I’ve been remiss for a number of weeks now–no new Simpleton strips, no blogging, and no announcements. Gingerbread Houses has continued to update weekly, thanks to Grug’s diligence, but on the writing side, I haven’t been nearly as productive as I would like for a variety of reason:

1. It’s summer. Hot weather always kills my ability to write.
2. I have a heavier class load for the second summer session, which takes more of my time. And I have an 8:00 AM class twice a week. Early mornings also consistently kill my ability to write.
3. I have another treatment for my thyroid cancer coming up. It’s a precautionary thing, not a major concern. But preparing for it is an issue: I have to go off my thyroid meds (which causes fatigue), and I can’t eat any iodine, which means I have to cook all my own meals in order to avoid iodized salt. So that’s been an additional time suck.
4. And, most importantly, Brandy and I are having a baby! Since we’re only just into the second trimester, this hasn’t actually been a time consuming issue, but it’s certainly been a mental preoccupation.

On the up side, I’m going into the last week of the summer session classes now. Then I get two weeks mostly off (still have to do some prep work for Fall classes) before the fall session starts. My fall workload will be heavier, but won’t start as early in the morning, so that should balance in my favor. And hopefully the weather will begin to cool off in a few weeks as well. Plus, my treatment will be done in just another two weeks, and then I can go back to a normal diet and start taking my pills again, which should have me in better spirits.

Despite all this, I have accomplished a couple of things. I did some revisions to the script for Gingerbread Houses, which I think will make the current chapter even better than it was. And I revised the opening pages of Trouble Is, to set a better tone for the rest of the book. I still have to follow through on revising both these projects, but I expect to do all of that in the two weeks between the end of summer and the beginning of fall. I hope!

After that…I might bring Simpleton back. It’s a low-priority project, but it is a good way to keep me working between other things. On the other hand, I may just go ahead and start a something new and big. It’s been over a year since the last time I started something new and big, so it seems about time.

I’m not going to do a big recap of MoCCA, since many others will do a better job of it than I would, but I just wanted to add a few thoughts to the discussion of the new venue. There have been some very strong reactions to the Armory, mostly negative. The two specific complaints worth noting:

• The Armory is ugly and looks like a gym.
• The Armory is oppressively hot and lacks air conditioning.

Both of these complaints are entirely accurate, and should certainly be taken into consideration in choosing next year’s venue. But I would like to offer a couple of counterpoints to these complaints:

• The Armory is much easier to navigate than The Puck Building. I wasn’t exhibiting this year, and spent all my time wandering the aisles—which I was able to do at my own pace, without getting bogged down in narrow, clogged walkways. This made browsing much more pleasant than it was in the tight aisles of the old venue. And it was also very easy to find out of the way corners to have a conversation or pull up a spot of floor to sit and eat your lunch. I find tight crowds very stressful—the new location was much easier on me in this regard.
• The Armory wasn’t any hotter than the upstairs portion of The Puck Building, which suffered a terrible greenhouse effect. Yes, it was wonderfully pretty up there, but it came at a price.
• Food was readily and easily available. More than anything else, the thing that frustrated me about The Puck Building was that it took me forever to figure out where I could get a quick meal that was both good and cheap. At the Armory, finding a great sandwich was as easy as crossing the street. I had a terrific Cuban hero at Latin Thing on Saturday, and an odd but tasty Asian-fusion pork sandwich at Baogette on Sunday. Both were affordable, fast, and easy to find, and I heard rumor of other wonderful places I could have tried if I’d just gone one more block around the corner. Food options are a vital consideration, and The Armory has it all over The Puck Building on that count.

The Boston Comics Roundtable was featured in The Boston Phoenix today. Read the full article here.

Most of the work done by the Roundtable’s members “has an indie-comics look,” Kender concedes. “But I sometimes wonder whether we may be pushing away people who are into mainstream comics, like superheroes. I see people drawing in cafés and I strike up conversations with them and find out they’ve drawn for Marvel or DC or Image Comics. And they’ve never heard about our group. I’m trying to bring in as many different genres as I can.”

News via my good friend and past co-author on Character Design for Graphic Novels, Steven Withrow:

Secrets of Digital Animation — August 2009!
by Steven Withrow

Now available for preorder through Amazon.com and other online bookstores is my book Secrets of Digital Animation from RotoVision and Rockport Publishers.

This book was quite an adventure to create, and I hope it lives up to the hype of the jacket copy:

Secrets of Digital Animation sets out to demonstrate and showcase a range of cutting-edge work, new techniques, and influential practitioners within all forms of contemporary animation, from anime to flashware, and from animated shorts to machinima, offering creative hints and tips from the genre masters. This book offers young practitioners, and those interested in broadening their skills, an insider’s view of the fast evolving work of animation; showcasing professionals and their creations, working methods, and inspiration, along with jargon-busting explanations and easy to follow demonstrations. Stunning examples of finished work are shown alongside conceptual drawings and works in progress. The book contains practical advice and case studies that explore the professional techniques behind designing innovative characters and fantastical worlds, and bringing them to life.

I will be attending MoCCA next weekend, but will not be exhibiting this year. I’ll probably carry a few copies of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day and Parens. around with me though, so if you should happen to see me around and feel compelled to make a purchase, I will happily accommodate!

It’s been a while since I last attended a con that I wasn’t exhibiting at. I’m looking forward to actually seeing some panels and making a better survey of the comics other folks are selling. Of course, I usually count on being chained to my table to keep me over-spending–without that shackle, I will be much harder pressed to resist temptation!

Unfortunately The Boston Comics Roundtable got shut out of tabling this year–MoCCA sold out crazy fast! The good news is a couple of our members, Cathy Leamy and Charles Snow, had already secured a table of their own, and so there will still be copies of Inbound available.

Gingerbread Houses moves steadily along — page 19 posted today, and we’re now in the final sequence of Chapter Two.

I’ve never read many biographies. I’ve always been a very fiction-oriented person, and where interests do extend into non-fiction realms, I’ve always been drawn more to science and technology than to personal or political history.

So, naturally, it makes perfect sense that I’ve now decided that I need to read one biography for each US President. I suppose it’s not totally random–certainly though the past couple of presidential elections, my interest in politics has increased considerably. But more and more of my fiction ideas are tending toward concepts rooted in historical events, so it’s time I started giving myself more solid grounding in the subjects that are inspiring me.

First up: John Adams. David McCullogh’s tome is on its way to me from the Wilmington Public Library at this very moment.

And yes, there’s a reason I’m starting with Adams — the Boston Comics Roundtable is working on its fourth issue, which will be on the theme of Boston history. I still need to script something for the issue, and I figure I might as well combine my current research project with my upcoming writing project and kill two birds at once by reading about a president from the Boston area. Otherwise, I do plan to go in order.

So–who has recommendations of particularly good presidential biographies I should read?

This past weekend I attended the first annual Maine Comics Arts Festival, organized by Rick Lowell of Casablanca Comics, and what can I say? It was possibly the most fun I’ve ever had at a comics convention! First off, it was located right in downtown Portland, which is one of my favorite places to spend a short weekend vacation. Lots of nice little shops (including Casablanca itself, which was already one of my standard stops when visiting), plenty of nearby places to eat, and the city stays active late into the night, with plenty of live music and good places to get a nice locally brewed beer.

The pre-show began Saturday night, with a ferry ride to Peak’s Island, where Rick hosted con exhibitors at the Peak’s Island Inn with complimentary appetizers and beer (courtesy of sponsor Shipyard Ale). It was a pleasure to be treated so generously—our participation in the show was clearly appreciated. After the first wave of exhibitors left (we had to exit by ferry, so there was no gradual tapering off of festivities) I shared a table with Rick, my good friends Shelli and Braden, Kean Soo, Zack Giallongo, and another gentleman whose name I didn’t catch. We had a delightful conversation about Muppet comics and TV shows of our youth (who else remembers the creepy yet touching moment when Red Fraggle, trapped in cave-in with Boober, and slowly running out of air, turns to her friend and asks the immortal line, “Boober…what is it like to die?”) I was particularly glad to finally have a conversation with Zack—for several years it’s seemed odd that I keep missing him, considering he seems to be friends with all my other friends. And now that I’ve met him, I regret that it didn’t happen sooner—he’s excellent!

I followed up the Peak Island party by joining several other members of The Boston Comics Roundtable at Novare Res, a “beer café,” which has a beer menu considerably longer than most restaurant’s food menus. (The Smuttynose Chai Porter is a real one-of-a-kind, and quite good. I recommend it.)

The convention proper started the next day at 10:00 AM at the Ocean View Convention Center, literally right on the water—with two full walls of windows facing the bay, letting in lots of sunlight, and nearby doors propped to admit the fresh ocean air, it was about as cheerful and well-lit convention venue as I can imagine. And that good cheer was only compounded by the youth turnout—I’ve never seen so many kids at a comics convention, clearly having a good time. There was some complaint from exhibitors that if they had realized the audience was going to be so kid-heavy, they’d have planned their exhibition materials differently, and there is already some discussion of taking the heavy youth presence into account when arranging the table distribution next year. That said, though, it was really good to see an event so welcoming to younger readers—it was the best kind of outreach, and kids and parents alike seemed to appreciate it.

There were some great talents at the show, which really made me wish I wasn’t on such a tight budget. All very indy, with lots of cool looking minis and self-produced books. The Center for Cartoon Studies had a great display, which I didn’t linger too long in front of, for fear that I would be too tempted to part with my limited cash. And I very much enjoyed chatting with my table neighbor, Sam Costello, who had some nice looking print editions of his Split Lip horror series.

By sheer volume, though, The Boston Comics Roundtable was biggest presence in the room—with five tables, we spanned nearly the entire length of the convention hall. You can see our exhibit in this photo by Aya Rothwell. Shelli’s artwork is in the extreme foreground, and in the far back, behind Braden’s hat, you can see my wife Brandy in a white shirt, standing behind my table. Everyone in-between is a BCR member.

I didn’t make very many purchases—it’s frustrating that convention season is in summer, when my personal funds are the shortest—but I did pick a quartet of Zack’s Novasett Island minis, as well as the first two issues of the Underburbs, which as been repeatedly recommended to me. My only other purchase was an official, ridiculously orange, con t-shirt. I don’t usually wear t-shirts with images on them, but I liked the sea monster. Also, I have an odd weakness for ridiculously orange t-shirts, and this was the most ridiculously orange t-shirt I’ve ever seen.

Sales for those exhibitors selling more adult-oriented material were generally pretty slow through the first half of the day, when the kids were really out in force. As the day went along, though, the audience got progressively older, and sales seemed to pick up. Personally, I actually did a little better than I have at my last couple of shows, especially with my big-ticket textbook.

The con was just the one day, ending at 5:00, which seemed like just the right amount of time for a smaller show like this one, though I was still sorry to see it end. The last thing I did before shutting down my table was to head back into the exhibitor lounge to get one last cup of coffee—yes, there was enough free coffee provided to exhibitors to last the entire show. That alone wins my heart. Then we packed up, and Brandy and I headed to David’s Restaurant for some of their exceptional clam chowder (a culinary must anytime we’re in Portland), then headed home again. I’ll certainly be back for the next one—even if I hadn’t sold anything, it was such an energetic and fun con that I would gladly come back next year. It’s the sort of con that sends you home really excited to get right back to making comics.

Via Steven Withrow, here’s Who’s Hungry, a short student film retelling “Hansel and Gretel.” It’s an especially dark and violent version, but very well done, and quite faithful to the structure of the original story.

This coming Sunday I’ll be exhibiting at the very first Maine Comics Arts Festival in Portland Maine, organized by the excellent Casablanca Comics. As usual, you’ll be able to find me tabling with The Boston Comics Roundtable. If you’re in New England, you should come to the show!