I am home! For a day or two, before lectures and weddings and things set me to scurrying out of town once more. Folks, in July, I am pretty sure that I’m just going to chain myself to the front porch and resist all attempts to dislodge me until the month is out.
While in Manhattan, apart from selling comic books, I got to:
– shake Allison Janney’s hand backstage after a performance of 9 to 5
– check out the view from Lerner Books’ offices on the 72nd floor of the Empire State building
– see Angela Lansbury perform two days before winning a Tony for the part from seats so close that I could see up her nose
– eat some seriously dangerous pine-nut almond sugar cookies from an Italian bakery on Bleecker
– pray for death in Times Square (as all sane people should)
– take a survey of all of the red-figure Attic vase paintings depicting chickens in the collection at the Met
– see the awesome Donnetta Lavinia Grays bellow every obscene word imaginable at a reading at the Public
– stalk the turtles in Central Park
– mock Teddy Roosevelt’s unbearably butch statue, and a few other billion things.
Nonetheless, I am happy to be home. New York is a helluva thing, but it has the effect of making me appreciate the silly provincial charms and humane calm of Portland and the Northwest. (Although I really do wish there were a better selection of 5th century BCE chicken paintings at the museum here.)
It was a great pleasure seeing so many people at MoCCA! Thank you to everybody who came and said hello, bought a book, or just gossiped with me. After four years of studiously keeping to the left half of the country it was delightful to see both old friends and new faces. I’ll be visiting much more frequently in the future, so you’ll all have a chance to get bored of me before the decade is out.
And now I’m going to sleep off a bit of the jetlag before finishing the most recent page of Family Man writing a detailed outline for a book proposal sending out more book orders mocking up an illustration laying out three small press publishing projects inking three Oscar & Annie strips ordering more stickers ordering a new round of Bite Me redoing the Family Man webpage…ET CETERA!
In about twelve hours and change, the fabulous Katie Lane and I will be getting up to hop a plane (or planes, rather) to New York.
We’ll be there close to a week, ostensibly for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) festival on the 6th and 7th, but also to eat lots of food, see plays on the cheap, poke around museums, and just generally make nuisances of ourselves.
During the festival, I’ll be at table 517 with Klio from SPQR Blues! I’ll have books and minicomics and a few other things for giveaway – please stop by and say hello! I am very friendly and I will write silly things inside your book.
Speaking of books, I’ve sent out almost all Bite Me! orders at this point – less than a dozen orders have been delayed due to reprinting of some sold out art, shirts, and a slight shortage of spoons (who’d have thought). But odds are that if you paid online, your package is on the way as of this evening. Hurray! It feels good to be mostly caught up. International orders have all gone out as well,with only a few exceptions like the above.
It does make me feel ridiculous charging folks the $15 US it can cost to send a book overseas, but it’s also no fun to eat the mailing expense – if somebody in the UK knows of a decent small press distributor who’d be up for taking on my UK, Commonwealth, and European orders, I’d be interested in connecting. It would be a pretty light task all things considered.
And now: packing! See you all in New York, and I’ll see the rest of you online when I get home. It’s gonna be one crazy little summer, and I look forward to it.
(There might be a half page of Family Man tonight. To settle my nerves, if nothing else.)
I’m in the middle of working my way through the Bite Me! shipping backlog, putting together material for potential future publishing projects, and preparing for a week in New York for MoCCA!
Not to mention picking up yet another sexy round of prescriptions in an attempt to make my post-viral breathing tube look less like this:
And more like this:
So I’m taking a pass on a page this week, which drives me nuts but seems responsible.
But, here we are, a new set of notes for pages 130-140! I really went kind of insane this time, trying to explain both wigs and early Protestant theology. I know that you have had burning questions about these things for a very long time. Consider them answered.
And, again, I’ll be at the MoCCA Art Festival in New York, June 6-7, tabling with Klio of SPQR Blues.
Ah yes! Time to remind everybody that I will be at MoCCA in New York this June 6 & 7! I’ll be exhibiting with (and courtesy of!) the dreadfully fantastic Klio, she who brings you SPQR Blues. Together we will be historytastic.
I’ll be there with some of the remaining stock of Bite Me! . Also with prints and buttons and stickers and whatever else I can cram into the suitcase that hasn’t sold out yet.
More news as we get closer to the show. In the meantime, more books go out in the mail every few days! It’s fun to watch the stack get skinnier. Had a bit of a bottleneck with the button packs (those little bastards are time-consuming), but that’s on the mend, so a big chunk more of the deluxe packages will be going out soon.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled pony.
