Blógünder Schlock

I’ll be in Manchester, New Hampshire on October 7th, 8th, and 9th for Another Anime Con. I’ll have a table in Artist’s Alley, and probably some other events and panels to attend.

I will bring books to sell, Tagon pins, and everything I need to create the commissioned pieces you hunger for. Oh, and I’ll do sketches for free.

I will ALSO have a press-match of Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between, which will be available for pre-order beginning the 2nd week in October. We’re putting the finishing touches on the new store now.

(Note: look for an upcoming blog entry about the new store, and how you can help us beta-test it this coming week!)

Just a quick reminder (and maybe an alert, since the blog wasn’t working right for the first announcement): The charity auction of Sketch Edition #293 will close at around 5:25pm Eastern Time today.

What’s the charity? We’re trying to make a dent in Paul Taylor’s medical expenses. He and his wife just brought home their first child, born prematurely, after a month in intensive care.

While it hasn’t been called out specifically in the auction, if the winning bid is over $200 I will include a piece of original marker-art of my choosing. If it’s over $300 I’ll take suggestions from the winning bidder as to what I’m going to draw (within reason - the picture must fit on a comic-book-sized “backer board” to ensure that it fits in the package with the book.)

I’ll be checking with Paul to see how big of a dent has been made by the various fund-raisers. We may put something else up on the auction block later.

At Comic-Con in July my friend Jim Zubkavich told me that he was finally going to take the plunge and put Makeshift Miracle into print. His webcomic burst onto the scene four years ago garnering him “Best Newcomer” at the Cartoonist’s Choice awards, and was among the first titles to be picked up by Modern Tales.

Jim’s line art back then made me a little envious, but his coloring drove me particularly green. He did more with tinted monochromes than most folks do with a 16-bit palette. And now, four years later, he has taken the whole story and remastered it. Some panels have been re-drawn, others re-colored, and the entire work is available now in book form.

You can read the non-remastered stuff at makeshiftmiracle.com. You’ll want to own the book, though, and that can be accomplished via instructions found here.

Okay, there’s the light. Now for the dark. At WorldCon 64 in August I met this cool guy in the bar at the Hilton. We talked for a bit before discovering that we were both comics professionals — kind of unusual at a strictly Sci-Fi event. His name was David Lloyd, and he’s the guy who was originally tapped to write and illustrate V for Vendetta, and who later teamed up with Alan Moore.

He has a new book out, too. If you’re into crime noir, you may want to check out Kickback, the graphic novel compilation of Lloyd’s Dark Horse series of the same name. The art and the story are both gritty and gripping independently of each other. Taken together they nicely epitomize “crime noir” without being predictable.

I read it on a bright, sunny day while sitting on my back deck. I fear some of the effect may have been lost on me. It’s possible I need to wait for November’s rains, and read it again cloistered in my office with only the reading lamp on.

I’m back from Swarthmore, and the blog is back under the comic.

Hurray!

I’ll write more later. Right now I’m nursing a migraine (or rather, I’m attempting to kill a migraine while nursing my achin’ head.)

This Friday and Saturday, September 22nd and 23rd, I will be at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore Pennsylvania. Freeculture.org is hosting a lecture series, and a few of us who make our living by “giving our stuff away” are going to be there to talk about it.

If you can’t make the Friday evening lecture (which begins at 7:00pm in “Science Center 199 Cunniff Hall”), my position on the matter can be summed up in the phrase “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.”

If you CAN make the lecture, rest assured that copies of Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management and Tagon pins will be on-hand and for sale. I’ll also be able to whip out quick sketches (On scratch and in copies of books), and I may even try to find time for a paid commission or two.

You gotta hand it to those folks at Swarthmore, they know how to cover their bases — in case I‘m not enough of a draw, or insufficiently erudite for the university environment, they’ve also invited J.D. Frazier, Eric Burns, Wednesday White, Shaenon Garrity, and Rich Burlew.

There’ll be breakout sessions on Saturday from 1:00pm through about 6:00pm. I don’t have a schedule, but all events appear to be in rooms 183, 181, and 199 in the Science Center. I’ll be presenting “Business for Artsy Types” and maybe offering a discourse on the mechanics of a good punchline.

Sadly, there’s no time for me to do a comics shop appearance while I’m in the area. You’ll just have to screw up your courage and set foot on campus…

This Saturday, September 16th, I will be at The Dragon’s Keep in downtown Provo for their 19th Anniversary Celebration. They’ll have copies of Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management and Tagon pins on-hand, and I’ll be showing off some sneak peeks from the new book. You can get free sketches in your books or out of ‘em, and you might even be able to buy originals.

The best part… I’m not the only comic-creator who’ll be there. Guests also include Tyler Kirkham, Michael Todd, and Chad Hardin.

Next week I’ll be at Swarthmore college, and during the first and second week in October I’ll be at Another Anime Con in Manchester, New Hampshire and ApacheCon in Austin, TX.

The next book, Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between has been sent to the printer. I’m expecting a press match in about two weeks. Between now and then I’ll make some announcements about pre-orders. Watch this space.

This afternoon I finished the last three pieces of margin-art for Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between and sent them off to Steve Troop for placement in the book.

The last of the three pictures was an especially creepy picture of Jevee Ceeta that sheds just a little more light in the direction of the censored bits in her bio.

I feel pretty good. It’s almost like a huge weight is off my shoulders, except that I still have to send everything to the printer, spend a pile of money, and worry about things right up until I’ve got the finished product in my hands in November. But at least I don’t have to create any more content.

I guess that means tomorrow I can dive back into the buffer. Just because I have the best job in the world doesn’t mean it’s not hard work. Au contraire, it wouldn’t BE the best job in the world if it wasn’t difficult.

While that number might look like a date in the Schlock Mercenary universe, that isn’t why it’s important. That is the number of victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, five years ago.

But numbers lie to us, hiding real meaning. The loss of these individuals is an ache still felt worldwide. They were not numbers in life, and should not be numbers today.

The 2996 website seeks to honor the fallen as individuals, eulogizing and paying tribute with the help of over 3,000 volunteer bloggers — each of whom signed up to write about one of our lost.

From the site… “We will honor them by remembering their lives, and not by remembering their murderers.”

UPDATE: The original site exceeded its bandwidth and was turned off by ehostpros.com. A mirror can be found here. 

Last night I watched the premiere episode of Heroes, with the help of an iTunes promotion, and a friend who had an extra coupon.

It looks like it’s going to be a good series. It also looks like it is going to cover a lot of the same ground that has been covered in mainstream superhero comics over the last 50 years, only without the skin-tight costumes and fantasy-borne physiques.

It’s hard to avoid the re-tread. You have ordinary people who discover that they have extraordinary abilities. How do they react? How do the people around them react? Do they go out and buy tights and capes? Why or why not?

But since most of us have fantasized at least once about having super-powers of some sort, there’s good reason to go ahead and cover this ground again — especially if we can cover it with people who look and act more like real people. I, for one, think it would be great if a generation of dreamers could avoid getting their power-fantasies tangled up with pictures of mostly-naked Adonises and Venuses.

The premiere episode’s primary weakness lies in the sheer number of characters who must be introduced. It is quite the onslaught, but the writers and director have mitigated the problem by finding clever ways to link the characters together. We segue, for instance, from the japanese comic-book fan who has a purple godzilla for a desktop background at work, to the young son of the exotic dancer as he reads a comic book with that same purple-zilla image on the cover.

The only other thing that bugged me was the intro, in which an indian professor (to the right of the cheerleader in the photo above) lectures about the genome project, and how it seems as if tiny changes in human DNA are unlocking hidden potential in otherwise ordinary people. Hello, X-men. But it’s not the re-tread/ripoff here I dislike. No, I’m upset because by using science to explain the mechanism for “who becomes supernaturally endowed,” the series seems to think it can trick us into not asking questions like “how can a particular protein sequence result in anti-gravity as a natural ability?” Just because a lottery’s organizers have a system for announcing the number of the winning lottery ticket doesn’t mean they have the money to pay the winner.

If you can get past those two bits — the large ensemble cast (which by mid-season should be quite a strength to the series) and the pillorying of genetic science — you’ll probably enjoy the show. The characters are interesting, their problems are recognizable, and they come off fairly believable. The writing is compelling, and there were three very cool “reveals” towards the end of the 56-minute premiere. Each of them alone would have been sufficient to convince me to tune in next week.

Well, if I had cable, dish, or a TV antenna. I doubt I’ll be spending $3.00 a week to watch the series on iTunes. I’m cheap that way.

Sorry for the lack of updates here. I’ve been heads-down on the next Schlock book.

The good news is that we’re down to the last couple of editing passes. The bad news is that I’m still not happy with the cover art. Or maybe that’s good news, because it means I’ll be working on the cover until I AM happy with it, and that means you get a better-looking book.

We plan to have the books available for pre-order during October, and shipping by mid-November.