Emerald City Comic Con - Day 1
EMERALD CITY COMIC-CON 2008: CUCKOO
A little perspective: The last time I went to the Emerald City comic show, it was a couple months after I’d murdered my baby rather than throw it to the wolves, metaphorically speaking. Yeah, that was not too long after I’d pulled STRANGEWAYS from what would have been a truncated publication at Speakeasy. I’d been >< that close to having a book out after talking my damn fool head off about it for the previous three years.
So walking those aisles was mostly a soul-sucking sort of affair, though talking to folks like Tony Moore and the Penny Arcade guys and being called over by Ed Brubaker to talk took some out of the sting out of it. But still, overall, it was kinda frustrating. I had a manuscript, but nothing really concrete. Okay, it was concrete enough to pitch to Scott Allie at Dark Horse, but nothing came out of that, other than a “like the material, not the artist, but I like this guy you got for the second book” sort of response. Which led to another six-month dalliance, which was just another link in the chain of Bad Timing that ruled 2006 it seemed.
Let’s hope that this year proved to be something a little more…concrete, then. Betrayed expectations are all fine and good, but they get old after a time.
This year, I had the bright idea to fly up with my kids and get them some grandparent time. That’s great. A whole weekend plus of a break. Except the I first have to get them there without killing them. Or at least doing so without witnesses. Don’t get me wrong; my kids are adorable and the light of my little universe, but you put them in seats right next to each other, and what you’ve got is a test of nerves. One needles the other. Waits. Retaliation. Escalation. I should be happy that they’re young now, and that they haven’t developed other, more sophisticated tortures for themselves. Not yet anyways.
I know. You didn’t come here for rewarmed Erma Bombeck essays. I’ll cut it short and just say that I arrived in Seattle with both kids intact, but my patience frazzled to a fine crisp. I slept uneasily, and not just because the hotel room was too hot, but because my daughter’s knee was either in my solar plexus or my kidney, depending on which side I chose to lay on. Yeah, I’ve gotten more rest while trying to sleep on overnight roadtrips in the driver’s seat of my Rabbit GTI, wired on a pot of coffee.
Met Jeff (you know, that AGENTS OF ATLAS guy) outside the show and tried to get set up over in the artist’s alley along with the rest of the Periscope crew. Great folks, every single one of them. But there weren’t no room for me there. Which had pretty much been my plan.
Time to put that Maxwell resourcefulness to the test. I did a quick pace of the hall, marking down the name and number of empty stalls and alley spaces, gathering a vagrancy list up on my iPhone and then marching over to the exhibitor liaison to see if any of them were actually available or if folks were just running late. I was in luck. One of the alley spaces I’d found was actually empty, vacated at the last moment. “Well, I’m 99% sure they’re not showing up,” I was told.
I’ll roll those dice.
Set up with a space to call my own, or at least close enough to that for me to get to work, I rolled out the maroon tablecloth, pitched the banner, struck the signs and set out the merchandise. And only then did I let myself get some real bearings.
Emerald City was a much bigger show than I remembered. I’ll go out on a limb and say it was twice as big as the last one I attended, though in reality it was probably only 2/3 larger. Either way, there was a healthy line formed up out front before the doors opened on Saturday morning. People were READY for this show to start up, dig? This was a big switch from the last show I attended, that being Stumptown in Portland. There, people made a strong showing on Saturday, but there wasn’t the same feeling of revolutionary zeal at work.
When I’d made my pace of the aisles, looking for a place to set down, I had room to move, but not a hell of a lot. I had to dodge and weave, spinning on my toes like a running back breaking past a linebacker corps mired in molasses. This was a real crowd, certainly one to rival recent Wonder-Cons. The room didn’t feel like a small regional show, but a much bigger sort of affair. It didn’t hurt that they had a great deal of talent there, not to mention that both of the big two were fielding teams, as it were. Dan DiDio was roaming the halls, when not running panels (and yes, he ran one of his “Why We Love Comics” sessions, which I recommend you attend if you ever can. I was unable to attend this time, sadly.)
Now, it didn’t have the same vibe as San Diego did, even when San Diego wasn’t appreciably bigger (like the first year I attended), because even in those days, San Diego was still The Big One, the one shindig a year that you tried to make if you were in comics. Emerald City doesn’t have that going for it, but it has a substantial group of talent (it helps that Portland, which is obscenely loaded with comics folks is just a short drive away) and good enough local retailers to build into a solid base. The new venue, that of the Seattle Convention Center is fresh and attractive as these sorts of buildings go, feeling not so much like an overlit basement or converted gymnasium.
As for my digs, I was over in artist’s alley, in-between Phil Noto to one side and Erik Thompson on the other. And that was an interesting study in contrasts, as Mr. Noto is known primarily for fairly realistic rendering and Mr. Thompson is very much in the Gennedy Taratovsky school of clean-line cartooning and exaggeration. Remember people, there’s on one right style, but there’s the style that’s right for your project. Though I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t envious of Mr. Noto’s ability to make Prismacolor markers actually do what he wanted them to. They never did that much for me. Stupid Prismacolors.
Once again, the combination of Cowboys and Werewolves proved to be a strong persuader when it came to the buying public. Hook ‘em with the high concept long enough for the story to do the rest of it. At least that’s the grand plan. Oh, and if you’re wondering, the fans of “werewolves” seem to outnumber the fans of “cowboys” by about 1.66 to 1. Who’d have thought it? Not me, certainly. But then some folks think that Darwyn Cooke’s style for something like JONAH HEX is “completely wrong” and I say they’re “completely nuts,” so go figure.
Yes, I got a lot of people asking “Is this a complete story?” and I got to answer “Yes, sir/ma’am, it is.” That makes some sales, lemme tell ya. So does knocking the price to ten bucks. Yeah, I’m one of those jerks who sells it for less than retail. But I’m also the jerk who flew up to the city in question and am manning my booth instead of being with my wife and kids.
One thing I didn’t do a lot of was wandering the floor. I was away for bathroom breaks (not having mastered the teleurination manuver that I’ve heard some cartoonists have indeed mastered), or to grab an overpriced Caesar salad for lunch, or to get a badge to one of my longtime friends (without whom I probably wouldn’t have read half the interesting comics that I did back in college.) About the only other trip I made was to deliver a book to Boom! Studios’ Ross Richie. This I did because I’d given him a galley of the first issue of STRANGEWAYS back when it was going to be a monthly, and I wanted to prove the point that I could Get The Job Done. Ross seemed to be down wit’ ‘dat, as we say in my stucco-encrusted hood.
Aside from that, it was all about selling the book and getting people to at least walk away with a postcard which would lead them to the preview chapter online. And I can tell you that more than one person who bought a book on Sunday told me that the preview is what led them to putting their money down. Maybe there’s something to this webcomic thing after all. Gears are turning in this regard.
Oh, one interesting person I ran into was Max Banks. He used to draw this comic book you might have heard of called THE TICK. Yeah, that was funny. He had some very interesting stories to tell about crazed TICK fans and Woody Allen when he (Max, not Woody) and Ben Edlund visited New York City. Nice guy, mostly crackers, but that’s pretty much par for the course in comics, isn’t it?
The day was over too soon it seemed. Mostly because I knew that Sunday wasn’t going to be nearly as busy as Saturday. But also because, well, it just rolled right by. Lots of talking, lots of selling, some actual books sold. Not as many as I’d done at Stumptown on the first day, but still, more than if I hadn’t gone at all.
Spent dinner with Parker, the PERHAPANAUTS crew and Karl Kesel (not Kerschel, who I always mix him up with. MARVEL APES? Who knew? Longish night. Tumbled into bed late, dreaming of bleu-cheese crusted Buffalo ribeye steak. Which was pretty damn good as I remember.