E-7 - Will Work For Tips!

Comic-Con 2013 is finally over and I find myself having to concentrate to write coherent sentences for this blog post. The show is so vast and reaches so far that it is still a struggle to not be overwhelmed even after 20 years of attending!

I was with the Bare Bones Studios booth (E-7) in the NW corner of the convention floor. Our good friends in E-6, Scary Robot Productions (Dustin and Sandra) were behind us once more. I was thrilled by the amount of new comic book material this year: Mike and Robert’s Pocket Book Heroes #4, Sandra’s Gothic Geisha and my Pretty Vacant: Made In China Part 1! Mike also had t-shirts and the free (stickman) action figures to give away. Carlos was also around as usual.

Over the past five years, Mike and I have developed a catch-call cadence in giving away stickmen, much like the Beatles song Help! (McCartney yelling, “Help!” and Lennon responding, “I need somebody.”) Mike would holler, “Free action figures!” and I would respond with “Customizable faces” or “Fully tax deductible” or even “Comics slightly more.” Many heads turned at our one-two verbal punch and a good number of attendess doubled back to our booth!

Mike and I at E-7, courtesy of Jenna!

One gag in particular surprised us: Tips! I took an old coffee cup and wrote “TIPS” on the side, placing it in front of the table in jest. Mike and I did our usual shtick, but at the end of Wednesday preview night we discovered there was $21 in the cup -- more than what we made selling our products! What started as a joke turned out to be very lucrative, and something Mike and I definitely will incorporate into future shows!

Yet I came to downtown San Diego with my print run cut by half of what I usually take due to uncertainty. With the person whom I asked to script the book (I just came up with the story) pulling out of Comic-Con at the last minute coupled with a barely passable print job, I was weary to even try to sell the book. It took my good friend Steve to knock some sense into me when he said, “This book is a reflection of you. If you don’t believe in it no one else will, so sell the (dung) out of it!”

So I did.

I touted Pretty Vacant’s originality (“Mad scientists making money to fund their evil experiments”) with attendees and producers searching for new concepts. I spoke about the Women In Tubes trope with fetishists. I revealed the scientists' dying for beauty mantra to Goths. I bantered (Robert would say “flirted”) with pretty ladies regarding the book’s message of female (and male) empowerment. By the end of Saturday I had sold out, which was good because I was beat…

It’s not just one thing that gets you down, but a lot of little things that chip away at you: my scriptwriter pulling out, my hard selling making me miss my annual lunch with my friend Rodney, Dustin and I getting hit on by guys, Sandra losing her badge, the convention not giving exhibitors enough time to get ready, none of my friends/family attending the panel I was on and last but not least, the constant jokes at my expense.

In spite of all that, I had a great time! I got to hang out with my friends (David, Courtney) and nieces, I met a lot a great people (Jenna, Chris, Ryan), Carlos and Mike led a group of attendees to sing Happy Birthday for me on Thursday, and I got to spend Sunday strictly as a fan in Hall H! (Where I got to see Bryan Cranston pull a prank on the “Breaking Bad” panel and see the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors compare sonic screwdrivers on the “Doctor Who” panel.) I even made enough money to pay my print run and settle with Mike regarding my share of the table.

Finally, something that had the potential to end badly turned out very differently. My millionaire investor cousin flew down on my birthday utilizing a private jet and came into the show via a limosine. He and his partner were wearing business suits – not to cosplay, but to invest in a movie studio. Then they came to visit me at E-7. I introduced them to Mike and my products. My cousin told his partner how much his son loves reading Pretty Vacant (cool!) and the partner asked me why the vibe is different in this area. This is what I told him:

“You’ve noticed something Hollywood producers, Comic-Con staff and returning fans all realize. Everywhere else they are selling you a product. In this section of the convention floor we are selling you our ideas. The ideas here will eventually be the products sold out there. We’re the creative fuel that powers pop culture’s engines!”

And with that, my cousin and his partner departed to no doubt take over more companies, but not before leaving a sizable tip!

Previous Comic-Con Entry

Stop Thinking, Start Drinking!

 When Janet Met Jonny
"Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps"

It's my birthday.

And I'm at Comic-Con.

It's my birthday, and I'm at Comic-Con!

I'm at my third favorite place in the world on my birthday!  Could the stars possible align again and enable a future birthday to occur at my first or second?

That's too much to contemplate on this birthday.  Today, I'm just going to take advice from BBC3's "Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps"...

... and let it fizzle out in a week!

Well, How Did I Get Here?

It’s been a long and winding road for Gigi Gutierrez. She has gone from Los Angeles to London, Las Vegas, Reykjavik and back. Now she’s headed for China!

Whenever readers pick up a new issue of Pretty Vacant, they realize that Gigi is pushed further away from a normal, stable life. The momentum is ongoing and it doesn’t seem to end!

We stumble from one situation to the next in real life. It’s the same for Gigi, only magnified. She's competing in beach volleyball matches and reality shows on one end while she’s frozen and plastinated as a mannequin's body mold on the other.

There’s a literary term for it: serialized storytelling. Passed on from generation to another, it led to a new level of critical respectability when television used it in the 1950s, leading to it’s use being co-opted by Marvel Comics in the 1960s.

Yet comic book serialization did not see its golden era until Chris Claremont was offered the Marvel writing gig of The Uncanny X-Men in 1975. With great artists such as Dave Cockrum, John Byrne and Jim Lee, Claremont weaved an ongoing tale over the next 16 years, taking The X-Men from one barely-survivable fight to the next: overcoming being hypnotized puppets in a killer circus, defending a star empire in outer space or taking on their arch-nemesis Magneto under the Antarctic.

It’s strange that Claremont doesn’t seem to get the credit he deserves today. Revisionists Alan Moore and Frank Miller (both taking delight in deconstructing superheroes) have passed him in the pantheon of comic writers, yet Claremont’s influence is undeniable. Where this year’s Iron Man 3 and Man Of Steel movies were original stories for the screen, the upcoming 2014 film X-Men: Days Of Future Past is a direct homage to the classic 1981 Claremont storyline in X-Men 141 & 142.

Cover for X-Men 141 (Jan 1981).  Art by the amazing John Byrne! 

Claremont’s stories dealing with religious and racial bigotry with the multicultural superhero team did resonate with a certain sixteen-year-old high school student in Southern California. However, the main reason why The Uncanny X-Men became the top selling comic book for 15 years was that Claremont’s stories were just plain fun!

In a nod to Miller and Moore, the mechanics of the plastination process is explained somewhat. Still, Gigi's adventures are not supposed to be scientific essays (yawn); they’re supposed to be fun! Judging by the look on Gigi’s face in page two (see above) of the upcoming Pretty Vacant: Made In China, she’s having fun kicking butt and taking names. And if she gets platinated along the way, getting her back to normal is just part of the fun!

The future is certain. Give Gigi time to work it out!

Kudos if you remember the lyric in the song that is used for the title of this post. Same as it ever was!