safely. Thank you for your concern. You can call off the search parties. Oh, and I took the liberty of razing that desert town with the mutant, inbred, flesh-eating psychopaths. Passage through the Mojave is now safe for all. Just be sure to bring water.

So the Blank Label Comics team is sitting in a restaurant with Eisner Award-winner Scott Kurtz, and the appetizers show up. Kurtz and Willis have pot-stickers in front of them, and the rest of us are just shooting the bull eating our plates of nothing patiently.

Willis looks down at his last potsticker like it’s a dead mouse or something, and Kellet says something along the lines of “if you’re not going to eat that potsticker, just say so.”

Willis: “What’s a potsticker?”

Kellet: “That thing in front of you.”

Willis: “But Scott and I ordered the lobster.”

And now the hilarity ensues. Willis didn’t order potstickers at all. Straub did. And Straub sat there very patiently, very non-confrontationally, and watched Willis eat his entire order of appetizers while wondering why the lobster came packaged as if it were a sausage-stuffed asian pastry.

I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that hard at a friend’s expense. Willis not only didn’t know what lobster was like (excusable) but didn’t know how to tell the difference between lobster and potstickers.

He told me I could post this. Hopefully he’ll post something about it too. Social gaffes like these must be exorcised, lest you find yourself dreaming that you’re at the mall naked without your homework, and you’ve just eaten all your friend’s food.

The convention today? Meh. It was another day of hard work. I met some new fans and friends, ate cheap food at great expense, and then tore down and packed up our booth with the help of some of the finest people this industry has to offer.

I think I grossed almost half a month’s pay, which probably means that I netted about a week’s pay. It took a little more than a week to do it, so your garden-variety bean-counter would call it a wash. There’s no substitute for being at this event, though. I’m glad I came.

I’ll be glad to get home tomorrow. I’ve got a twelve hour drive ahead of me, and I can hardly wait to get started. First, however, sleep…

Today was the busiest day of Comic-Con, as well as the day of the super-secret Blank Label Comics 2007 Planning Meeting.

You don’t want to hear about our 8am meeting, because if I told you I’d have to kill you.

Mostly I worked the booth. There’s not much to tell. I drew numerous free sketches, and did a few colored commissions as well. One fellow couldn’t make it to the Con himself, and sent his friends with instructions for me to draw “Schlock vs. Petey.”

Here’s what he got.

It took about half an hour (I think… time is so oddly compressed at these events), and it cost just $30. Yes, folks, it’s true. You can buy my time for a dollar a minute if you catch me at a convention.

Oh, there was this panel thingy, too. I talked cold, hard numbers with a crowd of business-minded fans, along with business-savvy folks like Robert Khoo of Penny Arcade and Scott Kurtz of PvP.

Speaking of cold, hard numbers, food here is expensive. I dropped $20 on lunch (appetizer, dessert, and soda) and another $20 on dinner (cheap fajitas and coconut-contaminated horchata), and I count myself lucky. Besides, I ate the cheap fajitas with a few of my Blank Label Comics friends, and we had a riotous time there in the Greasy El Spoono (yes, I’ve forgotten the restaurant’s real name.) David Kellett is hilarious, and Kris Straub, Brad Guigar, and David Willis are not a whit behind him. We laughed, laughed, and laughed some more.

Tomorrow is the final day. It’s a slower day, but it gets frantic there at the end, with people trying to unload merchandise at huge discounts because they don’t want to have to ship anything home. I can sympathize, but I don’t think I’ll be scrambling to slash prices on anything. I’ve only got about 30 books left at the convention, and even if I sell none of them, that’s not too many for me to haul out on my back.

If you’re in town, stop by early lest I run out of books. And now, to bed with me…

Finally, Paul Taylor and Brad Guigar have arrived!

I was running late this morning, but I got to the show in time to help the guys get our booth up and running, which was just in time for us to abandon it and head off to our panel.

Paul and Brad were waiting for us there. Apparently they got off the trolley, and headed straight up to room 1A.

The panel was a lot of fun. We had a good discussion on why “webcomics” is a silly word — it definitively describes nothing. We are not webcartoonists. We are cartoonists, and the web is just one of the tools we use to present our work to the public. We happen to be “independent cartoonists,” which nicely differentiates us from other web-enabled strips like Dilbert or Get Fuzzy, but ultimately we’re all cartoonists.

We’re all also in this picture… (except for Greg Dean and Paul Southworth — those two couldn’t make it to Comic-Con this year.)

I had a good time in the booth defacing books for people and selling Tagon pins. Also, all of those who pre-ordered originals have picked them up, save one person only. As of about 3pm today, I think I broke even. Tomorrow’s sales are all gravy, baby.

(This is your cue: If you are in town, and planning to come to the convention on Saturday or Sunday, buy a book and a pin from me. My children like to have a little gravy before bedtime.)

I spent a little time just before the show closed watching the Keenspot panel, but I had to step out early because I missed a call from Sandra. Afterwards, Jennie Breeden (one of the three lady Keenspotters on the panel) pulled me aside and said “all the women on the panel were sad to see you go.” I have no idea what that means, but I don’t think there’s any possible way I can be insulted.

“That Howard… it’s a shame he didn’t stick around. There aren’t enough short, bald, dumpy guys in loud shirts here to prop up our handsome companions through negative comparison.”

I went to dinner at an Irish pub with the Blank Label Comics team, and recalled something somebody from the UK said earlier that day: “Everybody in America seems to think they’re Irish — at least on St. Patrick’s Day.” Indeed, the pub-folk were cheering the Irish punk band very enthusiastically, yelling Irish things like “Och!” and “me Lucky Charms.”

I have it on good authority that some of them may have been drunk.

Now that I think about it, maybe it wasn’t a punk band at all. There was a guitarist, a violinist, and the pink-haired girl in the tartan halter-top was playing an accordion.

All told, a great day. It’s hard to believe there are two more days to go.

Thursday is the first full day of Comic-Con International. The show opened at 10am, and we were ready. Throngs of people descended upon the exhibitors, and the multitudes committed commerce in multitudinous manners.

Some of the bought stuff from us at Booth 1330.

And you know what? That pretty much sums up the day. I sat, sold, sketched, and took a couple of breaks for a good 9 hours straight.

I drew this for $25.00.

After the show closed, I hung out for dinner with T. Campbell, David Willis, and several people from the Supercollider team, including Rob Balder, and Pete Abrams. We had Indian food, and I went off-roading on the menu. I had a 15-out-of-10-stars curry, which supposedly means it was half again as hot as what they tell people they can make. Meh. It was hot, sure, but I stopped eating only because I was full. Had my head been pouring sweat, we’d have known there was some real fire in the pot.

(It’s probably a good thing it wasn’t as hot as I can physically take, because I’m happier knowing there won’t be fire in the chamber pot tomorrow.)

The convention began in earnest today. And I only have one complaint: the lady who does the announcements over the PA is an absolute harridan. She is capable of being nice and announcerly, but when things aren’t going her way, she will yell into the microphone.

I’m considering having her vocal cords stolen by organ-leggers.

I was at the booth all day, except for a lunch break. I sold a lot of books, sold a lot of pins, drew a few pictures, and watched the costumed people parade past for photos with Billy West (the voice of Fry, Zap, Zoidberg and others on Futurama). Billy is pretty wacky and zany even without encouragement from costumed fans, and he’s right next door to us, so we’re getting quite the show.

I’ll post more photos when I’ve got more time. Right now I’m late…

Here’s a quick photo of the BLC booth, 5 minutes after the mean lady on the PA system told all the attendees to scram. Yes, that’s Dave Kellett, expounding something or another to a rapt attendee. David Willis is seated, wearing an orange shirt that cleverly matches our booth. Kris Straub, a veritable dynamo of hucksterism, takes a much needed break and glazes over while wondering what I’m about to do with my camera.

The first day of Comic-Con is “Preview Night,” which is really just a half-day that starts late. This year the doors opened at 5:30pm, and the fans swarmed the floor until 9:00pm.

But that’s not where MY day began. No, I started with breakfast in an italian diner a couple of blocks from the hotel, followed by a quick circus-trick with my car. I drove Jim Zubkavich to the convention center, dropped him off with three of my bags, and then waited.

Actually, there was no place to wait, so I drove around in circles until Jim called me. He grabbed a bag of his stuff from the Udon booth, and I picked him up and we drove back to the hotel. Aaand then we walked back to the convention center. It is a ten-block walk, and we both decided it wouldn’t be worth it to carry a bunch of junk that far when I had access to an actual automobile, like a true modern human.

Later I got to repay the favor, helping Jim and Erik unload a bunch more Udon stuff while maybe double-parked (I’m not sure if they were double-parked or not — that’s why we hurried).

I got the Blank Label Comics booth all draped out in orange, and it looked really good. A little later the rest of the team showed up, and we got the shelving up, a schedule put together, and all the rest of the booth accessories in place.

During this entire time the A/C was not on in the convention center. After we got the booth set up, I took another 10-block walk so I could shower and change clothes. If butts could have armpits, that’s what my whole body smelled like after sweating like a butt-armpit for six hours getting stuff ready.

Another 10-block walk back to the convention center, smelling like roses rather than imaginary body parts, and I was ready for the show.

We got swamped with fans — Dave Kellet was whipping out Sheldon sketches at high speed, David Willis sold original strips and cool shirts, Kris Straub was hocking CDs of original music (when did he find time for THAT project?), and I autographed books and cranked out a couple of commissions. We were busy pretty much non-stop until five minutes before 9pm.

It starts again tomorrow at 10:00am. I’ll be ready.