Archive for June, 2004
Adrian Tomine Article
New York Newsday has an interview and cursory biographical sketch of Tomine:
You could view the melancholy souls floating through Tomine’s comics – graphic short stories, you might call them – as the spiritual offspring of Charles Schulz’s creations. They’re who the doleful, philosophizing Peanuts kids might have become if they had grown up and moved to the Bay Area in their 20s.
The Real Bullseye?
In the comics world, Daredevil mainstay villain Bullseye is renowned for killing opponents with razor sharp throwing cards. So I found it rather interesting when I saw this article about magician Ricky Jay, who in 1977 wrote the definitive book on card throwing, entitled “Cards As Weapons”. The site has reprinted one of the techniques from the book,
Once you’ve mastered the basic throw, you can go on to such advanced techniques as “The Sea-Urchin Spin”, “The Butterfly Swirl”, and “The Lethal Four-Card-Fist”.
Comfest, Day 3 – Addendum
Forgot to mention Sunday’s Stoner Moment of the Day (TM). Guy walks into the booth, ignores all the comics and zines and heads for the table with the BigCityBlues music CDs. I had a little portable CD player setup for people who wanted to sample the CD before buying it (this comes in to play soon). He asked me a question, which I thought was “how much for the CDs?”. Hmmm, the price is right there next to them, I thought. But whatever, maybe he didn’t see it. “The CDs are $8, or you can get the CD/comic package for an even $10″, I replied.
“No man, I mean how much for the CD Player? It’s sweet.”
Oh, right. The CD player. Because, you know, this looks like a pawn shop booth where we sell comics, zines, and one lone CD player. After I informed him the player wasn’t for sale, he looked rather disappointed and turned around and left.
PS. The portable CD player in question is over 10 years old, beat up, and you could easily buy a brand new one with 10 times the features this one has for 1/3 of what I originally paid for it.
Comfest, Day 3
“Hey, what happened to day 2?” is probably what you’re thinking. well, I didn’t have access to a computer Saturday night, hence no update. And seeing as how it’s past midnight on Sunday now, and I’m dead-ass tired, this will be a quick note.
(unrelated story: was checking the referrer logs on the site and saw that someone Googled “con festival goodale park” and the ferret Press site was the number 1 listing returned. And that’s just from me putting a short blurb on the home page a few days ago telling people we’d be at Comfest. Cool)
So anyway, while Saturday was slow sales-wise, today more than made up for it, and in fact was the best day of the three. Several more topless women were sighted, colorful (and drunk and/or stoned) people walked in the booth and chatted with us, Andy’s dog, Luna, drew in a total of 11 cute women (according to Steve), and Steve’s mothman painting that he was working on drew in even more people, male and female. In short, it was another great day at Comfest.
Extra special shout-out to Steve, Andy, and Tony for staying late and helping to tear down the booth and haul everything to the truck. Double extra special VIP shout-out to Tony for carrying the big blue tub which not only had a ton of comcis in it, but was also weighed down with 15 lbs of barbell weights (don’t ask). And thanks to everyone who helped out over the 3 days: Tony, Steve, Craig, Sean, Tom, Geoff, Andy, and of course Wendy.
I’m gonna’ crash now…
Comfest, Day 1
Just got home and took a nice, hot shower. I’m still a bit wired from the whole day, so I figured I’d type up a short summary of my experiences as a first-time Comfest vendor.
We got down to Goodale park around 10 AM. As I suspected, there was a long line of cars waiting to get through to the setup area. Between myself and Tony, we probably spent a combine 45 minutes sitting in “traffic”, but that’s as expected. (By the way, big shout out to Tony for helping haul most of the stuff down there in the truck.) Craig had been waiting at the spot for over half an hour, and helped with assembling the canopy before having to head off to work. We had the whole booth setup by around 12:30.
At 12:50, we made out first sale. AKA #1, to an older gentleman. Right on!
Shortly thereafter, a guy who recognized the Panel books from Motor-City-Con stopped in and bought a handful of other books. That, too, made my day. After that, there was a steady stream of people, and we did pretty well. A couple of people mentioned that they had heard Craig on the “Blue Collar” radio show the previous week (talking about his new comic, Me and the Devil Blues) and had made it a point to find our booth at the festival, which was way cool.
As luck would have it, the booth my girlfriend was helping out at is just a few spots away, which is quite fortunate given that there are over 300 vendor spots this year. Wendy was able to hang out with me on and off throughout the day, and we even took Hanna to shake her booty at one of the live band stages! Plus, she had the idea for how to best layout the tables to maximize traffic in the booth, which worked out great. Thanks, babe.
And before I go, I should point out the Stoner Moment of the Day (TM). A young man, obviously baked out of his mind, wondered into the booth and stared at the long table where most of the comics were laid out. We had placed a couple of long bamboo poles across the books to act as paper weights, since it was pretty windy in the early afternoon. After staring at the bamboo for a while, he picked it up, turned to me, and asked “dude, what’s this?”. After I explained that we were using it to keep the books from being blown off the table, he pondered the strange wood-like object some more, placed it down, said “huh…cool, dude”, and promptly turned around and walked out.
I love Comfest.
Hey gang,
the writer speaks at CBR today on NO DEAD TIME. And here I was freaking out because Oni hadn’t sent a press release about September. More pages are up in the article now lettered by the writer. Now back to the drawy-draw.
Comfest Bound
Well, I’ve got boxes and boxes and boxes of comics and art to haul to beautiful Goodale Park tomorrow for 3-days of Comfest! Those of you in the Central Ohio region, I hope you can make it to this fantastic, all free music festival. We’re talking 3 days, 4 stages, over 100 bands.
And the Ferret Press booth.
Stop by and say hi.
Blogging Gives Iranian Women a Voice
“Take one exasperated Iranian woman. Add a computer. Hook it up to the internet. “And you have a voice in a country where it’s very hard to be heard,” said Lady Sun, the online identity of one of the first Iranian women to start a blog – a freeform mix of news items, commentaries and whatever else comes to mind. Initially created to defy the nation’s tight control on media, these web journals have turned into a cyber-sanctuary – part salon, part therapist’s couch – for the vast pool of educated, young and computer-savvy Iranians.”
Also, check out this story: 137-year old Iranian woman enjoys high morale. There’s really no way to verify the veracity of this story, but heck, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Rule Your Own
Art boards, that is. I know most of you artists already do so, but here’s a link to a great little tutorial by Nate Piekos (font maker to the stars!) on how to do it.
Hmmmm, I found this on my lunchbreak on the CBR boards- Jumping on the bandwagon of Comic Book Idol- Dimestore Productions has created you guessed it… Small Press Idol. Seems kinda lame as the only way to enter is to become a member of the SPA and you’re prize is a spot in a book that traded around to SPA members. Aren’t SPA members already doing that? I guess the winner’s winnings is that he or she doesn’t have to pay for printing for once. Why?
Time Magazine (Canuck Edition)
Time Magazine Canada highlights independent publisher Drawn & Quarterly in their latest issue. Use the link to get to a PDF of the two-page article with a sidebar on Chester Brown and his graphic novel Louis Riel.
Your Art Site of the Day
NY Photographer Fred Lasenna has a nice little site with various pics. My favorite is the Commute series, which he introduces with: “Every day, more than six million people use the New York city transit system, approximately two billion customers annually.”
My New Hero
Wired.com has an article about “what happens when politicians neglect to snap up websites containing common variants of their name and election year.” For instance, Brian Rodgers has bought the domain name Bush2004.com and put up a satire site ridiculing the Prez. Snippet from article:
“Since then, Rodgers has received calls from Bush supporters who have offered to pay as much as $135,000 for the domains. He declined to sell, citing animosity toward the incumbent president as the chief reason. “He’s a sorry son of a bitch and I’ll do anything I can to bring him down,” said Rodgers.”
Cool Watches and Clocks
According to the WristFashion.com website, “Wrist Fashion is a Web Magazine that stamps out the latest news, trends and products from the Wristwatch Industry in little pocket size morsels.” There’s a 12-sided clock that switches time zones to the labeled cities on each side when you turn it. My favorite is the “Time Table”, which is, you guessed it, a table with a surface made of electro-luminescent film which displays a digital time readout.
(link courtesy of BoingBoing)
And speaking of boobies …
… here’s a little love from Wonkette (http://www.wonkette.com).
With Clinton so much in the news, it’s good to know that the Dems are not the only party who can overlook a candidate’s outlandish sex-freak ways. Illinois senatorial GOP candidate Jack Ryan’s divorce papers have been plaguing him the entire campaign and the latest revelations are Starr report-level steamy: In them, Ryan’s ex-wife (Jeri Ryan, former alien hottie, later cast in the equally improbable role of a Boston public school teacher) accuses him taking her to several sex clubs and says he asked her to get jiggy with him in front of other couples. Bright side for the family values folks: She insists he didn’t cheat on her.