pg 9
…To Be Continued…
There she is–JOAN OF ARCHEOLOGY! A year or so before creating MANLY TALES OF COWARDICE, I had come up with Joan. I had originally based Joan on my stepdaughter’s 7 to 10 year old idea of what an archaeologist is(Indiana Jones), and thought she would make a great lead character for a comic or young readers series. I even at one point did a few pages of a first issue where Joan was to match wits with an elder and dastardly archaeologist over the ancient treasure known as THE BUDDHA SQUIRREL! This however was at the tail-end of my “BY THE SEAT OF YOUR PANTS” comics-making approach and philosophy–basically, I’d come up with an idea, mull it over for awhile until a story was basically formed, and instead of writing a script I’d just dive right page-by-page and hope it all came together by the end. Often times this way of going about making my comics worked out well enough, but this is one of those times where a few pages in I hit a brick wall and called it quits until I figured out where to go next.
I never figured out where to go next.
Instead I did a couple other things “PANTS” style, and by the end of the last one I realized I NEEDED to start writing scripts. Long form stories and series’ were never going to work out the way I wanted them to unless I had a much more concrete idea of what I was doing and where I was going before I ever started drawing panel one of page one. And so, 24 HOUR and jam comics aside, I have yet to look back on this decision and am happier for it.
So some time after that I started MANLY TALES, and one of my first ideas was to bring back the dorment JOAN as that I thought she’d make a great foil for Fleming. I then quickly realized that giving Fleming a 10-year-old nemesis was a great pretext with which to flashback to his own childhood and help explain his casual disregard for life, especially if that life was the life of a child(Atlantis Lad). And so with those factors in mind, issue three was born. Why didn’t I reuse the BUDDHA SQUIRREL here as well? I dunno. I think its that subconscious “LAST CRUSADE” residue I mentioned on the post for page one. But fear not, for the BUDDHA SQUIRREL does make his way into the MANLY TALES OF COWARDICE pages….you’ll just have to wait until issue five.
****ZINEFEST 2009 RECAP:
This very special ZINEFEST jam was done by myself, RYAN DOW (www.introspectivecomics.com), DANIEL J OLSON (http://www.bewilderedkid.com/blog/) and MIKE TOFT (http://www.cartoonistconspiracy.com/brainfood/).
Ryan also did a pretty great ZINEFEST themed comic you can read at: http://ryandow.com/ic/2009/07/12/what-not-to-say/comment-page-1/#comment-4280
So, yeah…ZINEFEST….
I had such high hopes for ZINEFEST. I guess I figured a 2-day celebration of zines and indy comics (which was pretty well attended) would be a lot more….financially worthwhile. Not to poo-poo the work SARAH MOREAN(http://www.smorean.com) is doing in organizing ZINEFEST, because she has really made ZINEFEST great (believe me, I did ZINEFEST its first year back in 2004 and vowed to never do it again, but Sarah has really turned it around and its become so well known and attended by both fans and vendors that it’ll probably be moving into a bigger space next year), its just people seemed to treat it more as a place to go and see stuff, not so much with the buying. As Ryan points out on the link above, there was a strangely high amount of people who would walk up, READ AN ENTIRE COMIC which they seemed to enjoy, put it down and either walk away in silence, or say “I’ll be back to buy something” and then…ya know…never come back.
I wonder if the problem is systemic–a depressive economy and all that. It certainly couldn’t be because my stuff sucks….right?
Either way, I’m really glad I’m posting my work online now. At least I know people are reading it every day. If I had spent all this weekend at ZINEFEST and come home to an internet-less world, I would be crushed and probably give up making comics for many months. Instead, I’m going to go back to work–on FALSE WITNESS #2, TOMMY CHICAGO #3, MANLY TALES OF COWARDICE #’s 6 and 7, and the couple new projects me and some of my co-Conspirators came up with this weekend–and plowing ahead content in the knowledge that even though I do this to scratch my own itch, at least someone somewhere is having their itch scratched virtually as well.
Not that it was all bad…There were some fantastic highlights, like the 6 year-old boy who really wanted his mom to buy him one of Dan’s SUPER MAXI-PAD GIRL dolls(http://www.bewilderedkid.com/store/), seeing Ryan’s adrenaline ker-splode after his open-mike reading of JACK AND ZACK MAKE A COMIC(http://thejackandzack.blogspot.com/), the great sales for FALSE WITNESS(www.biasedliberalmedia.com), all the great trades, and all the great Conspirators who came out to support us and the indy comic/zine scene(Thanks all. You know who you are, and you ROCK!). And most importantly, if it wasn’t for ZINEFEST I would never have come up with a great idea for my City Pages submission(http://www.cartoonistconspiracy.com/conspire/?p=1499) which, if all goes according to plan, will never, ever see the light of day(as far as the actual CITY PAGES goes. It’ll be posted here though when the CITY PAGES “Comix Issue” come out next month).
Now onto FALLCON!!!! (…kill me please….)
