Comic Con - Wednesday Preview Night: The Show That Ate San Diego

Holy shit, man. Holy shit.

Comic Con International is here again, and I'm here with it. This time around I've got a professional badge, which is sort of like a license to kill, except not at all. It's more that I get in for free and can skip the long lines. I'm now the kind of person last year's me would have hated.

I'm going to go out on a (extremely sturdy) limb here and say that this year's attendance is enormously bigger than the last. I certainly don't remember this many people at Preview Night, and there were a shit-ton of people at Preview Night last year.

I hear whispered stories that Wednesday night used to be a quiet, genteel affair, attended only by the bored and completists. This year it was a hellish mosh pit of FREE FREE FREE showbags and posters and screaming, pushing people trying to grab 5 of everything.

There was a line 100 people deep for postcards and buttons at the DC booth. Just to pick them up. Postcards and buttons.

I almost died at the Warner Brothers booth while securing a bag with a picture of Wonder Woman on it. There was nothing in the bags, they're just bags, but people were crushing each other to get to them. The poor WB people were yelling for the crowd to remain calm. It was like the goddamn Fall of Berlin in there.

It made me a little bit sick for a little while. Then I remembered that Preview Night had shocked me last year, and I went on to have a really good show. And hey, if Comic Con's bloodthirsty consumerism doesn't make you throw up in your mouth a little, at least once, then you ain't human.

Besides, I bought my first comic book of the show -- the new volume of Elephantmen, signed by Richard Starkings! -- and I can't wait to read it. Comics are great. Comic Con is great. So long as I get to skip all the lines.

Now for the return of a now-annual tradition: the photographing of the daily swag. Here's Wednesday's haul:


Why yes, that Battlestar bag is awesome. Cool cover for this year's Event Guide, too.

And now, a picture of my satchel bag, new buttons on the right. I got a DC Nation, an Elephantmen, and a... Hang on. What's that?! Could it be?


It is. That, my friends, is a CAGES button. Limited run of 50. If you want one of your own, you'll have to bump into us at the con and ask us. Or we may be hanging out Friday or Saturday with the wonderful Eric Knisley over in the Small Press area.

Preview Night is over. On with the show!

Updatey

Still working, still kinda writing. Things are humming along with CAGES. I actually spoke to my publisher for the first time last week (thanks to Skype), which is weird when you consider that I've known him for close to two years now.

Bought myself a new computer. It is very lovely. After some wrangling, my dual-boot Ubuntu/Vista setup works like a charm.

Look! Animal-themed links!

- How the Vancouver Aquarium harpooned a killer whale back in the 60s.

- Man arrested for slapping a camel on the butt.

- Rat, cat and dog, living together in harmony.

- The greatest pets ever. EVER.

CAGES Is Almost Upon Us

My first book CAGES is at the printers right now. Like, as we speak. This is fairly exciting.

It also means that I'm going to be very busy for the foreseeable future. The marketing blitzkrieg is already underway -- the official website's getting redesigned (ditto the Insomnia Publications site), press releases are being put out, and I'm sending digital review copies to those worthy reviewers and bloggers who want to write about it.

So... are you a comic book reviewer or blogger? Would you like a review copy of the book? Well, why didn't you say so? Just shoot me an email at the usual place, and I'll be happy to send you a copy.

For those of you going to the Bristol International Comics Expo in a few weeks, you'll even have a chance to pick up a special advance copy of the book. Just sidle over to the Insomnia Publications table and look for a Scottish bloke called Crawford. Tell him, in these exact words, "G'day from Xander". He'll know what to do.

Thirdly (!), some more exciting news about CAGES: Australian comics superstar Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night, Fell) will be providing us with a foreword for the book. He is a scholar and a gentleman.

And last but not least, I can announce that Insomnia will be attending San Diego Comic Con again this year. Okay, actually it's just me and Mel. But we'll have a table, and banners, and lovely comics to sell. Have you booked your accommodation yet?

Okay, I lied, there's one more thing: My writing partner and all-around great guy Josh Hechinger just did an excellent interview for Sequential Tart. I swear, I would have pointed you to this even if he hadn't given me a shout-out in the interview.

Home, Alive

Back home now, after more than a month away. I was without internet access for a week, and it hurts more and more each time. Can we hurry up with the Technological Singularity already? Okay.

I detoured to Sydney on the way back for my US visa interview. It was even more nightmarish-citizen-processing-farm than you'd expect. Two-and-a-half hours of queue up, surrender your possessions, metal detector, security questions, sit down, watch looped film, wait in line, security questions, shuffle to next room, take ticket, wait in line, surrender your forms, wait in line, digital fingerprints, take ticket, wait in line, interview, and then you wander out of the building, dazed and blinking in the middle of a hot Sydney lunch hour. I passed the time by thinking loud subversive thoughts and chatting with my fellow processees.

Xmas is coming. The novel is still in my head, ticking and whirring and rattling at the bars. CAGES is cooking along, and my Elephant Words pieces are feeling like fun again.

And hey, look! A friend of mine made a cool new vlog post: http://www.sequential-one.com/blog/?p=1393

50th Post Comics Extravaganza!

Believe it or not, this is the 50th post since I started this odd little experiment of a blog.

Of course, 50 posts isn't very impressive for someone like, say Josh Hechinger, who gets in at least 20 before breakfast. But for me? Well, it's rather big. 50 posts in 3 months! That's, like... some number of posts per week. I no can do math. :(

Anyway, I thought I'd celebrate by giving you all first look at the cover to Cages, soon to be my first published comic book. (For those just waking up in the back: It's a dark future story presented as a self-contained graphic novel, it's coming out next year from the fine folks at Insomnia Publications, and the art is by the wonderfully talented Mel Cook.)

We wanted something really different and eye-catching for the cover, so we contacted Jonathan Hickman -- iconoclast, comic artist and soon-to-be-superstar -- to see what he could come up with. And, yeah, it pretty much blew us away:





But that's just whetted your appetites, hasn't it? What's that you say? You'd like to see some more of Cages?

Well, alright. Here's 5 finished pages from Chapter 2. This is about a quarter of the way through the book; our heroes, the three children, have just escaped from the lab and met a group of survivors, who are led by a slightly-crazed shaman:
















But that's not enough for you, is it? You'd like to see even more art from the brush of the prodigious Miss Cook, wouldn't you?

Well, because I can't say no to you, here's the cover art for Mysterious Visions Anthology #12, to be released next year and containing our story Ho Versus Joe. It's a blood-drenched black comedy that answers the eternal question: Who would win in a fight between Zombie Ho Chi Minh and Zombie Joseph Stalin?





(Dimestore Productions have taken down the project pages for some reason, but you can still see the fantastic Ho Versus Joe Round 2 character illustrations here.)

This concludes our 50th post. I wish I could promise you that the next 50 will be witty, erudite and bursting with content, and that they'll enrich your lives in hitherto unimaginable ways... but that'd probably be lying.


Cross-posted to my Comicspace and the official Cages website.

ALL CAPS

People are always interested to learn that there's no standard script format in comics.

Okay, no, they're never really that interested. But I was interested, the first time I learned that fact. Coming from a screenwriting background, where readers/agents/anyone will happily shred your script because it has improperly indented sluglines, or the wrong brand of metal brads or whatever, it was a breath of fresh air.

The fun part (or annoying part, depending on your point of view) is that you get to change the way you write a comics script to suit every new project or new artist. CAGES, which I've been working on for over a year now, has gone through dozens of slightly different script formats. But it wasn't until the latest rewrite that I hit on the idea of writing out the dialogue in ALL CAPS.

Warren Ellis does it, and I'm sure others do too. It's a pretty obvious idea -- after all, that's the way all comics text appears on the page. But it always seemed clunky and distracting, somehow, until I actually gave it a shot. Also, instead of underlining text that was going to be bolded, I decided to try actually, you know, bolding it.

Here's how it looked before:

RAPH: Mike, come on…

MIKE: You come on, Raph!

RAPH: What does that even mean? Look, I’m just saying, at this point we should probably –

RAPH: Run!

Whereas, in the new draft, it looks like this:

RAPH: MIKE, COME ON…

MIKE: YOU COME ON, RAPH!

RAPH: WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? LOOK, I’M JUST SAYING, AT THIS POINT WE SHOULD PROBABLY –

RAPH: RUN!

I have no idea why, but I find this method about a thousand times easier to work with. It's such a little change, but it's allowing me to produce much more natural dialogue. Perhaps it's something to do with the bold making it easier to 'feel' the emphasis, but who knows?

Whatever works, right?

(This post was cross-posted to the CAGES blog.)

Sequential <3

That thing in the title? It's a sequential heart. Get it?

I love comics, I really do. I'm writing chapter 3 of CAGES right now, and it's fun, fun, fun. Heroes get shot! Bad guys get eaten by monsters! Robot clones!

In honor of comics, here are some cool links:

Panel and Pixel, the spiritual successor of the Engine, opens to much fanfare and silliness.

Paul Pope's new book Pulphope is the best book about the creative process you'll read all year. Plus, it's unbelievably gorgeous. A bit like me.

This one's for all my friends who don't yet read comics: A link to a whole bunch of fantastic Issue Ones, free to read. I guarantee there's something in there for everybody. If you like crazy-explodey-action, click on Casanova. If you like crime-noir, try Fell. If you'd like to feel all indie and relevant, read Phonogram.

And now I'd better get back to that script...

Conventional Thinking

Being a collection of thoughts on or inspired by San Diego Comic Con...

• Man, Blackberries are popular over here. I must have seen 50 of the bloody things in just a few days. Same with Nintendo DSes. Not so much with the iPhones, but the ones I saw sure looked cool.

• What the hell are they going to do about the crowds next year? Word has it that the Con is locked into the SD Convention Center for at least another 5 years, so this should be interesting.

• After 5 days of teaser trailers, celebrities, Star Wars, Star Trek, costumes, toys, TV, gaming and collectibles, I'm trying to imagine what an actual comic book convention would be like. You know -- one of the ones devoted solely to, um, comic books.

• When you first crack open the official programme, you inevitably start circling panels and workshops and spotlight sessions all over the place. But when you actually get there, you find it's extremely taxing to attend more then 3 of these a day.

• Want to read Joss' new comic? It's free right here.
  

• Really, the city of San Diego is wonderfully supportive of Comic Con. Its poor citizens didn't seem to mind too much that their downtown was cordoned off, their roads detoured, their trains commandeered and their historic quarter defiled by the presence of a billion nerds. The SDPD did an excellent and thankless job keeping the crowds from spilling onto roads and train tracks. But Jesus, I'm surprised they all didn't just leave town for a week.

• Americans are fascinated by British people, aren't they? Watching Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis speak is to watch a crowd in thrall. And then you look at the massive output of comic books set in or related to Britain (especially from Vertigo), and the success of Doctor Who, etc., and you go 'Hmm'. My accent was frequently mistaken for British, and they always looked so damned disappointed when I corrected them.

• I'd like to give mad props and shout-outs to the Godly Men of Small Press Table K-15: The Xeric-winning Eric Knisley, the Eisner-nominated Paul Friedrich, and all-around nice guy and cephalopod enthusiast Kevin Dixon.

• More shout-outs to the excellent folks in charge of Age of Insects. I hope they did extremely well from the con, after the incredible effort they put in.

• I've learned a hell of a lot in the last few days. I've learned what it takes to make your book stand out from the crowd; I've learned about the importance of cultivating a writing persona; the nature of fans and fandom; the various attitudes and strategies taken by different companies in the comics world; the art of meeting people and the power of face-time. There's a whole mess of thoughts just swirling around in my head that I hope to make sense of over the next few days.
  

• I've also learned the importance of clothing. There's certainly an advantage to be had from wearing a classy shirt, as opposed to a fan-shirt, when you're trying to act all professional. Not that the latter doesn't have its benefits. For example, as I boarded the train back to LA, I was having a lot of trouble lifting my ludicrously-heavy luggage over my shoulders, let alone up into the luggage rack. Then I heard a voice from the seat behind me: "Need a hand with that... fellow Browncoat?". The man had spotted the brand-new Firefly shirt I was wearing. We are legion.

• I heard some crazy things regarding Hollywood's presence at the con. Rumor was that most major studios sent 5 to 8 scouts this year. Word at the Engine drinks was that the Avatar booth got at least 5 option queries a day -- producers would walk up to the comic books, point at them and go, "Is this optioned? How much?". Rantz Hoseley told me about the producer who tried to option his promo pamphlet for a book that's not even out yet. Next year, for the CAGES booth, I think we'll have to have big signs made up which read 'Option Available -- Guaranteed Bigger Than Spider-Man'. Or nametags that say 'Ask Me About My Low, Low Creative Integrity!'

• Jesus fucking Christ, Ladronn's Elephantmen books look beautiful in person.

• The highlights of the con? My Big Pitch, and Joss' panel -- plus honorable mentions to Warren's panel and the Engine drinks.

• And finally, there's one thought that haunts me: SD may be the biggest show, but it's only one convention among many. A lot of poor, tired creators and publishers are going to have to do this again at Chicago in 2 weeks, and at various places all year round. Madness.