Month: May 2013

If you’ve been paying attention to our comings and goings, you’ll know that this past weekend Dawn and I made our journey to Phoenix Comicon. If you haven’t? Uh, well… this past weekend Dawn and I made our journey to Phoenix Comicon.

How did it go? Well, in my blog on WonderCon 2013 a couple months back I mentioned how I’ve adopted a degree of low expectations where conventions are concerned, in hopes of being pleasantly surprised. WonderCon then indeed turned out to be shockingly good for us, especially given that we didn’t have to spend much in terms of getting there. Given the mess of WonderCon 2012, it really took me by surprise, and some of my exhibitor friends who didn’t come back had to just ponder what might have been.

Our situation with Phoenix could be said to be a reversal of that. All our exhibitor friends who’d been there in previous years talked it up so high that (as another first-timer stated) “it sounded like the aisles were paved with gold”. It’s a four day convention, which does imply a certain amount of bigness… San Diego lasts for five days, while I’d consider the average to be three… but it doesn’t matter how long a convention lasts if the sales aren’t there. Phoenix Comicon 2012 was reportedly such a money maker that one small creator-owned operation we know made over $1500 by the halfway mark. That’s probably a drop in the bucket to a vendor like BOOM! Studios, but it’s the kind of numbers that would put stars in the eyes of most people on our level.

How would we have done last year? Dawn and I will never know. This year, the aisles lacked their golden sheen and most everyone I talked to both new and old had to admit to some disappointment. Thursday and Friday were very slow for the exhibitors, seemingly across the board. It was definitely true for us. Saturday picked up, and after a desolate first few hours on Sunday things picked up so much Sunday actually became our best day, even with the drama of a fire alarm evacuation towards the end. Fortunately the convention did not burn down at that time, even if it might have been interesting to see if it would rise from the ashes like its namesake.

When all was said and done, we made more than we have at any convention aside from WonderCon, but the costs of going long distance still swallowed that, even though we avoided flying/shipping things and got a no frills hotel stay. The logistics were probably the smoothest we’ve ever had on one of these trips, so I have no complaints there… but it didn’t do anything to change our minds about scaling back to local shows for the foreseeable future. I’m not bitching and moaning here, because the fact is that here’s a situation where my tendency towards low expectations helped out. I listened to all the hype, and though of course it would have been great had we caught the wave of those previous years, I wasn’t devastated at not breaking even, much less the failure to rake in thousands of dollars. We didn’t put ourselves in a position where that was necessary.

Anyhow, it just goes to show that there are always surprises, whether you’re trying out a new show or even returning to a previous one. I had an idea that heading out to Arizona might be a place where our comic might find some traction, what with the Western themes, but it seemed like we found more people in Anaheim that were into the ranching and farming angle. Maybe there’s a lesson there in comics as escapism, where if you live in a desert, you’d rather read something set elsewhere. Maybe it was the position and size of our table. Maybe it was the phase of the moon. Trying to figure these things out seems like a great way to go nuts. The only sane expectation to have is the unexpected.

Speaking of which, before I wrap up for the week I did want to gush about a few cool things I could say made the trip worthwhile beyond the mere monetary aspects. We got to meet at least a few people who were fans of the comic that we hadn’t met before, including Laura Knatt who will be debuting a new webcomic of her own quite soon, titled CMYK. Sarrah Wilkinson of Red Nebula Studios, who drew that wonderful Popcorn fan art, personally presented a print of it that she had made up just for us (and you should’ve seen her stunning cosplay of Garrus from Mass Effect… wow!). We also got to be chatty neighbors with Jennie Breeden of The Devil’s Panties and Dusty of Scuttlebutt Ink, who were both very fun to nerd out with. I found Andrew Hussie of Homestuck standing alone at the Topataco booth on Thursday night and got him all to myself for several minutes of questions and admiration, which was pretty great because Homestuck is freaking amazing.

But I must give special thanks to Arizona-based artist Keith Decesare, who caught our eyes with his work and before the con ended was generous enough to agree to an art trade despite never meeting us before. I’m really glad I asked him because as far as I can tell this particular print isn’t even available on his online store:

You can click the image for the larger version based at his site, http://www.kadcreations.com . In fact, hell, click that link and browse around, he’s got several gorgeous pieces on display… this one is just the one that spoke most to me. What can I say? I have a weakness for tough ladies that look like they’re truly striving against the odds, and while this knight isn’t hard on the eyes, she’s not there to just be cheesecake… she’s got a monster to slay or die trying… perhaps both.

But as Keith himself admits, the image started as a doodle of something completely different. The direction it went in for him was a surprise. As far as I’m concerned, it was one of my happiest surprises of the show.

“I chartered one of the superb vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company for a hundred and eighty thousand dollars, and invited several parties to go along with me, twelve hundred in all. I shall not take so many next time. The fewer people you take with you, the fewer there are to grumble. I did not suppose that any one could find anything to grumble at in so faultless a ship as ours, but I was mistaken. Very few of our twelve hundred had ever been so pleasantly circumstanced before, or had sailed with an abler Captain or a more obliging baggage master, but yet they grumbled. Such is human-nature. The man who drinks beer at home always criticizes the champagne, and finds fault with the Burgundy when he is invited out to dinner.” – Mark Twain, in a letter to the Chicago Republican

 Ah, webcomics. Like Twain’s steamship, you are invited along for the ride, free of charge, for a venture beyond the bounds of the usual. And doesn’t it also seem to hold true that the more people along for the ride, the more grumbling occurs?

I’ve touched on this subject before, and while there’s always the possibility of commentary that’s just outright trolling, the majority probably comes from the idea of being helpful. That we care, so the criticism we are providing will make things better somehow, particularly if we’re pointing out what seem to be mistakes.

Now in looking at the issue from the other side in the case of Zombie Ranch, there has been more than once that we missed filling in the colors of a certain spot, or in the case of last week’s comic forgot altogether to put the bolts and brands on the zombies that should have been there. Truth to tell I woke up the next morning suddenly realizing it and expecting to log on to find someone questioning the lapse, and yep, there it was in the very first comment. There was nothing to be done there but go “whoops” and make the correction as soon as we had the chance. Thank heavens for a digital age that makes that easy. Sooner or later we’d probably notice these mistakes ourselves (hopefully before going to any print version), but I have no problem with people bringing them up. I do wish we were perfect enough it never happened, but occasionally there’s going to be a fly landing in the Burgundy glass and it’s legitimate to politely point that out.

But all that said and done, there are limits. There is a line where constructive criticism just crosses over into nitpicking, and the artist(s) who invited you along on this trip might justifiably become a bit frustrated. Now I still don’t think it gives an artist the right to have a public meltdown and go crazypants on someone, but my “inspiration” for the current post came from moseying by one of the latest pages for the always gorgeously drawn and composed Next Town Over.

NTO has a big audience, no doubt far bigger than ours… I don’t think we’ve ever gotten 20 or more comments on a single page, for instance, while Erin Mehlos gets them on a regular basis. But then I look at some of those comments and see things like “The wound has moved” or a discussion of how the rain shouldn’t be slanted a particular way. Now I’m no artist, but rain is not a particularly easy thing to do well, and I find the fact she’s including it at all to be rather impressive, particularly since she now has a newborn child to take care of.  She spends a few posts going back and forth on the idea of viewer perspective before the frustration bubble bursts:

Growing up in the 1980s, I was a huge Uncanny X-Men fan. I had next to no idea about who was writing and drawing it (although for the record it was the Chris Claremont/John Byrne dream team), all I knew was my big sister just happened to have a few issues lying around in her room that also happened to be the issues introducing Kitty Pryde, the Hellfire Club (including one Emma Frost), and culminating in the Dark Phoenix saga. To say they blew my fragile little mind is probably understatement, and for the next decade or so I devoured various X-stories even as the spin-offs began. It took the advent of the “Dark Age” of the 1990s before I gave up on the ever proliferating crop, no longer really recognizing the characters I had grown so attached to.

That’s a whole other story, but I want to get back to the fact that I first ran across those X-men comics in my big sister’s room. I don’t know if she was still interested much in them at that point, but they represented prima facie evidence that in some earlier time they had held her interest enough for her to brave our dusty, dark local comic book store and buy several issues over a course of several months.

But you know, why not? The X-books, by and large, still have a reputation for being “female friendly”, and what Claremont was doing around the late 70s/early 80s is probably largely responsible for establishing that. That age of comics was where heroes were getting more complicated than just punching the bad guys, and Storm and Jean Grey/Phoenix benefited from that just as much as their male counterparts. Sure it might have just been the two of them on the team as regulars, but as soon as you have even two ladies present, you stop being able to just define them as “the girl”.  I guess there still could have been “the white girl” and “the black girl”, but Claremont was pretty good about giving them a lot more distinctions to chew over.

A little over a year ago I made an entire post on the subject of superficiality in characters, of the danger of those that deviate from the “norm” being seen as symbols rather than people, becoming defined by their deviance rather than any other facet of their being. Unless you as a writer can overcome this human tendency to compartmentalize based on surface impressions, you risk your heroes ending up feeling somehow more shallow, like the way a happy face might represent a person smiling, but an actual photorealistic portrait of a person smiling has so much more for a viewer to contemplate. Without any perceivable depth to the presentation, the spectre of tokenism raises its stereotypical head.

In the course of that argument with myself, I came up with the idea that the easiest way to solve the problem was plurality. Like in the example above, if there’s two women on the X-team, the viewer’s mind will start to search for other differences besides just boobs/no boobs. Would they stop at the skin color? Maybe, but at least you’re already getting some analytical momentum going, right? The brain has now engaged in the same mode as it would when looking between the male characters and being curious about what makes this one different than that one. The next step as an author is the same as you would do with those men… give them distinct dialogue, give them things to react to in different ways, show the things that make them interesting so that the reader, in turn, gets interested. This gal’s tough, but her hot temper can get her in trouble. This gal’s honorable to a fault. Et cetera, et cetera.

Mind you, all this further development can only happen if the ladies in question get some time in the spotlight. That’s true of any characters, truthfully, but in mainstream comics it can still be rare to see the women on a team get some quality time. That’s why this month, I’m looking with piqued interest at the X-Men again for the first time in a long time. Why? Because X-Men may actually be a misnomer in this case. Call it an experiment in plurality:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/01/x-men-relaunches-as-all-female-superhero-team/

I’ll be interested to see how this turns out. A lot of the women on the roster have already benefited in the past from the X-books not being shy about focusing on them from time to time, but now we’re also looking at an entire team dynamic filled out without any of the usual (male) suspects involved. It leaves Rogue unquestionably in the “big muscle” role, Psylocke (with pants!) probably acting as the hard edged loner… and any Marvel brat of the 80s knows that “Storm With Mohawk = Leader”. But no matter which character of this team the spotlight focuses on from issue to issue, it’ll be a woman.

X-Men #1 should supposedly be out by the end of May. The plurality is there. It just remains to be seen what writer Brian Wood can do with it.

Verisimilitude, dear readers. Verisimilitude. Mouthful of a word, isn’t it? In fiction it speaks directly to the issue of “realism”, and how close or how far a story holds to how we understand things to function in our daily lives. It’s also tied into willing suspension of disbelief, internal consistency, blah-dee blah…

The important thing to me here, this week, was how it plays into a certain protagonist finally getting the opportunity to punch the hell out of someone who richly, richly deserved it.

Zombie Ranch is a story where for the most part, I haven’t had the characters do too much that might be considered, for lack of a better term, “badass”. They’re not superheroes. In fact, keeping with the theme of reality television, I like to think of them just plain folks. Plain folks doing a dangerous job. I tend to write them that way, too, because it makes them real to me… and, hopefully, that carries through to the readership.

The thing is, though, that no fiction will be absolutely true-to-life, at least not any fiction I would find conceivably enjoyable. This opinion piece has an interesting discussion on realism as applied to superhero comics, which includes the following quote: “…when fans talk about wanting more “realism” in their superhero stories, I don’t think that’s what they mean. I think they want verisimilitude. Which is a ten-dollar word that translates to, more or less, “fake realism that I can sort of believe in even though I know it’s silly.” ”

Now that’s definitely a “more or less” translation, but I understand what the author’s getting at, and it applies to more than just superheroes but all manner of drama. Every time some CSI perp is identified based on their “enhanced” reflection in a crappy photograph, every time the commanders of great armies suddenly find themselves face to face on the battlefield where they can engage in single combat, every time characters trade perfectly formed, zingy one-liners over the blades of their crossed swords or the trays of their afternoon tea… none of these things are very realistic, are they? But they sure are entertaining. No matter how grounded and realistic the setting, we crave a certain amount of departure. We want those acceptable breaks from reality, or why bother with fiction at all?

Even where the vaunted “reality television” is concerned, by the time it reaches an audience there’s a soundtrack added, visual effects, and tons and tons of editing to make sure you only see enough of the boring moments of working a crab boat long enough to remind you there are boring moments. But Zombie Ranch mostly represents the raw footage, right?

Well, it’s also a story. Mind you, it’s a story I paced with a deliberate slowness to the point where at least one review accused that in the entire first issue/episode, “nothing happens”, but there’s still plenty of stuff that comes with a bit of dramatic license attached, whether for the sake of humor or just presenting something cool.

Most of the time I’m pretty low-key about it, and Dawn’s art follows suit. You probably won’t ever see someone in this comic wielding chainsaw nunchucks, awesome as that is. It ain’t that kind of setting. But that doesn’t mean I can’t try to provide the occasional cathartic, heroic moment of… well, verisimilitude, of the kind Suzie has just busted out.

Some people even contend such moments are good for character development, but regardless of that they sure are damn good fun to read.

And write.

You know, I’m not sure if our weekly schedule has been harder or easier of late on those of you who are truly caught up in the throes of “What happens next?” Is it good to have a week to relax the tension while you go about your other business, or is it torturous? I hope it’s more towards the former, seeing as the schedule isn’t going to get faster anytime soon. My intent is not to torment, honest.

But yeah, regardless of intent I sure feel like I’ve hit the readership with a lot of cliff hangers lately, particularly compared to the early episodes. Not every page has ended with someone figuratively dangling by their fingernails, so I dare to dream that I’m not running fans to emotional exhaustion… but these last few weeks have been pretty intense.

In my defense, we’ve come to the climactic moments of this whole first story arc, so dangit, it’s high time for some focused intensity. Also in my defense, most of the readership likely isn’t nearly as invested as the vocal (and much appreciated!) few that are piping up every week to urge Suzie onwards and shake their fists in Muriel’s direction. I know at least one person who’s commented that they can’t ever really get concerned about a main protagonist because of the phenomenon of “plot armor” (mind you, if they ever read any of the books Game of Thrones is based on they’re in for a shock or ten). Others are reading over a dozen webcomics and taking classes/working jobs and just mosey by every month or so to see if “whats-her-name” finally got the drop on “whos-her-face”.

I don’t honestly know how many fans we’ve corralled that could be termed “hardcore”, in that they really (cliff) hang on our every update. I would be hesitant to declare that even one such exists, except just a few days ago Dawn got a comment on her DeviantArt page from a reader who claimed “yours is the only webcomic I follow religiously and bother to learn the posting schedule of. It has a lot of my favorite things.”

Just knowing even one such is out there is a heady feeling. Successfully getting people embroiled in your story and characters, especially to that level? Hell yeah. And yet ironically, those people are the most likely to suffer at those points of your story where you put your characters in harm’s way. I think most dramatic fiction gets its hooks in us regardless of people being aware of the plot armor phenomenon… the James Bond 007 movies are continuing proof of that. And Doctor Who has that whole bit where even if he dies he’ll come back, but that doesn’t stop people from being on the edge of their seats in regards to his adventures.

Mind you if a story was dependent on nothing more than cliff hangers I would probably find it boring rather quickly, which is why it’s important that people are interested in what James Bond is up to even when he’s not chained into the latest death trap. And then when he’s in the death trap, you desperately want him to get out of it so he can continue doing all those other cool things, and also kick the butt of that smug villain who put him there.

So, at least in some of your cases I think I’ve gotten to that point with Suzie, and because of that I do apologize for any emotional trauma all these recent cliff hangers may be provoking. Just remember, if and when she does make it through, you’ll also be the ones most primed to stand up and cheer.