This cup of coffee and I are currently recovering from a long but successful weekend in Seattle for the Emerald City Comicon. Thank you to everybody who came by and said hello! It was a much-needed morale boost for me, here at the tail-end of this Winter of Ultimate Suck.
Thank you especially to everybody who asked me (often aggressively!) when the first Family Man book will be coming out. The answer: as soon as possible. I’ve got several requests out for quotes, and as soon as I receive one that sounds good, I’ll kick into pre-press mode. It’s going to be a lot of work to get it into shape (Dylan of 2006 didn’t quite know what she was setting herself up for…) and I’ll be taking preorders/Kickstarter to help cover the costs.
On to other business:
My lovely friend, sometime-collaborator, and all-around champion YA author and youth librarian Sara Ryan is tackling an excellent project.
She’s in the process of writing a graphic novel to be illustrated by Carla Speed McNeil, and, being a good person, decided to ask all the artists at Periscope Studio about their pet peeves when it comes to comics writing.
I chimed in. I write for myself, I’ve written for others, and I’ve drawn scripts from other people as well, so I am just full of annoying advice!
My first item:
1) Don’t say “Have fun with this!” Unless the writer actually knows what I find fun. “In this panel, we see an elegantly-dressed 18th century intellectual riding a dragon” would, for me, be fun. For somebody else, eye-stabby.
Grammar, by Sebald Beham. There are a lot of old illustrations depicting the classical liberal arts: there’s a whole slew of them here.
Those of you who’ll be at the Emerald City Comicon this weekend will get first crack at these sweet little 5×7″ giclee prints from my Heifer International series. Come get ’em at Table F-07!
They are easy to frame and easy to love, and they won’t go on sale at my store until after the convention.
If they do well, I’d like to gradually release the whole series in print form and donate a percentage of profit to Heifer. So stop on by!
Heeeey it’s a page. Another bruiser of a week, gang. April! April will be the month where things start to go my way! Oh well, at least Luther seems to be doing well for the moment. We can be confident that will end soon.
But, most importantly, I’ll be in Seattle this weekend at the Emerald City Comicon. Come visit me at Table F-07, right next to Erika and much of Periscope Studio.
I’ll have some snazzy new prints to sell – many featuring cute animals! You want them, I know you do.
An (unattributed) image that manages to be delightful in half a dozen different ways. Courtesy group fashion-history blog La Mode Illustree.
