Month: April 2014

Several months back I wrote a blog about the “sounds of silence”, where I explored the way creators choose to portray (or not portray) sound effects in comic pages. I won’t rehash that entry here (that’s what the link is for, after all), but as today’s comic goes live with its whumpings and bumpings and ble-e-e-gh, the subject is on my mind again.

For instance, how do you spell the word ‘okay’? The way I just did? Or are you more of an ‘o.k.’ or ‘ok’ person? Or are you Raymond Chandler who always insisted on spelling it ‘okey’, and screw you if you didn’t like it? Do your characters say “damn it!”, “damnit!” or “dammit!” ? Do they just “sigh” or do they bust out with an Alan Moore-style “huaaaaauuugh!” ?

It occurred to me how much these little variations can mark stylistic differences between one creator and another, similar to the way a handwriting expert examines how someone loops their signature. For instance if you know about Chandler and a dude offered you a “lost manuscript” of his where ‘okey’ was spelled differently, you might get very suspicious. If you picked up an Alan Moore comic which was chock full of ‘ZOT!’ and ‘KA-POW!’ and people weeping with word bubbles of ‘Sob!’, it would seem like something was very off… like a Rob Liefeld drawing displaying realistic anatomy and a lack of pouches.

But so long as a creator is alive, there’s also certainly no prohibition against them trying different ways of doing things. Not every Moore comic has that same sound effects moratorium that Watchmen or V for Vendetta had. Moore even penned a “Writing for Comics” guide in 1985 that he nowadays disavows as crap that should be forgotten rather than studied… just as an example of how people can change their thinking, even on matters they seem quite adamant about for the moment. Hell there’s stuff in this very blog series I can go back and read and scratch my head wondering what “that guy” was thinking.

There’s also the possibility where comics are concerned that the writer isn’t doing their own lettering, which could mean you’re looking at the stylistic preferences of another person entirely. But if they are doing their own lettering, all the choices they make from bubble structure to font to bolding to even how they choose to convey expressions and sounds can get pretty individualistic. And there’s really nothing wrong with that, so long as the story gets told effectively. I think it’s actually part of what makes comics fun, especially in the independent scene.

Plus, you have no idea how long it took me to come up with a visual way to express the sound a goat makes, funky font and all. This is my onomatopoeia, mm hmm. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Sit back, compadres, and let me spin you a little tale.

Y’all already know how I feel about the “hard sell” and its place at comic conventions. If you don’t, or don’t remember, here’s the harsh language rant, and here’s the kindler, gentler version. If you don’t have the time or inclination to read those, the summary is that–nossir, no ma’am–I don’t like it. I believe you can sell your product without getting in folks’ faces about it, and while some level of assertiveness and engagement is a good thing to have, and there are probably decent debates to be had about where the lines can be drawn between “active” and “overbearing”…

…pardners, there are some times when the behavior in question just unquestionably crosses the line.

Let me take you back to last Friday, the first day of WonderCon Anaheim 2014. Dawn and I have finished setting up our table in the Small Press area, which by happy chance has ended up on the corner of two aisles. True, this year the Small Press area has been moved to the furthest back corner from the entrances, but I remind myself that I thought our placement last year was terrible and yet we ended up having our best Friday ever. Patience. Our displays are up. Dawn’s artwork is ready to catch wandering eyes. 3-day badges have sold out (and apparently Friday-only badges did as well, at least by day’s end). We are pleased to note steady foot traffic almost from the beginning. Maybe last year was a fluke, but maybe not. We’ll let those who are interested come to us, check us out, and…

“DO YOU LIKE COMICS?!”

Like a lightning bolt in an otherwise clear summer sky, a high-pitched voice rent through the background noise. I sought the source of this disturbance and spied a woman out in the middle of the aisle, accosting passerby repeatedly with this question. If they answered in the affirmative (which, c’mon… you’re at a COMICS CONVENTION… this is like someone at a Farmer’s Market shouting “DO YOU LIKE VEGETABLES?!”) then she would corral them over to a table in the midst of our row, pulling them past all the other vendors, whereupon the man there would offer them free comics and candy, and (I’m guessing) a sales pitch. Rinse and repeat.

Now mind you, I’m also observing a percentage of people who are visibly shying away from her when she suddenly inserts herself into their path and barks her inquiry. They flee, and as long as she’s there they probably won’t be back. This is not good. The only times people are walking down that big aisle in peace are the times she’s playing pied piper to those who said yes (or probably in more than one case, were just too afraid to say no). If this intrusive hawking was happening from their paid table space, I would still be annoyed, but the fact she was repeatedly leaving it and going out not just to the middle of our row but to the main artery intersection leading to it? The fact she was herding people past several of her neighbors, who had also paid for their tables? My teeth were starting to grind. A lot.

Still, I’m not a naturally confrontational person, nor is Dawn. We, and our friends at the table next to us, suffered in silence, wondering how many people we were missing out on that might have browsed our wares (and possibly bought things) had they felt comfortable doing so.

Maybe that would have been the sad state of things for the rest of the convention. Except then it got worse.

Two people were right in the middle of checking out Dawn’s art display when the woman barged in with her pitch and ran them off.

Could someone seriously be this oblivious to exhibitor etiquette, or was this on purpose? Either way, I’d had enough, but first I went to ask some veteran exhibitor friends if that kind of behavior was merely rude or actually against the convention rules (I vaguely recalled some sort of prohibiton against operating outside your booth). They agreed it sucked from an “empathy towards your fellows” standpoint but weren’t sure, and suggested I bring it up to the WonderCon staff.

So, for the first time ever, I found myself seeking out the folks responsible for keeping order on the exhibit floor to express my concerns about another exhibitor. You may say I should have directly confronted her myself rather than doing this, but really, I figured at worst all they’d do is warn her to stop, and I wouldn’t have created an awkward atmosphere between us personally for the rest of the weekend. Also I wasn’t even sure I had grounds for complaint, but the moment I said what was happening the staff, to their credit, were quite sympathetic and informed me in no uncertain terms that it was against Con rules, and a floor manager went out there and then to see if it was still happening. According to another text I’d gotten from Dawn, not only was it still happening but another exhibitor in our row had now joined in hawking his wares in the aisle, perhaps feeling it was the only way to compete.

So then, you may ask, why was I talking up being a vigilante in this blog title? I went to the proper authorities, and they took care of it, right?

Well, no, I’m afraid not. I don’t know if the floor manager never made it over there or what, but when I got back to our table it was still happening. 30 minutes went by, and it was still happening, with no sign of official intervention…

…and then suddenly there the woman was, close enough to reach out and touch,  fully blocking our table as she was pitching her table to the latest group to come by.

That was the last straw. I waited until she returned once again to that main aisle way, got up, went over, got her attention, and politely explained to her that what she was doing was not permitted, and furthermore was really unfair to the rest of us. Her response was telling… no argument, no protest, except to wave towards the other guy now handing out bookmarks and demand “Well you better tell him, too!” And you know what? At that point, in for a penny, in for a pound– I had no problem going right over and doing that (though I felt like I was the adult at a playground having to say “I don’t care who started it, it’s going to stop!”). His response was more along the lines I expected, basically that he figured anything that drove more traffic “our way” was a good thing… which ignores that both of them were driving traffic specifically to their tables, when they weren’t just driving people away from the area entirely.

I never touched either person, nor raised my voice, nor uttered a harsh word. It’s possible, however, that because of my natural largeness, I did loom. It’s possible that my politeness came across as the barely restrained rage that, admittedly, it was. I was past caring about anything except both the offending parties returning immediately to their tables and staying there for the rest of the evening. Which they did.

Well, okay, I later spied the woman up and about again, handing out flyers down the way where she maybe hoped I couldn’t see her, but at least she was no longer walking people past us, or accosting them while they were very obviously trying to browse another exhibitor’s wares. I guess at that point, I figured I’d done all I could be expected to do, and since our sales had finally starting picking up (go figure!), that was enough.

Still, that night in our hotel I pondered how it was going to be for the next two days. Would the people I’d confronted resent me? Or worse yet, lapse back into more of the same behavior? I didn’t regret my actions and felt them more than reasonable under the circumstances, but I’d certainly have to deal with at least some awkwardness as a consequence.

Or not. Friday night was the last I saw of either of the people I’d had a word with. When we set up on Saturday, the woman was nowhere to be seen, and the other table was entirely empty (later bearing a note that they’d moved to a booth elsewhere on the floor). And Dawn and I proceeded to have our best single sales day ever in our entire history of exhibiting.

I don’t know enough to claim I had anything to do with the vanishing acts. The man running the table the woman was leading people to was still around, but I didn’t talk to him. If he resented my interference, so be it, but it seemed like he ended up doing just fine getting customers without her help. For all I know he never really wanted her to be doing what she did. Maybe she decided it was a hostile environment? Or maybe she had only planned to be there for one day, anyhow? As for the other folks, if they were dissatisfied with their position and took the opportunity to move? More power to them.

Maybe my speaking up made the difference, and maybe it didn’t, but whether their behavior was born of ignorance or a misguided sense of competitiveness, I do feel better that I confronted it rather than just stewing and letting it slide. I don’t really consider myself the Batman type, but at least just this once, a little bit of courage in my convictions seemed to go a long way.

The comic before this one shows Chuck opening a bag of Jolly Ranchers, which are fairly readable on the bag as being such (not to mention Chuck joking about it in the comic before that). I had mentioned in the script that maybe we shouldn’t go so far as to have the name on the bag be readable, but wires got crossed and there it was. Should we blur it out? Make it generic? If I was that afraid, why even write the joke in the first place? Most importantly, what did it say that I even have to ask these damn questions?

I mean, it’s technically illegal to use anyone else’s trademarks or intellectual property without their permission… except when it’s not. I remember companies in commercials used to be limited to comparing their product to a vaguely suggested “leading brand”, but then that changed so you could, for example, show a bottle of Tide detergent, trademarked logo and all, as long as it was for comparison purposes. And really, trademark law is supposed to apply only when there is the possibility of confusion, especially when one brand might be unfairly profiting from that confusion. As an example you could start up a company selling “Wrangler barbecue sauce”, but if you’re marketing anything to do with clothing, especially jeans, you’d be in some hot water.

Assuming anyone bothers to try and enforce it, of course. I look at a company like TeeFury and still scratch my head over its continued existence, with a business model built almost exclusively on profiting off products featuring unlicensed IP’s of popular culture. TeeFury claims they’re protected by the parody clauses of fair use, but really when you get down to it “Parody” and “Fair Use” are concepts that are still nebulous at best and subject to the whims of how much money and how many lawyers people are willing to throw at them. For all that I might hate what George Lucas did to the Star Wars franchise with the prequel movies, I’ll admit he always took a very lenient attitude towards the fandom in regards to allowing them to produce derivative works without interference. Now that Disney owns the rights, though, who knows?

Look at the average convention artist’s alley and you’ll see unlicensed fan art being sold everywhere. Etsy and Ebay, too. Enforcement of IP in the Internet Age probably seems like an unwinnable game of Whack-A-Mole to legal departments, particularly when any crackdowns tend to result in PR backlashes. Remember the whole Firefly “Jayne Hat” controversy? No? Well, you can read here if you wanna. When people first started making and selling them Joss Whedon himself was reported as more overjoyed and flattered than anything, then a few years later (and as some makers argued, after their hard work had created a demand) the official licensing deals came in and the Cease and Desists started.

How many parody (or even non-parody) Dungeons & Dragons webcomics are there out there? And yet Order of the Stick to my knowledge has never been hit with a C&D, while Rusty & Co. had to shut down for several months and work out a settlement with Wizards of the Coast that included the creator having to change the name of a character (including all previous references) from “Yuan-Tiffany” because WotC had “Yuan-Ti” trademarked. If you’ve ever read Rusty & Co. (and you should, because it’s a good comic), it’s about as clear-cut a case of parody–and for that matter affectionate parody–as you can get. Riddle me that one.

Dawn used to have a Zazzle store for her personal artwork. Then one day, she got a notice from them they’d wiped her whole site because of an infringement claim. Not suspended. Wiped. Why? Fender, the guitar manufacturer, said that this image used their trademarked style of guitar head without permission. For that sin, not just that offering but all the offerings on her Zazzle account were now gone, and while she could have remade the site from scratch without the offending artwork, can you blame her for not bothering? After all, next time she might unwittingly draw someone’s tennis shoes as looking too much like Nikes, right?

And yet Homestuck flat out uses Betty Crocker’s name and logos with no changes, as well as casting the corporation as an evil empire, and no one blinks. The company is aware of it and just shrugs and considers it fun, or perhaps even free advertising. Gunnerkrigg Court at one point featured very recognizable action figures of Spider-Man and Batman in someone’s room. I’m not sure if the Archaia’s published print version still had them, but if it did, I submit it as further evidence of how maddeningly random all this still is.

It doesn’t seem to matter how known you are, or how you’re using it, or anything else that should matter in a sane world. So we’re living a bit dangerously, except we run this site ourselves so I figure the worst that happens if we do get some C&D from the powers that be behind Jolly Rancher or Spongebob Squarepants is that we’ll have to go back and change an image or two. We have that technology, and while it would still be annoying since I sincerely doubt we’re profiting in any way off of their inclusion in our comic, it’s not a difficult fix. I don’t plan to hinge any plots around them. I’m also not going to fight against it since I don’t have a legal department like ThinkGeek does that can take the time to spar over concerns about unicorn meat slogans. And people should have something of a say on when and where their creations appear, if it’s reasonable. But it’s gotten so sensitive these days, and sometimes I just get so damn tired of watching movies and TV shows where everyone has to drink “Beer brand Beer” or is only allowed to drink, say, Schlitz. Or Duff. I know, I know, it’s not crucial to the narrative, but it does occasionally lend an air of the surreal to the proceedings.

This from a man who created “ClearStream” as a thinly disguised take-off on “Clear Channel”, right? But would calling the candy “Happy Ranchers” have had the effect I wanted? Or showing a statue of Blandy Beaks, the bubbly bird friend of SquishBill SphereShorts? Tying into an air of nostalgia doesn’t work very well if the audience doesn’t get what they’re supposed to be nostalgic about. Perhaps one day we’ll be called upon to replace them with products of our imagination instead of products of our recognition. Perhaps that day will be tomorrow; but for today, at least, we will show them as they’re meant to be.

One of my favorite moments in Jaws has nothing to do with a giant shark attacking people. It’s a slow, quiet scene in a dining room between a police chief who’s had a really bad day, and his young son responding to his father’s brooding by imitating his oh-so serious countenance. Eventually the father notices and a bit of a game plays out, and by the end Chief Brody might not be entirely cheered up, but you can see him remembering and contemplating that there are still good things in the world.

There are no explosions. There is no blood. There is only the most tangential relation to the main storyline. Nothing earth-shattering is revealed about anyone… a father and son care about each other? The mother watching on is charmed by their antics? Big whoop. And yet Spielberg recognized that cutting it would have been a criminal act. It’s somehow magically both completely off-topic and yet completely crucial to the narrative.

I don’t claim to possess anything approaching that level of instinct, but somewhere along the line I composed a scene where Chuck tries to share his stash of old sweets with Rosa, and it felt right. A reader might well ask what the hell this has to do with zombie ranching, perhaps even going so far as to declare their time is being wasted with inconsequential padding. Well, maybe. Come to think of it, I may have gone over this exact same argument before, when I brought up the idea that not every Chekhov’s Gun has to fire.

That entry is getting on towards three years old, now, and oddly enough predates some of the “guns” that have gone off, such as the lawn flamingo playing a role in the Zane/McCarty confrontation, the Z Tracker, or the thought of the siege house moat being filled with zombies. Does that mean Chuck’s jar of honey will be playing a vital narrative role in the months to come? I’ll let you speculate if you want, but I wouldn’t think too hard on it. Right now it just stands as some more (hopefully entertaining) interaction between Chuck and Rosa, and I’m content to offer that up since I’m still of a mind to think it serves a purpose. It might seem off-topic, but Jaws made moments like these work, I think precisely because they possessed a certain organic feel that gets an audience invested in the characters as real people rather than just human-shaped enablers of plot.

That and the whole honey thing is pretty fascinating. So thanks, Chuck, for again serving as my human-shaped enabler of factoids. When you’re involved it seems like nothing’s off-topic at all.

So here’s a thing that happens sometimes in fiction. You have a character who’s a young teenager, but a writer who’s in, say, their thirties. If said writer isn’t careful (or perhaps just flat out doesn’t care), you can end up with a 13 year old girl talking and acting like someone much closer to that writer’s age. Alternately they could end up as the author’s vague memory of what being a teenager was like, or perhaps a crankily rendered stereotype of “those damn kids” that the author is certain they were never, EVER like in THEIR youth, uttering all manner of unintelligible slang when they don’t just have their noses buried in their Twitters or Instaspams or whatnot.

I may have mentioned this before, but I went to Junior High School (not sure foreign equivalents here but think around ages 12-16) in the Valley. Not just any valley; the San Fernando Valley. THE Valley that brought the phrase “Valley Girl” to the world, with all of its attendant “ohmuhGAWDS” and “totally tubular to the max”‘s and “gag me with a spoon!”s. Except… I don’t really remember any of my peers at that time actually talking like that, except when they wanted to make fun of the TV shows and such that insisted we did. The male equivalent was the surfer dude a la Jeff Spicoli, and to go by the media of the day, all us damn kids at Walter Reed Junior High should have sounded like that. We didn’t. Well, not all of us. All stereotypes do have their elements of truth, after all.

Is this a terrible thing? Perhaps not. I doubt I should be casting too many stones when I’ve made a conscious decision to have most of my characters talkin’ like twangy cowpokes (y’all), even though many modern day Texans don’t sound too different from, say, Californians, barring certain pronunciations of words and names for things. What can be more jarring to me is a 13 year old in 2014 who suddenly starts ranting about how the Star Wars prequels are so inferior to the original trilogy. Or rattles off a multi-page statement on the dichotomy of Church and State in America. Or instantly recognizes and starts gushing over a Snake Plissken figurine.

I’m not saying it’s impossible for a 13 year old to be capable of any or all of these things, but as they are things my 40 year old self is totally capable of I feel a certain alarm and closer examination might be in order before they go live in the mouth of a character who could be being reduced to little more than a mini-me sock puppet.

It’s a challenging thing, perhaps, to put yourself in the shoes of a generation different than your own. You can find far more webcomics characters nostalgic for Super Nintendo and Gargoyles than you can find ones nostalgic for the Apple II and Johnny Carson. Even more challenging, though, is to put yourself in the kicks of the younger generation (it is “kicks”, right? Damn kids). What are the things that they’ll be pining for 20 years from now? And looking back at my own youth, I have to admit, my fondness for the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival comes straight from my dad… so it’s not *just* the new stuff that kids might end up carrying through to adulthood.

According to his bio that I myself wrote, Uncle Chuck scavenges “pre-plague memorabilia”. Well, what’s that mean? License plates and coca-cola signs, the kind of vintage stuff you might see on a show like American Pickers? That’s the memorabilia of *this* day and age. There’s no reason he can’t since he very well might have watched that show as a kid, just like he watched Deadliest Catch. Obviously I have at least one nod to the 1980s in his love for ZZ Top (a band which itself cultivates an even more retro image with its classic cars, etc.). ZZ Top is still touring to this day, but maybe might be considered “old people” music? Still, like I said, I’m all into CCR and they broke up before I was born. I think the ZZ Top vibe is one Chuck would similarly appreciate, especially since they’re Texas boys.

You know who else is Texan? Sandy Cheeks from Spongebob Squarepants. So yeah, her presence amongst Chuck’s acquisitions is my speculative nod to future nostalgia, the kind even a zombie apocalypse won’t be able to fully extinguish. Or considering how much would have been lost, maybe it would just make it all the more keen.