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HIGHWAY 62 REVISITED available for your kindle devices now. Click to view at Amazon.

Culled from the last ten years (or more: there’s a surprise piece from 1993 in there, but I won’t tell you where) of blogging on comics and horror and music, HIGHWAY 62 REVISITED is a titanic (almost 1200 pages) tome of pop culture dissection and celebration, all from my unique (arguably warped) perspective. It also makes the perfect companion volume to THE COLLECTED FULL BLEED, the compilation of comics-related writing that I did between 2003-2008.

This volume features an introduction by friend Ken Lowery, he of LIKE A VIRUS and THE VARIANTS (oh and RINGWOOD RAGEFUCK if you’re old enough to remember such dalliances.) He pegs me pretty good in the introduction, though it’s not what you’d expect at all.

It’s available for the low price of three bucks. That’s less than you’ll pay for a new comic book and I guarantee it’ll take you at least fifty times as long to read. So if you’ve enjoyed anything that I’ve written in the last forever since I started blogging, might I humbly ask that you give it a try? And if you find yourself in a state of enjoyment due to its reading, please leave a review indicating such at the Amazon page in question. Thanks.

This is a gigantic collection of not only my writing on comics (both the reading and making) but horror film and fiction and thought, as well as all of my collected convention reports for the years 2004-2012 or so (haven’t been to any shows this year). Additionally, it collects all of my Conversation: Fear columns from the lamented DARK, BUT SHINING. Additionally additionally, there’s several short stories and some other assorted fiction.

I hope to have this out by the end of the month, if not significantly before. Kindle and related platforms. Printing this thing would break the bank. No, really, it tips more than 800 single-spaced pages.

I wrote a lot of stuff for free, it turns out.

“the land devours those living” by Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein

Keep in mind this isn’t the cover art, but it will be in this vein. Which is fine by me. I was pointed towards her work via Twitter, which is how things get done these days, apparently. The atmosphere she creates is a pretty perfect match for the stories, so I’m very excited to have come across her work.

I’ve labelled DUSTBEARER as fantasy, but there’s some horror there, and hopefully something a lot more than the sort of standard wizards and elves and that sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong. I grew up reading fantasy alongside sci-fi and comics and all that. As a genre it gets something of a bad rap, but a lot of things, primarily the LORD OF THE RINGS and THE HOBBIT movies and the GAME OF THRONES books have changed the expectation levels. Which is fine by me, just don’t expect my work to simply ape those. And between you and me, I want to take what works in superhero comics and graft some of that into the stories (yeah, I can’t do the visuals, I get that, but I can push some boundaries other places.)

Right now there’s going to be the story collection. Have a novel more or less planned out. Now I just need to figure out if I’m going to write it next or not.

In other news, I’m going to be putting out a book called BLUE HIGHWAY. I joke that it’s sci-fi/noir/magical realism, but it’s not that much of a joke. And the artist I’ve asked to do the cover is a hum-dinger, let me tell you. More on that as the time approaches. Perhaps a May release, but I can’t guarantee it. It’s a toss-up whether I work on the sequel to this one or do the first DUSTBEARER novel first. Oh yeah, the sequel would be called THE LEVIATHAN BANKS.

Additionally, I’m putting the final touches on the second collection of my non-fiction/commentary/convention reports. Tentatively titled HIGHWAY 62 REVISITED, but I might go with FULLY BLED instead. I expect that to be out in the next couple of weeks as well.

Now if any of you fine folks wants to talk to me about publishing these works, I’m all ears.

Right. I thought not.

So yeah, new year. New stuff going. No central warehouse to put it in.

If you’re following my various work and have missed something, here’s where it all goes.

http://highway62.tumblr.com – Tumblr blog, about half original content and half reblogs of intriguing detritus.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxwellm – Flickr site where photos are posted on occasion.

http://theroswellincident.bandcamp.com – Bandcamp home of The Roswell Incident, where you can listen to the latest release from the band, entitled HIGH ORBITAL

http://tinyurl.com/mattmaxwellauthor – Which takes you to my Amazon page, where I can talk up the books I’ve got my name signed to (which don’t sell as well as the ones I’ve worked on but don’t have my name signed to them.

http://twitter.com/highway_62 – Twitter, where I spend too much time and energy. @highway_62 to follow.

I’m on Facebook, but trailing that down. Email really works better. So does Twitter.

Current projects

The One I Can’t Talk About – Don’t ask. Not my personal work anyways.

BLUE HIGHWAY – Revision of the 1991 manuscript. Science fiction. Got a lot of predictions right, many very, very wrong. Wasn’t necessarily trying to prefigure the world anyways, and the things I got right I’m wishing I hadn’t. Anyways, should be out in the next few months on Kindle. Will update

The Roswell Incident is working on a couple of compilation tracks and trying to figure out how to afford one of the new Moog keyboards once they come out this year.

EDIT – The whole of this story will be available in a future collection of short stories. Once the third one gets written and the second gets re-written. Might be by the end of the year, but don’t hold your breath.

MOONFLOWER
By Matt Maxwell

Oh yeah you bet this got nuked. It’s going into the DUSTBEARER collection, so no, I’m not giving it away anymore.

Mentioned this new project of mine over the weekend via Tumblr. If you’re interested, you can see the research stuff I’m beginning to accumulate for it there: tag-king of all the dead. As you might’ve guessed, it is a straight-up zombie story. Just because I’m constantly disappointed by the lazy zombie offerings in film and fiction doesn’t mean I’ve given up on them as a device/trope/existential puppet.

NYC 1980. Nothing but death.

Hope to have the plot shaped up shortly, written in the early part of next year. Will be published to your favorite reading device if Amazon doesn’t stop mucking around with DRM, anyways.

Excerpts will probably be posted online, but not the whole thing unless someone wants to pay me for it. Yeah, I didn’t think so, either.

This is something that I’m never asked. And it turns out to be its own explanation.

I’ve left up the first chapters of both the books, MURDER MOON and THE THIRSTY. That’s more than enough to decide if you want to spend money on them. Putting out the whole thing online might have been a strategy that seemed to make sense at one time. But that time is past now. Perhaps it’s a winning strategy for sites that are delivering self-contained daily content. Particularly those that are merchandising out based on said content. Then the daily strip becomes the ad for the real moneymaker: T-shirts or whatever.

I should have figured that out a long time ago, but I’m dense and stubborn and woefully optimistic. It’s not a strategy that works for everything, and I should have recognized it. I’m not in the business of selling T-shirts or prints or resin statues or what have you. This is not to denigrate that business. It’s fine and I sometimes buy from said businesses. Just that I’m not running one of them.

I write comic books that I publish myself. Giving them away isn’t something that makes sense.

There was a time that I thought that the big comics blogs would be falling all over themselves to partner up with comics creators to make that kind of content and maybe even pay for it. Well, the truth of it is that everyone like free content, assuming it gets them some hits. But it’s not anything they’re really interested in promoting or paying for, not what it takes to make it work. My guess is that the people who drive those sites, their main audiences, only want to read about the comics that they already read. Confirmation bias writ real big. Co-evolution.

Oh that’s right. Co-evolution ain’t happening. The big blogs just reflect what’s going on. It’s not like that reflection has any impact on what they write up or gin up hits around. Hey, everyone needs hits to make their brand more valuable. That’s not a slam, unless it’s an exclusive strategy.

So yeah, feel free to read up the first chapters any old time you want.

One of the things on the list will be pairing up with a digital publisher. Looking into that now. When I’m not working on those other projects. More on those in a bit.

Originally posted in 2010. I don’t even say anything mean about steampunk in it. That’s how old it is.

—

Lovecraft is a hard act to follow, and an even harder one to adapt. “Oh you mean HP Lovecraft, the guy who came up with Cthulhu and all those cute little plush toys.” Yeah, the guy who launched a thousand little cottage industries pumping out VOTE FOR CTHULHU: THE STARS ARE RIGHT bumper stickers and Mythos Hunting Guides and all that stuff. Yeah, him. I do wonder if he’d be tickled or appalled at his legacy and all the eldritch dust-catchers and t-shirts and radio plays.

Well, he’d probably like the radio plays. He’d probably have even approved of the silent film adaptation of THE CALL OF CTHULHU, arguably his single most famous piece of fiction, certainly the one that’s lodged most deeply in the collective consciousness, for good or for ill. The film adaptation gets a solid recommendation from me, and anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m pretty hard to please as this stuff goes. Not because I think Lovecraft’s every word is sacred and perfect. I don’t. My relationship with HPL’s work is problematic, mostly in terms of the execution. I like characters. I like it when characters drive the plot. HPL couldn’t be bothered with that by and large, except when it was an incessant curiosity on the part of the players that made the eldritch secrets of the plot unfurl to their almost unerringly messy conclusions.

So I find HPL’s conceptual work rightly celebrated even if I find his prose nigh-unimpenetrable at times. Which is why I’m often attracted to adaptations of his work, where creators have a desire to stick to the template that HPL laid out, and often there’s some sense of respect for the source material, but it’s filtered through a different sense of aesthetics. HPL-inspired stuff that stars HPL himself? Not so much. Though there was that beautifully-illustrated LOVECRAFT OGN with art by Enrique Breccia that was so wonderful that I simply didn’t care about the story. Though I suppose there’s an interesting vein to mine when talking about Lovecraft as fictional construct rather than historical figure, but that’s for someone else to do.

One of the comic adaptations of HPL’s work that’s always stuck with me was John Couthart’s magnificent adaptation of CALL OF CTHULHU, which was as much inspired by the work as it respected the work. Now that’s not the same thing. Inspiration is when the artist is moved to go beyond the letter of the text and take it into a new realm. In that way, it becomes a collaboration, and if you’re lucky, it becomes something as unique as the original work itself. An adaptation can be reverent and respectful, but taken too far, that can become a straitjacket, where the artist is afraid to make a move that somehow steps out of the shadow of the original.

Luckily with Mr. Coulthart’s adaptation, we get to see an artist taking chances and really daring, not just simply literalizing the cosmic horror that HPL at his best served up. Instead of shying away from seeing That Which Must Not Be Seen, Mr. Coulthart shows us everything and dares us to look away. Now, this is not always an approach that pays off. Sometimes it’s just…unseemly or at worst trashy. In Lovecraft adaptations, there’s a fascination with the monster, this incarnation of the cosmic horror that we’re all stewing in. And yes, the monsters are neat, and sometimes they’re even surprising, but the monsters are not the point.

The point is human insignificance in the face of these gaping and half-glimpsed terrors. Very few adaptations get this, and instead fall back on pulp action and exploding creepies from beyond. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it’s not Lovecraft.

Mr. Coulthart’s adaptation understands that. Even in the first page, even if there was nothing more than that page, he’s encapsulated the story and better, he’s encapsulated what is best in Lovecraft’s fiction itself: that once the infinite and uncaring horror that sprawls between the stars, once that has been seen, it can not be forgotten, it forever infects the viewers (at least in the stories—we in the outside world merely move on to other entertainments.)

Lucky for us, we have more than that first page. As with the best comics, each page has a life of its own. Some of them more vibrant than others, rejecting a standard storytelling layout and becoming a single whole unto themselves, but still advancing the plot along, still giving us glimpses of what’s driving the characters onward. And, like the globe-spanning-locales of the original tale, Mr. Coulthart anchors the events with his choices in architecture and design, all these tiny details that might go unnoticed but still add to the atmosphere and sense of place.

This isn’t to say that it’s a hidebound historical document that’s more interested in costume drama than fear. It isn’t. There is constant and awe-inspiring horror lurking just beneath the surface, just beneath the scratching ink-lines that at moments feel more like scrimshaw than pen. And this serves further to literally etch these visions into the reader. And to shock in a way that Lovecraft himself might have shied away from in his prose. There is a moment when a group of parish policemen find their way into a swamp to break up a blasphemous and terrible ceremony. Mr. Coulthart goes further than HPL did in his visualizing of the gruesome nature of this cult, making their actions explicit, but not exploitative. That’s a fine line to walk along and often artists end up going too far in an effort to get a reaction out of the audience. I mean, nothing exceeds like excess, right?

That was rhetorical.

I could go on and on about Mr. Coulthart’s brave fusion of underground comics and hints of psychedelic imagery and gorgeous design to tell this story. I could, but maybe it’s better that you get a look at his pages and maybe get inspired to read them for yourself.

I first came across this adaptation in a book called THE STARRY WISDOM: A TRIBUTE TO HP LOVECRAFT, which also features Lovecraftian stories by the likes of Grant Morrison, Alan Moore (the original version of THE COURTYARD which was later adapted into comics form), and even Michael Gira (he of The Swans). I recommend it to all HPL fans, particularly those who want to get their cosmic horror filtered through a more modern sensibility, though I’ll note that many authors take things in directions that I don’t think HPL would have necessarily approved of, particularly in terms of the sensual and the occult.

If you want to see an unflinching (but still quivering and beautiful) vision of Lovecraft’s fictional gift to history, then by all means, track down this adaptation. And do yourself a favor by visiting Mr. Coulthart’s website. You might even recognize some of the work there (such as the surprise that Mr. Coulthart designed the Cleopatra Records logo, for instance), and marvel at the crossroads of his work which spans more than twenty years now and touches on subjects Lovecraftian, hermetic, steampunk, and maybe a name or two that’s already familiar to comics readers.

And thanks to the miracle of the internet, I was able to reach Mr. Coulthart to ask a few questions about the adaptation and how he approached the work.

Matt: Is “comic” the right term for your approach to THE CALL OF CTHULHU? Were you setting out to make a comic book per se?

Coulthart: Strictly speaking I think of those adaptations more as illustrations in sequential form. That might sound like “comic” to most people but my original idea in 1985 was to simply start illustrating Lovecraft properly, having done a few drawings prior to that. My model at the time was going to be Berni Wrightson’s illustrations for Frankenstein and the work of Gustave Doré. Before I’d made a start I picked up a copy of the first book in Bryan Talbot’s Luther Arkwright series; seeing that made me realise I might be better off trying to do the whole of the first story I’d chosen, The Haunter of the Dark, in comic form instead. Once I’d finished that story the intention was to try something more ambitious so The Call of Cthulhu came next.

Matt: There are moments where you’re very determined to tie the text of the story to what’s going on in a particular page, which gives it the feel of an illustrated novel. But then there’s pages where you cut the text altogether and go “between the words” as it were to really explore the horror of what’s unfolding. Was it difficult to escape the text, the actual words themselves?

Coulthart: Some of it was the old thing of “show, don’t tell” but mostly I was trying on the one hand to keep the unique flavour of Lovecraft’s prose, and on the other to show more of what was often only implied or hinted at in the narrative. One of the things I liked about story was its international reach; you go from a Rhode Island professor and an art student to sinister Eskimos, New Orleans voodoo ceremonies, the Arabian desert, Norway, New Zealand, and finally the South Pacific. Along the way there’s a thread that connects a variety of different religions and beliefs, and it quickly became apparent that I could enjoy myself showing how Cthulhu was represented by a diverse cast of people. Representation is at the heart of the story; it begins with Wilcox’s clay tablet and statues of Cthulhu are discovered at key moments.

Matt: Very few pages in your adaptation of THE CALL OF CTHULHU follow a standard grid pattern, becoming progressively unhinged as it were. Some of the pages, and I’m thinking of Old Castro’s story in particular, seem straight out of an illuminated manuscript and not a comic. What inspired those choices?

Coulthart: This is mostly down to my being far more of an illustrator than a comic artist. Illustrating the scenes took precedence over the usual panel-by-panel storytelling that comic readers are used to. This didn’t seem to me to be completely unprecedented. Many of the comics I’ve responded to the most have taken this approach. I liked the frequent emphasis on art over story in Heavy Metal magazine in the 1970s and 80s. Burne Hogarth took a similar approach in 1976 with his Jungle Tales of Tarzan. That aside, the form was dictated by the content to a degree, with the CoC narrative being a collage of different occurrences around the world which eventually piece together. When I started work on the unfinished adaptation of The Dunwich Horror I was using a page grid for that since the story is a lot more straightforward.

Matt: I’ve noticed that many illustrators of Lovecraftian work leap to imagery such as Ernst Haeckl’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel) ART FORMS IN NATURE. That book and aesthetic were a heavy influence on Art Nouveau design, but it seems like there’s precious little dovetailing between Nouveau visuals and Lovecraft in terms of adaptation. You’re one of the few artists I’ve seen who put the two together overtly in terms of design and anchoring things in a time and place. Is it important that HPL’s work stay in time or does it still work in a modern milieu?

Coulthart: I only discovered Haeckel’s work after I’d finished those adaptations but even if I’d known of his book I can’t imagine how I might easily have applied his pictures to the stories. I think Lovecraft’s themes can work well in contemporary terms, he was consciously writing modern horror tales, after all, and his interest in post-Einsteinian physics is certainly relevant today. Some of the stories wouldn’t be harmed too much by being brought into the present day although there can be a problem with the way technology has changed people’s lives. When you read old detective stories, for example, you find scenes in which an elementary problem or threat would be negated immediately by the presence of a cellphone.

Two things were important when adapting the stories: one was being true to the material which meant treating it seriously on its own terms. This was a deliberate reaction against jokey horror comics. The other was trying to be faithful to the period which meant I was watching a lot of films from the 1930s looking all the time for details. King Kong was a big influence, and where it says “THE END” on the final page the lettering is based on the card at the end of the RKO films

Matt: THE CALL OF CTHULHU was completed in 1988 and was pen and ink. Do you work much in that media any longer or are things largely digital for you now?

Coulthart: I still draw now and then but these days it’s mainly preliminary work for digital illustration. After the Lovecraft stories I drew 270 comic pages for David Britton’s Lord Horror series, Reverbstorm, and when that ended I felt I’d done all I wanted with detailed, cross-hatched ink work. In the past I’ve been fairly restless, I’ve tended to do something in one area then move elsewhere. After the comics I was doing painting for a while then moved to computers. That’s bad in career terms since people prefer it when you become established doing one thing but I can’t help my impulses.

http://highway62.tumblr.com/

I may occasionally post longform stuff here, but likely not for some time.

Did I even write up my Wonder-Con this year? It was dreadful enough that I’m not going to go check. I’ll write up a short review as a reminder: SDCC crowds, expense and hassle without SDCC sales or sunshine (or just clouds) or locale. Oh, and the Anaheim Convention Center might be big, but it’s showing its age. These are easy gripes to throw, given that the show was relocated on short-ish notice. That it came together at all was miraculous.

But still, having the sight-lines blown away by gigantic pillars and booths, effectively hiding the back half of Artist’s Alley, that’s zero fun. As well as the observation that people at a big show like Wonder-Con aren’t headed to Artist’s Alley in order to buy books. They want sketches, maybe pages, that sort of thing. Trouble is, I just sell books. And on-the-spot five-minute-stories, which still aren’t catching on. Though I did move a few, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

An empty convention center.

My single favorite part of the Stumptown Comics Fest, aside from the excuse to visit Portland? There is no Artist’s Alley. There is no small press area. There’s only comics in every aisle and at just about every booth. There’s publishers selling books and there’s creators selling books or minis or pages or sketches or whatever. I realize that this sort of arrangement is impossible for a big show, and kinda antithetical to the whole convention course we’re in. The big companies dominate and the little fish sorta dart around behind their tables, hoping that people come down the aisles. Of course, it’s tough to do tiered charging for tables if you just throw everyone in the mix like that, so like I said, understandable that it doesn’t happen at bigger shows.

Stumptown does away with all that. It’s all comics. Web comics, art comics, superhero comics, weird genre-mashup comics, what have you. Nobody lined up by publisher. Everyone just out to be browsed. Kurt Busiek and Benjamin Marra in the same show, which is a weird kind of ersatz Alpha to Omega for someone out there, I’m sure.

But, as usual, I’m ahead of myself. Let’s start with going on vacation.

Dylan's inky laptop.

That’s half the reason to go to an alien city crawling with cartoonists, right? Get out of the house, away from the family and dog for a couple days. I mean, how can I miss you guys if I don’t go away? That’s a crib, by the way. Or a bite, whatever. I used to joke about going to sell at conventions as being like running away to join the circus. You get to eat bad food, stay out late, drink too much, make a spectacle of yourself, populating someone’s tumblr stream with shaky low-lit shots of you dancing on tables and making that funny face just before you toss your cookies right onto the lovingly-waxed parquet flooring.

For the record, I was in bed before 9:30 on Friday and around midnight Saturday. That’s how I roll. Can’t keep up with me, right?

Yeah, for me going to the circus is hanging out at Periscope for an afternoon and watching Steve (Lieber—the hardest-working man in showbusiness, Maximum Leader and Duke of Portland) act as comics ambassador, either by fielding phone calls or escorting visitors, all the time keeping the drawing board in the corner of his eye, realizing that he should be sitting there but is too nice a guy to just run over there and get back to work. That and listening to Colleen Coover hold court over the majesty that is Freddie Mercury.

I still don’t know how anyone gets work done there. I mean, they must. Still, with my undiagnosed Asperger’s, my brain is running in too many directions at once most of the time. I can barely keep up with one cerebellum much less a room full of them. Still, that’s a novelty for me, as I spend most days staring at a magic box while the kids are at school and the dog is lying under my desk at home. Twitter might be the water cooler for the entire world, but it’s not the same as being in the room with people, y’know?

Should I blog lunch? Is that gauche? Just let it be known that fries with debris gravy (which is taken from the ends of roast beef and then left to stew for a bit) and cheese on top is good. Really good. Dangerously good. Like I could eat an order right now good. So, thanks Bunk sandwiches/bar. You were good lunch.

Mexicoke at Bunk.

More relaxing at the studio, getting with Ben Dewey, he of the Tragedy Series on Tumblr (which I may or may not be lazy enough to link to and you should read anyways) as he’s working on a STRANGEWAYS story for the upcoming THE LAND WILL KNOW. It’ll be good, well, just because. That and he’s one of the overlooked gems of cartooning right now.

Aside from that, I figured out a story problem that’s been bugging me seemingly for more than twenty years. No, that’s a joke. Nobody would possibly look to revisit a twenty-year-old work with an eye to fixing it, right? I mean, that’s some crazy talk right there.

I mean, totally crazy.

Ride back with Paul (ONION HEADED MONSTER) Friedrich and Jeff (BUCKO/Parkerspace) Parker, drop off at hotel, try and figure out the way back to the casa de Parker and wonder how the hell anyone gets around by car in this town. It’s not enough that there’s a river right in the middle of it but there’s enough one way streets and cantilevered intersections to make even old HPL scream for the comfort and sanity of R’leyh. Yeah, I don’t get Portland roads. Luckily, I don’t have to, between the Parkermobile and the Max (creatively reimagined as the Trimetrodon by Reid Psaltis over at his table this year.) You should check out his work, and you will if you read that next STRANGEWAYS book. Yes, I hit Portland pretty hard in recruiting artists for this next book. Reid and Ben Dewey and Tony Morgan all hail from here. Well, there, since I’m writing this back at home in Folsom.

Hey, there’s that party for HENRY AND GLENN FOREVER AND EVER over at Floating World Comics that I could head over to. I could just get on the Max and head back down and hang with folks and then I couldzzzzzzzzzz… Yeah, I punked out hard on Friday. I think I started reading a little something, but my 5AM wake-up call preceded by little-to-no sleep the night before did a number on the old brainpan.

Woke early, just sat in bed and read for awhile, which is a luxury I don’t get much of at home, what with the kids and the dog and all. I have to be responsible and stuff and make sure everyone gets to school. Yeah. Being grown-up is kind of a drag sometimes. But you get to go on vacation from time to time, so that kinda makes up for it.

Down to the show in its second-year home of the Portland Convention Center, which is a decently-sized big concrete room that’s big and echo-y. I’d love to borrow it for a couple hours and put a big amplifier at one end and a microphone down at the other and take pictures of the air moving, but another time for that. And yeah, it’s not the friendliest room in the world, particularly when compared to the Lloyd Center Doubletree conference room that the show had been held at for the three or four years before 2011. But the plain fact was that the show was too big for that space and had been for a couple of years. There were still times that it felt like current room was too big for the show, but not many. And Saturday was legitimately busy, requiring con muscle memory to kick in and let me dodge between people loitering in aisles or moving like shoals of bluefin tuna as they roamed in search of that perfect whatever it was they were looking for.

Point is, as cold and unfriendly as the room itself was, physically, the show either needed to move or it needed to scale back. I may end up eating these words, but I think that the Stumptown folks made the right choice. Then again, I can remember going to the first Emerald City Comic Con that I’d attended some six years ago. And I don’t think it was in a venue that was too much bigger than the one that Stumptown was in right now. Not saying that Stumptown is destined to get that big. The shows are very different things for pretty different audiences. Still, you’ll note that comic conventions get bigger and bigger (by and large) even as the Direct Market itself only holds steady or dwindles slowly (depending on who you’re reading on any given day.)

Saturday started slowly, slowly enough that I was flashing back to Wonder-Con, not heavily enough to assume a fetal position underneath the table, but wasn’t having a good feeling about things either. I sure hope my whimpering didn’t disturb Tom (Neely, he of THE BLOT, THE WOLF and one of the mindermasts behind HENRY AND GLENN). But things picked up finally, as hipster and civilian alike began to filter into the convention center, dancing around the pods of pre-adolescent female dance teams that were occupying the other room at the convention center. Yeah, I forgot to mention them, and they were another reason why I was having flashbacks to Wonder-Con (the Anaheim Convention Center being taken over by girl’s sports teams at the same time as the comic convention in question.) Yeah, I thought it was weird too.

But Portland delivered. People came out to buy stuff to read. Sure, there were plenty who were buying things just to assert their lifestyle choices and validate them. I don’t do so much of that. Or maybe I’m just not running into enough people who dress up all old-timey and feel the need to hunt down supernatural menaces. In fact, things were probably too good. I know, there’s no such thing as “too good” but when you only have what’s in your suitcase because you forgot to drive across the river to the studio to get that box of books that you shipped up ahead of time and that stack of books is running down quicker than you thought. Yeah, that’s a good problem to have, I guess. But it’s still a problem.

And you’d think that if the same people were coming to this show over and over, that they’d have gotten their fill of my books. But the fact of the matter was that there were new people discovering the books for the first time. I wasn’t just selling THE THIRSTY (that being the new STRANGEWAYS, only having hit stores two weeks prior), but I was selling plenty of the first book (that being MURDER MOON) as well. This led me to figure that there were plenty of new attendees coming to the show, which is indeed a good sign. I mean, you can’t just recycle the same crowds over and over and expect to sustain things. Gotta bring new people in, don’t just service the ones that are already reading the funnybooks.

I know. That’s crazy talk.

Caught up with some friends, sold more books, passed out cards for the webcomic version for people who weren’t going to buy a darn thing anyways. Maybe they’d hit the digital version and decide that they wanted to drop some money on the books. Hey, it could happen.

And then I flat ran out of books to sell. Well, not quite true. I still had a few of volume one leftover, but zero copies of volume two. That whole didn’t-grab-the-box-from-the-studio thing. So I took the opportunity to walk around a bit and actually see the show, which doesn’t usually happen when I’m working a table and have no backup. Grabbed a copy of the new SHARKNIFE book and a copy of FORMING (looking forward to finding a quiet night to give that a read) and the GREEN RIVER KILLER and DEAR CREATURE books from Jonathan Case. That last one was great to finally see collected, after having read very early versions of some of that material years and years ago. The GREEN RIVER book is outstanding, by the way. Unsettling and never resorting to cheap tricks to tell the stories or make up pat villains. Real life is scarier than just about any fiction you care to come up with.

Biggest thing I bought.

Oh, and I bought a couple new comics from Benjamin Marra. This is what America’s education system needs. Exactly what it needs. That and the new HENRY AND GLENN. Hard to pick a favorite out of all the stories because they were all damn good. And outrageous. Best five bucks you’ll spend this year.

Finally got my re-up (yes, I’ve been re-watching THE WIRE, thanks for noticing) and started moving the books again. Steady business all afternoon, until about 5 or so. Really, the show doesn’t need to stay open until 6, but I’m not the guy in charge. Caught a great Thai dinner with friend Brandon Jerwa and a bunch of other folks, discussed the spiritual successors of arcade legend BERZERK (actual successor was FRENZY then to SMASH TV and TOTAL CARNAGE after that, but whoops, forgot all about ROBOTRON 2084). Then off to Ground Kontrol for a bit.

Ground Kontrol wants you to see the past.

Ground Kontrol was a very weird place for me. Granted, I’m not the usual clientele there. But to see all the old arcade machines and have people walking around with booze and food in hand just made the old arcade attendant in me cringe. Yes, I worked at an actual mall arcade, in 1988, long after the first bust and before the Nintendo Revolution had taken hold and made it so that the gap between console game and arcade game was so thin as to kill off arcade games altogether. So yeah, being transported to an alternate 1988 where arcades grew up into adult entertainment/singles/meatmarket threw me off. That and, let’s be real, most of the people there that Saturday hadn’t been old enough to go into an arcade in their American heyday. If you’re 21 in 2012, you were born in 1991. Yeah, roll those dice around and see what you come up with. Anways, happy birthday, Taki.

Bailed out when folks wanted to head over to the Stumptown after-party. There’s being in room full of loud music and people and videogames and then there’s just being in a roof full of loud music and people, and I’m more equipped for one than the other. Hopped the Max back home to unwind.

On Sunday, the show didn’t open until 12, which is probably wise, when you get down to it. Nobody’s coming in before then anwyays. And honestly, if you were at the show on Saturday for any length of time, you probably got to see whatever you wanted. Sunday was a nice addition and all, and I did a fair bit of business, but seemed somehow superfluous. Spent the early morning writing up a bunch of story ideas for something I’d thrown at Ben Marra which will never happen because the license-holders would see Ben’s work and say NO WAY NO HOW AND THERE’S THE DOOR, but maybe something will come of it. It was fun to spitball stuff up, even if it’s all pie in the sky and “wouldn’t it be cool if?”

Who knows. Maybe it can get worked out.

Spent the downtime on Sunday chatting with folks when I could, trying to nail down editors (which I better go do once I finish this), and generally being relaxed about things. Now, put this up against Sunday of Wonder-Con where I’d basically given up on sales completely and just spent the day talking with Gabriel (Hardman) and Corinna (Bechko) because foot traffic just wasn’t happening. I won’t say that Stumptown on Sunday was gangbusters, but it was worth sticking around until I got down to the last couple copies of STRANGEWAYS books. Those went to Bridge City Comics, who’ve been strong supporters of the book since it came out. And since I can’t guarantee that Diamond will be stocking it for long (if they haven’t dropped it already), I figured it’s best to get those books to places where they’ll find readers.

For those of you keeping track at home, I sold in two days at Portland, about a third (or slightly more) in raw numbers than were ordered nationwide by Diamond. And that was just for THE THIRSTY. MURDER MOON, which Diamond has made clear they will not stock, sold just as much. And people wonder why exhibitor spaces and artist’s alley spaces at comic shows sell out months in advance. Wanna know why? Because that’s the new market. And people there are ready to buy more than Big Two comics. Granted, then all the risk/cost falls on the shoulders of the small publishers instead of the retailers, but them’s the breaks.

Even had time to fill out my Eisner ballot on Sunday between customers. Someday I want to get in on the ballots before the ballots, if you know what I mean.

Portland is the only place where five-minute-stories go over, too. People are actually willing to pay for a new piece of prose created right there on the spot. Not sure why that is. Maybe it’s all the radon in the air, dunno. Whatever the cause, I’m down with it.

Michael Meyers buys a copy of STRANGEWAYS.

Bottom line? Great show. Venue could be more friendly but since when is any convention center going to make you feel all warm and fuzzy, right? They’re basically big concrete boxes that are lit poorly. Kinda grim by institutional design. Sure, it’d be great to find a big ‘ol warehouse that’s available and not made of sealed concrete, but when you hit a certain size threshold, your options get limited, specially in the Northwest where you can’t guarantee anything but wind and drizzle most of the year.

But maybe one day someone will be able to pull off a comic show in a redwood grove or something. Maybe take over a big chunk of a swap meet. A comics swap meet. Now there’s something I could get behind. Someone get on that.