Blógünder Schlock

Apparently more than a few of you liked the sixth panel of today’s comic.

I’ve created a page of desktop backgrounds featuring this image. Best of all, it’s free. Enjoy.

I’ve got a fat stack of original artwork waiting for the auction block. These are pieces that got used to fill the white-space in Under New Management and The Blackness Between. Sandra and I have been so busy lately we’ve been forgetting that some of you are interested in buying this stuff.

I can’t think of a better piece to auction today than the candid portrait of Jevee Ceeta that appears on page 78 of The Blackness Between. The auction is right here.

I say “candid portrait.” I’m pretty sure that if she knew somebody was taking her picture at the time, she’d have been just a little busier with that knife. So, Happy Hallowe’en. May your sleep be long, uninterrupted, and dreamless… like death, only shorter.

I get so busy I forget stuff. Lately the stuff I’ve been forgetting has been footnotes for certain strips.

So… over the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing some back-and-fill, dropping footnotes in the last few months of strips. Watch this space, because here’s where I’ll let you know where they’re showing up.

Dragons Keep in Provo, Utah will again be hosting the Schlock Mercenary fulfillment party and book launch.

Thursday, November 16th: Come help us pack books into mailers - pre-printed mailing labels, postage, and invoices will make this go pretty smoothly. The festivities start around 11am, and will continue until about 6:00pm. We’ll feed everybody who comes to help out.

Friday, November 17th: Lather, Rinse, Repeat. More books, more mailers, more preprinted stuff. And more food.

Saturday, November 18th: Come to The Keep and play! We’ll have games out, and this time the food isn’t just for those who help out. Throw down in a round of Frag, Munchkin, HorrorClix, or whatever else, and do so with a mouthful of free grub!

Naturally we will have copies of both Schlock Mercenary books available for purchase or pick-up, and yes, I’ll be whipping out free sketches. Even if you don’t buy a book, you can get a nice sketch from me.

Even if you can’t make it, you can still participate. Buy a book, and the party-goers* on Thursday and Friday will mail it to you!

*Note to party-goers for Thursday and Friday — please RSVP with Sandra sometime before the event.

Per my last entry, I wasn’t at Anime Banzai. Really, I wasn’t there. No table, no sketches, no merchandising… that’s what being “at” a convention is for me, so there I wasn’t.

I did bring my 11-year-old daughter to the event on Saturday, though. There were some “bored,” “tired,” and “uncomfortable around all these people” patches, but by the end of the show I couldn’t drag her away.

Before we get too far below the fold, here’s a picture of me wearing one of my new favorite “convention attendance” shirts. This one got dozens of compliments.

Credit goes to Shawn Handyside of Staccato Comics. I traded him a book for this shirt. Maybe he’ll sell ‘em on the web someday, and you too can look like a donuts-and-dice fanboy.

I’ll confess — I did do a little of my usual convention attendance shtick. There was a Webcomics panel, and while I intended to sit in on it quietly and see what was said, I can’t keep my mouth shut in that sort of setting for long. Ultimately it came out that I was a full-time cartoonist, and then the tone of the panel changed from “what are good ways to get hosting?” to “how do you make a living at this?” Blah, blah, blah, I talked a lot, and later apologized to the moderator for hijacking his event.

But back to the “dragged my daughter to a convention” train of thought: in the morning she wanted me to be with her wherever she was. By 3:00pm she was running around on her own. At 5:30 as I was leaving the dealer’s room (where I sat down for a podcast interview, I think it goes live in a week, I’ll post links when I’ve got ‘em) Security told me “your daughter said if we see you to tell you that she’s at Registration.” So I went to registration where they told me “she said to tell you she’s in Viewing Room One watching Naruto.”

Well, okay then. I arrived at Viewing Room one as it disgorged the 150 people who had been watching an Anime Music Video presentation. Kiki (the name I use for my daughter when I blog) was among the 25 or so people who were NOT disgorged. Apparently she grabbed a good seat right in the thick of a darkened, crowded theater so she could wait for Naruto to start.

*sigh*. Daddy’s little girl can take care of herself.

So I said hi, told her to stay put, and drove to Wendy’s to pick us up some dinner. Sure enough, nothing horrible had happened to her in the 20 minutes that she was completely alone and without backup at a 1000-attendee anime convention 50 miles from her home. Oh, and she was glad to have the food. She actually ate what I ordered for her instead of making a fuss.

I watched the last half of the Naruto feature (it’s the one with the Stone of Gelel and the giant fortress-on-tank-treads), and then Kiki made me stick around for Inuyasha: the Fourth Movie. My take on these — if I’d been renting them at home and watching them by myself they would have lost my interest. Sitting in a crowd of people who knew when to laugh and when to cheer made both features a lot more engaging. I guess that means that for all my efforts to grok anime, me still no grok.

So… there you have it. I wasn’t there at my tenth convention of the year, and you don’t have a convention report, complete with no pictures.

I was spotted at Anime Banzai in Salt Lake City last night. But I’m not there, really. I’m not doing sketches, I’m not doing panels, I don’t have a table, I’m not selling books or pins, and you’re not getting a convention report.

(Oooh, they’re running the “make and take” cat ears panel TWICE. Squeee!)

Security Guru Bruce Schneier linked to an Anders Sandberg blog post in which the topic is Warning Signs for Tomorrow.

Sandberg’s fourth paragraph, before he gets into creating some truly cool warning signs, references some ancient Schlock Mercenary strips.

Well… okay. I’m at once flattered and pleased to learn that Sandberg reads the strip, but I’m also forced to admit that the signs Sandberg went on to create are much, much better than my own. (I may be forced to borrow them…) I take heart in the assumption that he is speculating in deadly earnest, where I was just trying to make a few quick jokes.

And now, commentary:

Sanders remarks that the “ghostbusters” symbol on the wall seems a little out of place given Kevyn’s rationality. While this interpretation is supportable, if you take the sign to mean “there is no such thing as a ghost” as opposed to “no ghosts allowed” then it fits just fine. Then again, maybe Kevyn has the sign posted because it makes him giggle. I’m pretty sure it made me giggle at the time.

Sanders commented on the DNA spiral I used, saying:

The DNA helix suggests some alternative to the (IMHO great) biohazard symbol, or that it was too hard to draw. Maybe it is about threats to the genome.

Rest assured, Anders, even back in 2000 I was able to draw a biohazard symbol. That’s not to say I don’t make compromises in the artwork from time to time (read “every day”). It’s just that the DNA helix wasn’t one of them. I’m thinking that “threats to the genome” is a better interpretation. Not that I have any idea what Kevyn was working with that he needed that particular sign.

Perhaps he picked it up at an Umbrella Corporation asset liquidation.

Books are still orderable and pre-orderable at store.schlockmercenary.com. You may have seen the non-subtle ads now running in the Schlock archives (along with equally non-subtle ads for Schlock shirts from Warehouse 23). Since we are fast approaching that time of year, I decided to post this handy reference to let you know when you need to buy stuff in order to have it arrive in time for that most commercialized of holy days, Christmas.

International/Intercontinental Shipments
November 29th is the latest you can ship with Global Priority Mail and have it arrive on time.

U.S. and Canada
December 11th is the latest you can ship USPS First Class, or Global Priority to Canada, or anything to APO/FPO addresses.
December 16th is the latest you can use USPS Priority Mail.
December 17th is the latest for 2-day shipping
December 19th is the latest for Next Day shipping, but to be on the safe side you’d probably better not wait until then.

If you’re pre-ordering The Blackness Between, your order will go out in plenty of time for Christmas arrival, unless you’re shipping it “Media Mail.” I’m not knocking Media Mail — I just know that when there’s a glut of Media Mail at any USPS distribution center, it goes out AFTER everything else has been taken care of. This means that while you’ll PROBABLY be okay, I wouldn’t put it past the USPS to delay things. Think of Media Mail as the Postal Service telling you “it goes with the First Class stuff, unless we get really busy.”

Now, if you’re scheduling delivery of Christmas presents from the Schlock Bookstore, there’s something else you need to know. We’re taking a week off for Thanksgiving, and that week of vacation falls immediately after the shipment of pre-orders. Unless you want wait until the last week in November, you ought to pre-order Schlocky-Booky Christmas presents sometime before November 8th.

Often retailers will run ads in which they make all sorts of absurd, sensationalistic claims about how important it is for you to BUY NOW. Well… as much as I’d love for you to do exactly that (BUY NOW!), mostly I just want you to know that it’s only important if you’re counting on delivery in time for the Christmas holiday, and even then it’s not a show-stopper. Hopefully I’ve been neither absurd nor sensationalistic.

The twenty-four hour window for pre-ordering numbered Sketch Editions is now closed. If for some reason you missed it… how did that happen? I thought I did I pretty good job of announcing when we were doing this.

Regardless, it is closed now. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your patronage and support. I don’t yet have a final count on how many sketch editions were purchased, but I’ll come up with one later today.

And speaking of “later,” pre-orders will remain open for regular, unsketched books until November 8th. All pre-orders will be signed, and all patrons will get immediate access to the exclusive desktop backgrounds I’ve created using the cover art.

(note: the wallpaper URL is at the bottom of the receipt that shows in your browser. It’s just text, so you have to actually read your receipt to see it.)

Head on over to store.schlockmercenary.com. Shopping there will keep the schlock coming uninterrupted through the dark winter months, and into spring of 2007 when we hope to have yet another book ready for you.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that pre-orders are open now for Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between.

You also know that sketch editions are limited only by the 24-hour period in which we’re letting you order them. As of this writing, two thirds of that period has expired, and you have but eight hours left.

Of course, by the time you read this post, you will likely have less time still. If you want me to draw on the mostly blank 100th page of your book alongside a number that says “I paid extra for this,” hurry to store.schlockmercenary.com RIGHT NOW.

I’ll update the blog when time runs out.

So far over 600 people have ordered numbered sketch editions. Their financial acumen and artistic patronage rivals that of the Medici family of Renaissance Italy, to whom they are either related, or dead-set on displacing. And for just $25 (plus shipping and handling) you can join their noble ranks.

(I should write marketing materials for the Franklin Mint. Of course, I’d feel dirty using these kinds of words to hawk somebody ELSE’s schlock… )