Heroes Con '08

Man! HeroesCon was quite a show, lots of fun. I rode up with Shawn Crystal, Andrew Robinson, and Nolan Woodard on Thursday. I went downstairs in the convention center and set up my table, and then took a nap - I'd been awake the whole previous day, doing the final preparations for my lecture. At about 9:30, I started wandering the streets of Charlotte, took in the last half of the last act of Romeo and Juliet being performed in the park, and through fortuitous circumstance bumped into a group of friends leaving their hotel - Alec Longstreth, Aaron Renier, Laura Park, Julia Wertz, Nicholas Gurewitch, and David Malki. They had just gotten in via train, and we all went to go look for some dinner. It was just after 10, and most places were closed, but we found a pizza place open.

Alec took command of the table, as everyone was hungry, ordering three pies with the assurance of the manager that if we weren't full that he'd provide another, free of charge. We ate merrily and passed around a drawing started by Alec of an old conductor getting robbed. We DID finish up the pizzas, and the manager DID give us another one, which was just as good as the first three. It was great getting to meet Nicholas and Laura, who I hadn't met before, or if I had it had only been in passing.

The next morning, Friday, everyone set up and the show began in earnest. I had the good fortune to sit across from my friends at the Oni Press booth (my publishers). Cory Casoni is the new marketing and PR guy at Oni, and he does his job ten times better than any of us would have ever dreamed hope, and I'm confident that he'll do great things for Oni - this is, of course, in addition to him being loads of fun, and hilarious.

Next to them were Mike and Matt Chapman, the brothers behind Home Star Runner, which, for those who've lived under a cave for the last five years, is the most consistently funny web animation series out there. They were so nice and generous (they gave me the Strongbad e-mail dvd set), and it wasn't until we were all packing up that I found out that they were Atlanta folks, too, living only a couple of miles from where Liz and I are moving to this weekend.

In our table block was a bevy of cartoonists that I know from just about every local show there is, most (if not all) of them being based in the Southeast. Except maybe Pat Lewis, who I think is in Ohio or some such place. But everybody else is in this general neck of the continental woods, including Dean Trippe, Jason Hornswaggle, Rob Ullman, J. Chris Campbell and Duane from Wide Awake Press, Brad McGinty, Josh Latta (who according to the Heroes site, shares a website with Brad... is that right, guys? I'll correct it if it ain't), Hope Larson, Bryan Lee O'Malley, and the guys from the Dollar Bin Podcast.



Matt Kindt, creator of Superspy, borrowed a copy of Crogan's Vengeance and was really nice about it. He also traded me a drawing of pipe man, one of my favorite characters in his book, for a picture I had done of the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword (from Indiana Jones). Here's Matt's drawing, which is no end of beautiful:



I also did a trade with Hope, who did these characters from her new book, Chiggers:



Mal did a picture for me too (an intended gift for Liz, actually) of young Neil crying, her favorite part of the first book. But it's on his Flickr account, so I won't put it here... check his out! He did a lot of great sketches this weekend.


Hope, Evan the Intern, and Mal

On Friday night I had dinner with Brian Hurtt, Cullen Bunn and his wife, Randy, and Cory, after a LONG walk to find a place. It was great - delicious food, good drinks, nice atmosphere. Hurtt and I have a similar idea for an anthology series, one that I hope we can work on together. He's also been putting AMAZING sketchbook stuff on his blog, so check him out.

Saturday Morning I did a few sketches...



And then went upstairs to give my lecture on Character Design. It went really well - I've been planning it for weeks, so I felt ready for it - and there was a really good-sized, responsive crowd there. There's a bit about it on Kevin Burkhalter's journal comic, if you want cartoon audience response.



Kazimir Strzepek was kind enough to man my table while I was gone. I did my best to send people to buy his book, which I think was one of the best available at the show.

I bought AdHouse's Project Superior #3, which had a cover by that grand English gentleman Roger Langdridge...



with stories by HeroesCon organizer Dusty Harbin and Laura Park. I drew a picture of Dusty:



And another of Laura, which I colored at home:



I also picked up the new issue of Papercutter, published by Greg Means... it was, as usual, amazing. Here's Greg with Alec, and you can see Indie Spinner Rack's Charlito in the background:



Saturday evening it poured down rain, and me and Doug Dabbs, Cara McGee, Jackie Lewis/, a couple of Jackie's friends from her days at Emory (one of whom was apparently in "Into the Wild"), maybe Brent Morris, I'm not sure, but he was around a lot with this crowd so I'm guessing yes, Rachel, and another guy from SCAD-Atlanta's illustration grad program. We had Tex-Mex, and me and Doug were daring and got the buffet. Mmmm!

That night was hopping! Everybody and their brother and sister was at the Westin lobby bar (we stayed at the Westin, by the way, and it is posh, with beds you never want to get out of), and it was just a good time all around. I spent a lot of time talking about (among other things) the difference in distillation between American Gin and English Gin with an English expatriot writer named Ben (whose last name I don't know, but he's engaged to Heidi MacDonald). He pretty much carried the evening for all in attendance.

Sunday was mostly spent doing sketches, like this one of Iron Man:



And this one of Short Round, which is of terrible photo quality, I apologize. It was for a "Sidekicks" sketchbook.



I also got to see Jeff Parker quite a few times. We read a lot of his Marvel Adventures stuff on the way back to Atlanta, and if there is any doubt that Superhero monthlies can still be really, really good and loads of fun to read, then these books will asway it.
Here's Parker on the right, talking to brand new dad Dean Trippe:



That night we all went over to the Heroes Aren't Hard to Find store for the dead dog party, were we had disappointingly rationed amounts of AMAZING barbecue and copious amounts of delicious pizza. It was a great wrap-up, and I bought a few things at the store, including Wimbledon Green (which I've read a dozen times) and a cool little statue. I also, over the course of the weekend, picked up Ben Towle's Midnight Sun, which I've been dying to read, and Chris Wright's Inkweed. I got lots of trades and minis and whatnot, too, and came back with luggage about twenty pounds heavier. After the store party, we went back to the hotel, where we briefly went up to Darwin Cooke's room and watched a guy paint. Afterwards we went to our respective rooms and crashed, knowing we had but a few precious hours of sleep until the morning.

On Monday morning, a bunch of us went to breakfast at a big fancy pancake place - it was me, Shawn, Nolan, Andrew, Cory, Randy, Jason Latour, Jeremy Haun, and one of my favorite guys to see at these shows, Chris Brunner. I ordered prospector flapjacks, but Randy ordered a REALLY delicious looking eggs benedict with hollandaise sauce and it looked so good that bI ate my flapjacks with the syrup of unpalatable envy.

We headed back that afternoon. I read the Parker comics, lots of them out loud for the benefit of the others, and we got in around 4:30ish.

That's it! I'll have some new drawings up soon, but I hope that everyone had as good a time as I did.

A Page a Day, Art Speigelman, and an Emerald Miner

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted! It's been a long and exhausting couple of weeks. A while back I set myself a pretty rigorous schedule in order to complete Crogan's Vengeance by April 30th, and sticking to it has been doable but draining. I'm supposed to be finishing an average of one full page a day, and so far have gone a little past that, averaging about nine a week. But it's hard! I have a rough idea as to what happens (example - "Crogan and D'or get into a fight") but no real details nailed down in terms of dialogue, shots, pacing, etc. I'm making it all up as I go, scene by scene (each scene usually being about five pages), thumbnailing and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and then doing about two or three finished pages in a day. Sometimes it's great - other times, like this week, it's unpleasant, and I pace around the apartment all manic and grumpy, waving my hands around in the air and reciting potential dialogue in piratey voices.

Anyway, here's a couple of panels from the recent batch:






On a slightly less-piratish note, I've been doing a lot of twenties/thirties adventure sketches in my sketchbook lately... rickshaws and overgrown temples and gorillas and sky pirates and that sort of thing, and have had some ideas as to what to do with the subject matter... but, like everything, it's subject to how much time I have (which isn't a lot, if referring to spare). But I was thinking about doing some adventurer archetypes - maybe a new one with each post, just to keep me fresh.

I decided for certain to do this when reading the amazing Matt Kindt's blog this week - he and Brian Hurtt are collaborating on a really, really, REALLY cool looking project together that seems to fall into this same vein. It got me wondering who else is feeling this sort of thing? If you're a cartoonist, and YOU are, post it up somewhere and put a link in your comment - I want to see them! High adventure is where it's at! Here's adventurer archetype #1: the Miner.




Since I pretty much NEVER update my gallery pages, I thought I should post THESE jobs here as well... I've also finished a few to which I've previously alluded, some of which were seen in-progress - The first is that Arthur poster:



Next is that Captain Morgan Saint Patrick's Day thing (or at least a crop of it):



And last is a safety goals poster for CSX, the railroad company:



In terms of news, Art Spiegelman came last week and was a really amazing guest. He did a Q&A for Scad Students, after which he, Allen Spetnagel, and me went out to the front to smoke and chat.


(Allen and Mr. Spiegelman, photo by Charles Taylor)

Later that evening Spiegelman gave an amazing lecture, the details of which are too varied and long to try and do justice to here, but it was truly an eye-opening and exciting talk. One of the things that really got me going was some examples that he showed by Töpffer, who made comics in the early nineteenth century. A Swiss, I might add pridefully.

Anyway, I've always been extremely wary of claims of pre-newspaper comics. There's a school of thought that earlier examples of sequential picture narratives (such as the Bayeux Tapestry) are the first comics, but I think that this is an oversimplification - as with most art, I think that motive is everything and as such these works are NOT comics. I feel like it's an attempt to give artistic legitimacy to a medium which has always struggled for it simply by virtue of age and pedigree, and I think that's selling ourselves short - an academic equivalent to claiming that one's ancestors came over on the Mayflower, knowing full well they came through Ellis Island.

Thus I'd never read (or really looked at) Töpffer's stuff, but Speigelman showed a comic which was of men giving a series of toasts. I read it, and thought, "that's good, but you know what would make it better? Showing them drinking after the first toast, and therefore implying a drink after eah additional toast without having to show it," and then I realized that the comic I was looking at had almost the exact narrative structure of one of my own (the Goodbye Beard)! I thought I was being quite clever with mine, but apparently I was almost two hundred years late. It makes me insanely curious as to what other gems Töpffer has, what styles and syntaxes he may have invented that haven't been subsequently employed. Hmmm...

Anyway, afterwards we (Shawn Crystal, Doug Dabbs, me, Dr. Griffis, and some SCAD administrators) went to dinner with Mr. Spiegelman, and had a great time. At first the conversations were a little more rounded - what it's like to teach AND be a cartoonist at the same time, anecdotes, etc - but before long we got into some heavy shop talk about brush pens and fountain pens and ink and papers and all that good stuff, and I fear that we temporarily excluded the non-cartoonists at the table as a result, but all in all I think that everyone had a great evening. I know I did!