The streets around Comic-Con from high in the Convention Center. If that doesn't look like a good time to you, don't bother coming. I'm ambivalent. I do like the Muppety light-rail train. The whole city of San Diego gets into the spirit.
I've used the joke in that title before, but it's been a few years.
I'm home from Comic-Con in one piece. Interesting visit. The Con continues to evolve in just the decade I've been attending off and on, I can't even imagine what it's like for the old-timers. Probably sad. But I took my daughters along and had a terrific time despite not winning an Eisner Award for Best Digital/Web Comic.
Talking with Robin and Laura afterward, I realized that my favorite thing about Comic-Con is simply the people--seeing friends and maybe making a few new ones. I had at least brief conversations with Dave Roman and Raina Telgemeier, Richard and Wendy Pini, Scott McCloud, Dave Kellett, Tom Richmond, Otis Frampton, Calvin Reid, Rick Geary, Andrew Farago, Brent Anderson and his family, Chris Sparks, Tom Racine, Lucas Turnbloom, Ces Marciuliano, Karen Green, Stephan Pastis, Shena Wolf from GoComics.com. Abrams-related people Charlie and Rachel Kochman, Chad Beckerman, Eric Himmel, Chip Kidd. New people Katie Cook, Cece Bell (a real sweetheart), Becky Cloonan and Paul Tobin. I don't expect you to know who all those people are, but some of you will know some of them.
That's not a complete list, it's just off the top of my head. I only learned some friends were at Comic-Con after I'd left.
My girls and I agreed that the frustration of Comic-Con is that even if you're there you're missing it. There's too much going on, and the stuff that makes the news is inaccessible to most. For example, the cast of "Star Wars" was in the same building we were, but if we'd wanted to see them we'd have had to camp out overnight to get into the room. They might as well have been on Tatooine. We'd drag back to our hotel room after a day at Comic-Con and then check Facebook to find out what had happened at Comic-Con.
Here's some of what I saw. Links take you to people's websites and such.
In our hotel lobby even before we got to Comic-Con, I saw these two guys helping each other into their costumes. They're the Marvel superhero Daredevil (in red) and his arch-enemy Bullseye, but these guys were taping up each other's boots and tucking each others hair into their masks almost as if they weren't deadly foes. I knew I was in the right place.
I liked pretend Batman posing in front of real Batman. Except the pretend Batman was a real man and the real Batman was a fake man and then I blew my mind, man.
Had a nice chat with Dave Roman (Astronaut Academy, Teen Boat, Star Bunny) and bought a Star Bunny comic from him. His wife Raina Telgemeier (giant bestsellers Smile, Sisters, Drama) was elsewhere then but we caught up later.
With my friends Rachel and Charlie Kochman (my editor) at my publisher Abrams' booth. That's Abrams Creative Director Chad W. Beckerman lurking in the back. Chad took the lead in designing the paperback cover for Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow.
Galactus, devourer of worlds and aisle space.
My close personal friend Stan Lee, snapped faster than the "Sir! No Pictures!" cops surrounding him could shoo me off.
Friday afternoon with Tom Racine and Chris Sparks. Tom's "Tall Tales Radio" is the best comics podcast in the business (he's had me on a couple of times), and Tom hosts a "Drink and Draw" drop-in event for cartoonists to have a beer and draw funny pictures. Chris is the mastermind behind "Team Cul de Sac," which raises money for Parkinson's Disease. A few hours after this photo was shot, he also picked up Richard Thompson's well-deserved Eisner Award for The Complete Cul de Sac collection.
Still at the "Drink and Draw," Tom with Ces Marciuliano (left). Ces writes the "Sally Forth" comic strip and has put out a successful run of books about cats, poetry and pee. This photo was taken after I'd tried to take three others that all looked bad because one or the other was making an odd expression or stuffing something into his mouth. I said, "You two guys just cannot take a good picture!" and they did this and I snapped it.
Laura and Robin and me before the Eisner Awards. We clean up OK.
Then this happened.
Saturday was a new day.
While my girls slept in Saturday morning, I took a walk along the waterfront. At 8 a.m., two hours before the convention opened, I found a line at least a quarter mile long (literally!) of people waiting for a chance to buy Con-exclusive Legos. These people all got up before dawn. For Legos.
A little farther down the path I found all these Penguins from the TV series "Gotham" lined up and urging joggers and cyclists to go through for high-fives. Many did. It was silly and fun.
Same walk: stumbled across Andrew Farago from San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum and Chris Sparks getting a morning coffee. I joined them for a while. Later this day, Andrew was awarded the convention's Inkpot Award for services to comics above and beyond the call of duty. He deserved it (and was dumbfounded when he received it).
A hotel concierge in the spirit. Many of the hotel and restaurant staff around the city wore superhero t-shirts and such to support the cause. I think San Diego really loves Comic-Con (and the business it brings) in a way that other cities wouldn't or couldn't.
I knew Wendy and Richard Pini were doing an Elfquest booksigning at the Dark Horse booth at 11 o'clock, so I began circling the booth around 10:45 to catch them. My stalking paid off. In addition to just saying hi to two of the nicest and most accomplished people in comics, I had an important favor to ask of Richard. Someday I'll tell you about it, but he said "Yes."
Raina and Dave. She won an Eisner Award this year for Best Writer/Artist. In fact, it's sitting on the table right in front of her.
More of the madding crowd outside. There were a lot of religious protesters out trying to save souls this year. There were also counter-protesters professing their faith in Thor, as well as some pretend-protesters who looked like protesters but were just trying to drum up interest in new TV shows. Sometimes it was very hard to keep all the street theater straight.
This original art from pal Dave Kellett's comic strip "Sheldon" will soon grace my office wall.
Scott McCloud and his wife Ivy. I had a nice talk with Scott about the diversification of comics in terms of sex, age, and publishers represented in the Eisner Awards. Although as two middle-aged white guys we both admit to our self-interest in the old status quo, we're both happy to see work by new, young, often female creators get recognized over the same old Marvel and DC stuff that might have dominated in the past.
Ace caricaturist, MAD Magazine cartoonist, and swell fella Tom Richmond.
Rocketeers.
From the ABC-TV and Marvel television series "Agent Carter," circled in green are my close personal friends James D'Arcy (Jarvis) and Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter). This is as near as I could get because about 2000 of their other closest personal friends were between us.
Nickelodeon always puts up one of the most colorful, spectacular booths in the hall.
One of the things folks do at conventions is cosplayer gatherings, where people who dress in costumes with common themes--all from the same TV show, video game, or comics company--get together at a particular time for a group photo. These are people cosplaying as DC Comics characters . . .
. . . and these are people taking pictures of the people cosplaying as DC Comics characters.
The Abrams ComicArts panel, presenting Abrams' comics-related works for the coming year. Designer/writer/editor Chip Kidd is at the podium, with my editor Charlie Kochman, and Chad Beckerman giving me the stink-eye. They've got some genuinely great books coming up.
Before flying home Sunday, my girls and I toured the USS Midway Museum. The Midway is a decommissioned aircraft carrier that floats right where all the San Diego tourists can see it, and draws a million visitors per year. Friends and long-time readers may recall that my daughter Laura is on the staff of the USS Hornet Museum in Alameda. The Hornet is (in my opinion) an even more interesting and historic decommissioned aircraft carrier stuck in a hard-to-find place far from casual tourist traffic. We all wanted to see how the rich relations to the south ran their ship.
What I'm really saying is we were on an intelligence-gathering spy mission.
Lunch with Robin and Laura and a Coke. Coca-Cola's doing this thing now where they put names or cute words on their labels. Totally at random and against great odds, the Midway cafe's clerk handed me a Coke with my own name on it. Surely it was a sign. Of something. Haven't figured out what yet.
Selfie on the flight deck. Although I'm honor-bound to express nothing but contempt for the Midway (my loyalties remain with the Hornet), I've got to admit they put on a pretty good tour. Worth a stop if you're in the neighborhood.
This was a good and worthwhile trip for me. I talked to some folks, did some business, had some fun. As far as a pure comics convention goes, San Diego Comic-Con's not my favorite experience. But as a place where everyone in the business you'd want to see and talk to gets together once a year, it can't be beaten.
I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they're posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 19 (July 2).
Yeah, we really got that reaction from Mom's medical team. They couldn't believe her osteopath's incompetence. But we were making progress, zeroing in on a diagnosis and a plan.
I mentioned this a few months ago but will repeat it here: I was watching TV recently when I saw a face in a commercial that brought me to an abrupt stop. "Hey, I know her!" Given the commercial's subject matter, it only took me a moment to remember how.
That's her younger version caricatured in the comic above. She was a terrific doc then and it's good to see her still working hard and getting it done.
I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they're posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 18 (June 29).
From time to time, people ask if pages from Mom's Cancer are available as prints or posters. (No, sorry.) This is almost always the page they're interested in. We used this image for the cloth bags given to participants of the 2011 Graphic Medicine Conference in Chicago (with, as I recall, a kind donation from my publisher Abrams to help pay for the bags).
It depicts a long day at the hospital. The different colored backgrounds suggest that these exams are happening in a variety of times and places. Different tests, repeated tests, different docs and nurses. They also make a visually interesting checkerboard pattern.
The day and the page begin with recognizably drawn features: hands, feet, arms, legs. As the day goes on, the features become less concrete. Everything becomes an exhausting abstract mush. By the time Mom's given the final command to "feel," it's impossible for her to feel anything.
I'm surprised how strongly some people respond to this page. I think maybe I captured something many folks have felt but didn't quite know how to express.
My wife Karen had one birthday gift request for me: she wanted a hard copy of my webcomic "The Last Mechanical Monster." She'd only read it in installments online, and wanted to sit down and enjoy it all together. What she had in mind was a print-out of the pages, maybe slipped into a little binder or report cover.
I ran with it.
First I printed all the pages on good heavy paper, the type you'd use for a resume. I wanted to print on both sides without any bleed-through.
I cut, scored and folded a piece of thick matte board to be the guts of the cover.
First attempt at binding the pages. The pages are clamped in a homemade press to keep them lined up and tight. Many of the Internet bookbinding tutorials recommend using watered-down "Gorilla glue," which is meant for wood. Makes sense. The idea is that the glue soaks into the first quarter-inch of the pages and sticks them all together.
While that dried, I worked on the cover. I found a nice red cloth remnant, ironed it (can't remember the last time I used an iron), and spray-glued it to the folded matte board. Things I learned: using diluted Gorilla glue warps the matte but spray adhesive works great, it's best if the cloth isn't stretchy, and the cloth has to be thin so that you can glue it down flat to the back (i.e., the inside covers).
Flipped the cover over to glue down the fabric and apply the end papers, which are the light blue images of flying robots I used as a background for the webcomic.
That's about when I figured out that the glued spine probably wouldn't hold up long term. It was OK, but I could imagine pages popping out pretty easily. Initiated Plan B, which was to sew the pages together using the bookbinders' stitch. I was worried my drill press would tear up the pages when I drilled the holes, but it worked like a charm.
Next I glued the sewn pages into the cover, creating a little crimp along the spine so that the front and back covers would attach up to the sewing holes before bending out. Clamped and let that dry for a couple of days.
Last step: Drew a jaunty flying robot on the cover. Wrapped it up and gave it to Karen.
She sat right down and started reading the book last night, so I guess it's a success.
I know I didn't hew too closely to traditional bookbinding methods. A lot of this was "look at five things on the Internet and combine them into something that seems like it'll work." But I'm really happy with the result. It was fun! And it looks like a real book!
I could see getting addicted to a cool craft like this. I'm looking forward to trying it again sometime.
I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they're posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Pages 12 and 13 (June 8 and 11).
This image of Mom as the character in the "Operation" board game often gets a strong reaction. It tends to be one of people's favorites or least favorites.
Occasionally people who haven't read a comic since "Little Dot" in 1966 accuse me of "making fun of my mother's illness," which couldn't be further from the truth--but I think this might be the sort of drawing that leads them to believe that. It does combine the deadly serious with the absurd, which was one of the points of Mom's Cancer. So much of the situation was absurd!
I don't remember how I thought of using this iconography. I think I wanted to take a breath and summarize what Mom's condition was at this point. How to do that in a comic? You can't just list symptoms and treatments with words, you need a way to show them. Diagrams, x-rays? Somewhere in that train of thought, the board game came to me.
One thing I like about splitting the image into two pages is it naturally divides Mom's tumors, and therefore the treatments she received for them, between her head and her chest. Which is basically what happened: she had head doctors and chest doctors, and rarely did the twain meet.
In the first draft I posted online, I just drew the "Operation" character in its original style as a stand-in for Mom:
I never liked that solution--not least because I didn't want to get sued by Milton Bradley--but my problem was a simple one: I didn't want to draw my mother fat and naked! I don't know how long it took me to solve it by putting a medical dressing gown on her, but it was an embarrassingly long time.
I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they're posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 11 (June 4).
When I drew the picture of Mom modeling a swimsuit, I was relying on memories of photos I'd seen very briefly a long time before. Turns out my memory wasn't very good. Here are the actual pics of my Mom the model:
I could've sworn there was a beach ball.
What the heck, here are a couple more:
Beautiful! Classic Mid-Century Modern.
In case my asterisked footnote in the comic was too subtle, Mom worked as a model when she was 18 to 19. I was born shortly before she turned 20.
Having her papers and affairs in order was one of the best things Mom ever did for her family.
I'm annotating individual pages from my book Mom's Cancer as they're posted on GoComics.com. These are my notes on Page 10 (June 1).
The panel of Mom drowning in a sea of medical jargon is one of the first and strongest (in my opinion) visual metaphors in Mom's Cancer. There'll be more later. A friend compared trying to absorb all the information rushing at you when you're suddenly seriously ill to drinking water from a fire hose. The ability to use this type of image is one of the reasons I decided comics was the right medium for telling my family's story.
I think this is a good example of how a picture conveys more meaning than a thousand words could. You look at that and you instantly get it. I don't need to use the words "drowning," "overwhelmed," or "terrified" at all. It's a type of communication comics do uniquely well.
Looking at this page today raises a couple of craft notes. First, I see I used the typeface "Comic Sans" for the words. Sorry about that. Back when I made this page I don't think it had acquired its infamous disrepute.
Second, I wasn't yet comfortable with digital art tools. Pasting those words into the background behind my hand-drawn figures would've been a 10-second cinch in Photoshop. Instead, I printed out the words on paper, cut out the shapes of the figures with an Xacto knife, and rubber-cemented them to the original art! It looks OK in print but the original is a gluey mess. What a maroon!
One nice surprise of reprinting Mom's Cancer on GoComics.com has been watching a little community of readers and commenters build. Some have been or are going through similar ordeals themselves. An unexpected hitch is that some readers who (very reasonably) don't know the history of Mom's Cancer seem to be under the impression the story is happening now. They offer me and my family advice. I don't want to ruin the story's immediacy by telling them "No need, it happened 10 years ago," nor interrupt the conversations to constantly correct people, but I don't want to give the wrong impression either. There's a fine line there I haven't figured out how to walk yet.
An early sketch of the Inventor toting his box of old vacuum tubes to Lillian's repair shop.
I kept a notebook by my bed to capture ideas that came as I woke up. This was one.
Yesterday I posted the final page of my Last Mechanical Monster webcomic. I published two per week since November 2013 and am proud to say that in 170 pages I never missed a deadline.
However, I confess that the four-month backlog I began with evaporated to about two weeks' lead time at one point, until I fought back to being about a month ahead by the end. If I had advice for potential webcomic creators that'd be near the top: don't even start posting until you've got a big cushion built up, then don't let it slip away. One of the points of doing a webcomic is practicing professionalism. Pros hit deadlines.
I won't repeat what I wrote over at my webcomic's "Coda," which you can go read if you're interested. I will say that it's been an interesting, gratifying experience. The Last Mechanical Monster developed a nice little fan base that grew over time, as I'd hoped. A few noteworthy mentions on other sites brought surges of curious readers for a couple of days, some of whom seemed to stick around. Nothing spun the ol' visitor counter faster than a mention on Metafilter following the announcement of our Eisner Award nomination in April. Not even close. At times like that you really get a visceral, almost scary feel for the power of the Internet when roused from its slumber to focus its gaze on you.
It's like this.
The Last Mechanical Monster was a story I wanted to tell, struggled a few years figuring out how to tell (you may recall my tale about drawing 110 pages of it before deciding I didn't like that version and starting over from scratch), and then sat down and did it. Sitting down and doing it is where a lot of creative people get hung up, but there's no short cut or substitute. Ideas and good intentions are useless if you don't execute. One day you've got to turn a blank sheet of paper into Page 1. That's very hard to do!
It's been great. Meanwhile, I'm knee-deep in a new project I've never discussed publicly, but which my editor and I think would make a terrific book. More on that when appropriate. I've got one or two other potential projects lined up behind that one. There's also a possibility that The Last Mechanical Monster will be published in full color, but no contracts have been signed so that's all I can say about that. Too many ideas, not enough time.
Thanks to my Last Mechanical Monster readers. Thanks to two different panels of Eisner Award judges who thought it worth nominating for Best Digital Comic two years in a row. Thanks to the folks who reviewed, mentioned, or linked to my comic, it made a big difference. From my perspective the whole project couldn't have gone better, and I appreciate it.
Readers of Whatever Happen to the World of Tomorrow may recall that I began the book with the 1939 New York World's Fair, which (I argued) first presented a common vision of a technologically sophisticated future to millions of people. So Karen and I were shopping at an antiques store today when she asked, "What year was your fair?"
"1939," I replied.
"Oh . . . this has the pyramid and the sphere on it, but it says 1940."
"Hold on."
She'd found this beautiful plate from the fair highlighting the event's signature Trylon (tall pyramid) and Perisphere (sphere), and five of its great show buildings. Though the fair began in 1939 it ran until 1940. The plate's back has a sticker saying it was made to commemorate the 150th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration, which was one of the Fair's big themes.
Look at those colors! That Art Deco styling! It's a gem.
eBay tells me I got a really good deal on it. It'll go on my wall and always remind me of three things I love: the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, my graphic novel, and my sharp-eyed wife.
