Blógünder Schlock

Free Comic Book Day at Dragons Keep is always fun, and this year we had a great ensemble of talent. Chad, Mandy, Kevin, JJ, Dave and I had a good time talking, sketching, and committing commerce. Spider-Man himself dropped by for a bit (he even signed a few comics as “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man”).

My only complaint… Smart Howard never even checked into the building. I did a bunch of sketches, but didn’t have the brain space to tackle anything complex. Chad, meanwhile, knocked down some GORGEOUS sketch cards, inked AND colored. It was pretty humbling.

A couple of interesting merchandise ideas reared their heads. The most amusing: Schlock cross-stitch patterns. They’d be cheap as nothing to print, but kind of a pain to design. Question: would YOU pay $10 for a nice cross-stitch pattern (you stitch it yourself) of one of the SHoHEPirates Rules with an illustration?

Following the event, Kevin Wasden, Chad Hardin and I went out to eat, and I ate too much. Good friends, good conversation, good sushi, good times…

This Saturday is the Seventh Annual Free Comic Book Day, and I’ll be at Dragons Keep in Provo, UT with several other creators including my good friends Dave Stanworth and Kevin Wasden. Also there: Chad Hardin, Mandy McMurray, and JJ Harrison.

I’ll have a stack of paper in front of me, and will cheerfully whip out free sketches of Schlock characters (read: “easy stuff.”) I’ll also be sketching in the backs of your Schlock books — we’ll have plenty of Tubs, Unders, and Blacknesses on hand — the books won’t be free, but the sketches will be.

You might be able to talk me into doing something more complex, including perhaps a light-weight commission in color, but you’ll probably need to wave some money under my nose to get the really good stuff. Oh, and as long as you’re waving money around, I shall make sure the store has plenty of Rule 1 T-shirts, and I’ll even bring some Rule 37 posters and Tagon Logo pins along for good measure.

I’ll have the Bonus Story from The Teraport Wars in black-and-white line art available for perusal… if you’re inclined to spoil things for yourself by reading it months ahead of when the book will actually be available.

(Not in Utah this weekend. I understand. So very few of us are… Maybe NEXT weekend you’ll be in Arizona, because I’ll be at Leprecon!)

I skipped out on Penguicon this year (it’s my favorite out-of-state convention), and it’s probably a good thing. All of Tuesday night was spent making trips to the bathroom to shout at the porcelain, and while this sort of thing usually kills a day or two, I was still running a fever and losing precious sleep Friday night, and stumbling around all achey like a zombie on a no-brains diet on Saturday.

Penguiconners, I missed you this weekend, and for this you should be thankful. Whatever I’ve got, you don’t want.

I colored two pages of Bonus Story before falling ill, and then, in spite of the illin’ an’ chillin’, I actually managed to bang out a week of comics on Friday and Saturday. They’ll probably need touch-ups when Smart Howard checks back in for work Monday, but most of the heavy lifting is done.

I know, I know… the buffer is supposed to give me time off for sickness, but with book deadlines crushing me, and conventions coming in May (Hello, Leprecon!) I really don’t want to lose a week just because the new entrees from Panda Express thought so much of themselves they demanded I taste them twice.

When I called my friend Bob Defendi to let him know I couldn’t join his game Wednesday night, I told him I probably wouldn’t be eating at Panda for a looong time to come. “The taste of chinese food on the way back up is one of those memories that just won’t let go,” I said. Bob told me that would be a great first line for a book. It made me laugh, but laughing still hurt a lot.

Sorry for the huge quantities of “Too Much Information.” I’m sure you’ll agree (to complete the song lyric in the title of this post,) “these are the things we can do without.”

I’m in Toronto at Ad Astra, and you are probably not. But you’d LIKE to be, right? Here’s your chance to “meet” me and actually interact with me.

“Crazy Kyla” has a BlogTV.com channel at http://www.blogtv.com/People/Crazy_Kyla, and she’s interviewing Ad Astra guests. On Saturday at 12:00 noon Eastern time, I’ll be on camera live. If you log in, you can ask questions of the interviewers, and I can respond on camera.

Life in the 21st Century… so cool! We haven’t had a breakthrough like this since radio stations installed telephones and started prank-calling on the air.

Seriously, I have NO idea how well this is going to be pulled off. I suspect there may be an atmosphere of amateurism, but I’m going to give it a shot, and we’re going to have fun.

A little over three years ago my friend Richard Bliss saved my life, or at the very least saved Schlock Mercenary. He provided me with some contract cartooning for a deep-pocketed corporate client, and that was when “GWAVAMan” was born.

For GWAVA, Inc. this black-and-green muscleman stood for their flagship product, the GroupWise Anti-Virus Agent. For me he represented the finest in mercenary traditions — getting paid, and living to spend it. Today, three years after the final issues of GWAVAMan aired, there is a seven-foot-tall GWAVAMan mascot walking around at Novell Brainshare in Salt Lake City.

Naturally, I have to be there.

Richard is blogging the details over at gwbliss.blogspot.com, and I’m going up at around 5:00pm to shoot an interview and get my picture taken with my creation. I’m told the interview will air at 6:30pm Mountain Daylight Time on GWAVA TV.

I’ve been looking high and low for my GWAVAMan t-shirt, but can’t find it. This saddens me. What if, unauthenticated by attire, he false-postives me as spam and hucks me out of the convention?

Hopefully if it goes down that way the cameras will be rolling.

Today is the Tub of Happiness Launch Party at Dragons Keep in downtown Provo. The store opens at 10am, and festivities will begin around noon. Food and drink is free! We’re having DK Pizza delivered all day, and there will be other assorted snacks and goodies on-hand.

Sandra will be there too, for those of you wishing to meet the woman behind the timely delivery of your books.

I’ll have all my pens and markers with me, I’ve got comic boards for free sketches, and I may have the time to knock out a few commissions. Those who know my current figmentia may seek to bribe a commission out of me with metal from the shelves at the Keep.

You can pick up your Tub of Happiness and get it signed and sketched (no charge for that service!), or you can just hang out and play games. I’m bringing my Trollblood army, and we’ll likely have several other board games and card games out and available, including my personal favorites: Munchkin, Frag, and Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Dragons Keep is located at 260 North University Avenue in Provo, a block north of the construction project, and on the same (east) side of the road. The phone number is 801-373-3482, and there are some sales on if you feel like doing shopping for your favorite tabletop gamer.

There’s parking in back, but be warned! It’s been raining and snowing, so there are some very cold, deep puddles back there.

There are two key elements to a successful book-mailing: smart help, and solid organization. Neither can pull the operation alone. In my last post I mentioned the great volunteers we had, so it’s only fair that I begin this post with a picture of the work that Sandra stressed over for the last month — the organization.

These two file boxes contain every one of the 2000-or-so invoices, as well as pages upon pages of printed mailing labels and pre-printed postage. It has all been sorted into blocks like “Media Mail, One Book, Sketched, Petey” (which had around 100 invoices in it.)

Sandra’s job was to pull out a block of invoices, labels, and stamps, and put it in front of a group of people who could assemble it all.

Left to right Eric, Jason, Julie, and Timothy are one such group. Eric, Julie, and Timothy are boxing invoices with the correct books, and then affixing the correct mailing label. Jason is affixing the postage.

But they’re not the only ones at work. In this shot you can see almost three-quarters of the operation… RJ, Timothy, Jason, Tyler, Julie, Ty, Matt, Kim, and Sandra are all motoring through their assigned tasks.

Kim is running books to the folks working up at the front of the store, Sandra is supervising and running blocks of invoices, labels, and postage. And Matt… well, you can just make out the box-cutter in his right hand. His job is to break down our empty boxes and keep them out from underfoot. We moved fast, and kept him surprisingly busy.

That monstrous pile of books I sat among in this blog post literally melted under the combined effort.

The mail-man showed up at around 1:00pm. We completely loaded his van with tubs, and then got back to work.

In the afternoon it got a little more tedious as the media mail gave way to the international orders. Here each team had to break up a bit and work solo, because every order was unique.

Here’s Mike assembling international orders… this is one of my favorite pictures. Look at the concentration on Mike’s face, and contrast it with the wall full of possible distractions (incidentally — if you’re coming to the party on Saturday, Mike will be there playing Warmachine with Timothy starting at around noon, and they’re trading armies for the day. It should be a good show.)

Here’s Tyler, Ty, and RJ, similarly focused, though in the back of the store there are fewer distractions.

That, of course, is why my drawing table is back here instead of out front.

We kept filling tubs until there were only five or six empty tubs left in the store, out of a starting number of almost seventy. This stack to the right eventually wrapped around both corners of that wall, and when the mailman came back with the big truck he STILL couldn’t fit it all in.

In this picture you can almost make out what sort of a tall beverage Eric is getting ready to tear into. Is it one of those twenty-ounce energy-drinks? Is Eric a “Rock Star” or is he a “Monster?”

I had to go back to the full-resolution, pre-crop image to make it out. It’s a bottle of water. Eric James Stone is a writer, and yet somehow he manages to fuel himself without using carbonation, trendy asian herbs, or methylxanthine alkaloids in his drinks. Even more amazing, Eric was among the very first to arrive, and spent almost eight hours furiously packaging your orders.

Speaking of fuel… I provided food for this event. By the time the pictures here were taken the morning and midday bagels were long gone. The “handling” fragment of the “shipping and handling” charge adds up over 2,000 orders, so it was pretty easy to do right by the volunteers at the end of the workday.

Dragons Keep’s owners bought a pizza place up the road this summer, making it both convenient and economical to provide three of DK Pizza’s twenty-six-inch “Colossal” pizzas.

Left to right that’s ham and pineapple, chicken-bacon-alfredo, and BBQ chicken-bacon-pepperoni completely covering the table that RJ, Ty, and Tyler had been working at. These three pies looked imposing, but with close to twenty hungry shipper-and-handlers tearing into them they lasted maybe fifteen minutes. The BBQ went first, but the consensus seemed to be that the alfredo chicken had a more interesting flavor. I think that means that the alfredo fans were more discerning and less gluttonous than us BBQ aficionados.

The volunteers also each went home with a numbered 11″x14″ poster version of the penultimate page of the book. Once we’ve taken care of postering our volunteers we’ll put the remainders up on dutch auction. That way you can see what they got, and they can see what it was worth.

We had a very, very successful mailing day. Every book that needs to be mailed out has been packaged, and 75% of them are in the mail. Of the remaining 25%, most of those are ready to go, but had to wait because there wasn’t room in the USPS truck for them today. They’ll go out at 1pm tomorrow. The remainder still need postage printed on them, but will also go out at 1pm.

In short, we accomplished in one day what we worried would take three, and earnestly hoped would only take two. This is thanks to a fantastic team of volunteers: Timothy, Eric, Julie, Melissa, Chad, Dave, Mike, RJ, Matt, Jason, Ty, Tyler, Scott, and the Driggs made for a brilliant crew.

All these books have been signed and/or sketched by the poor, tired sod sitting amidst them.

There is an entire room full of shipping materials that we’ll be using to package these up and send them out to their rightful owners.

I counted books and did the math… this is right around two tons of… STUFF that has to be carried off by the postman.

We’ve printed over $10,000 in postage in the last couple of weeks. We have had to lift temporary suspensions on our credit cards at least three times during this process. Apparently both VISA and Discover get nervous when you start draining your available credit into your printer at the rate of $250 per page.

Timothy, Robby, Dave, Boyd, and several other folks have been hugely helpful during the last week, moving boxes, and shifting books around while I stand in the middle and sign or sketch. Without them this process would have taken at least twice this long.

But the queue of volunteers-I’m-indebted-to really shapes up starting Thursday morning at 10am, when we start the boxing and mailing.

Saturday is the launch party at Dragons Keep. Hopefully all these boxes are gone by then…

Saturday’s figpainting class was fun, and was the usual mixed-bag. There were a few regulars for whom I demonstrated technique (I started and finished the miniature pictured here — “Princess Penelope” from the 1997 Ral Partha release of legendary Larry Elmore’s Snarfquest), and offered pointers.

There was a child who needed something to do, and mostly wanted to pour paint in puddles and then make a cardboard-brown mixture to be applied to the brown cardboard tabletop. And there was that most rare of gifts, the newbie prodigy.

Her name was Jeanette. Her Significant Other is often at the Keep playing Magic, and she is often left to entertain herself sorting his cards. She took to painting like an owl takes to hunting mice by moonlight… the poor miniature never saw it coming, and after a very productive session she had “Weird Pete” from the Knights of the Dinner Table series painted up just right.

It was hugely rewarding for me. Jeanette would ask what the next step was, and I’d explain it. She would then say “I can’t do that! It’s so tiny! You’ve got to be kidding!”

Then she would hunch over and do it, tiny, with no kidding whatsoever.

Then she would squeal with delight when she pulled back to look at her work. “I did it!.”

I don’t have pictures of what she worked on, but I’m guessing she’ll paint quite a few miniatures in the weeks and months to come. She also may start dipping into her honey’s Magic Card budget in order to fund her new hobby. The poor guy is going to have to start playing Warmachine…