The Book is SO CLOSE ...

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It is so close to all of you out there, but for me MY ADVANCED COPY HAS ARRIVED AND IT IS GLORIOUS AND IT IS SPARKLY:

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Here's a picture of the back and OH HEY LOOK MK Reed had something to say about it:

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I'm JUUUUUST a wee bit over excited that my first ever full length full comic written and drawn by me is going to be out in 10 weeks. 10 weeks! March 25th! It's teens! It's an amusement park! THERE MIGHT BE FIGHTS TOO!

Here are some ways you can get the book and therefore support me and become my best friend:

WHATEVER your preferred method of buying and viewing and consuming, you have my deeeeeepest appreciation!

IMMA JETPACK OFF INTO THE BEST 2015 EVAR!

 

End of 2014

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G'wan, get outta here 2014, move along, chop chop! Hey c'mere 2015, come sit down, how you doin'?

I've been so over 2014 for about 6 months now but also weirdly afraid to let it go. Some years are just all about plodding through stuff and making creative deposits for the future, and floating along impatient until stuff starts to take effect. As glad as I am that 2014 is over and sad that the holidays are done, I am nerdy enough to appreciate a good fresh start. However, before you can look ahead and promise yourself you'll eat more veggies, jog 24 hours a day, learn Ruby, and save enough to quit your day job, it's always important to take note of what you have accomplished so far. Then you can meet that future/better/snarkier jerk version of yourself that's got her shit together STRAIGHT in the eyes and say "SEE? Here is the proof I've got this future - a whole list of things I've already gotten!"

THINGS I MANAGED TO DO IN 2014:

SOME THINGS I LEARNED IN 2014:

  • Just keep swimming
    • You will get kicked in the teeth by life, but it's helped me to think that when horrible things happen and you lose loved ones - you appreciate those around you MORE and dwell on people/things/situations you don't have LESS. Keep them close, but also keep going.
  • Writing every day is important for my process as well as my sanity
  • Building/maintaining a comics community is incredibly important in encouraging/inspiring one another
  • Patreon is fun, ads are not fun
    • In terms of trying to make this crazy thing we call comics into more of a paying gig, being able to post sketches and videos and communicate directly with my audience (as opposed to chucking things into a void with each update) is IMMENSELY more satisfying. Plus, enabling people to support me directly instead of depending on icky sticky ads is really nice too. Yay new models for comics biz!

Okay, enough reminiscing about good ol' 2014. ON TO THE NEXT!

COMICS COMING OUT IN 2015:

  • Part-Time Princesses - released by Oni Press on March 25th. GET PUMPED!
  • Short story in Vertigo's Strange Sports Stories #1, March 18th. BIG TIME, Y'ALL
  • Another secret thing to be released March/April timeframe - yay/shhhhh!
  • Bonnie Collected book - I've put this off wayyyyy too long, but yes - I would actually like to collect and post a big book of all my Bonnie strips thus far

CONVENTIONS PLANNED FOR 2015:

  • Staple!, Austin, TX - March 7-8, 2015
  • Emerald City Comic Con, Seattle, WA - March 27-29, 2015
  • TCAF, Toronto, Canada - May 8-10, 2015
  • Heroes Con, Charlotte, NC - June 19-21, 2015
  • I'm also planning on spamming comic stores of the states with signings this year, so if you've got a kick-ass store I should put on my list, holler at me here!

Anyway, as always I couldn't do this whole crazy comics thing without you all out there reading my stuff! I mean, I'd probably still do it but it'd be WAY SADDER. A big, hearty, cheesy-face thank you to all of you out there for continuing to support me!

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Podcasty Love

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LET'S TALK PODCASTS!

I know everyone's all about the Serial right now (myself included - only 12 episodes, wha-WHAT??), but I wanted to give a shout out to some of my tried and true faves over the years (as any comicker will tell you, we go through a LOT of podcasts and audiobooks, crammed in amongst pencilling and inking and computerizing hours). I always try out some new ones, so this isn't ALL I'm listening to just now, but these are some oldie reliables:

Stuff Mom Never Told You - A big one for me - Cristen and Caroline are not only informed and thorough when presenting a lot of women's issues, but somehow manage to keep it from succumbing to OH GOD WHY with a good blend of sassy humor. Cristen dons her fake British accent and Caroline talks about everything in relation to her mom Sally and we all learn something without feeling depressed. And - check out how awesome Cristen's youtube channels are - the muppet is strong with this one!

Mysterious Universe - Another one I've been listening to for years, this podcast run by two Australian gents about everything paranormal is a real treat. They dish about all the latest sightings, mock Time Travelling Yowie followers, and admit to ghost encounters of their own that still leave them terrified. If you LOVE paranormal stuff like me but are afraid of the crystal worshippers, check this one out.

The Guardian Tech Weekly - A newer one (to me) that I've been trying out to get my fix of tech news. It always features a panel with a variety of topics, and the panelists are knowledgeable without being boring.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour - Oh man - my obsession with live radio broadcasts began with an episode of Frasier and WILL NEVER DIE. I was so happy to find not only an old-style radio broadcast but one that blends in heaps of nerd culture and amazing storytelling altogether. WITH tons of guest stars. And incorporating the ghost of a pterodactyl who's a deputy private eye. I LOVE THIS.

Jill on Money - Money slash financial podcasts are boring and awful but Jill answers questions, listens, and makes fun of her producer while not making you feel like an idiot AND passing on good advice. She's awesome.

99% Invisible - A design podcast that points out the design in the everyday - I love its subtlety and appreciation of the minute details. Plus I love any podcast that exhibits city planning that was actually, you know, thought about a bit.

RadioLab - Beautifully crafted sounds and discussions around several stories making up one scientific topic - I've had many a walk while listening to all the little bips and beeps Jad throws in the background, which really fill each episode with surprising depth.

StarTalk - Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a hero for all of us, leading the charge to bring scientific discovery back into vogue. His podcast is super informative while being exciting and encouraging, in true NDG fashion. Plus, every now and again he has Eugene Mirman co-host or run one of his live shows, which makes my day every time.

Savage Lovecast - I go through phases where I alternate between his snarky antics and Sex Nerd Sandra's zippy, fun answers to sex questions.

Stuff you Missed In History Class - The latest host pairing has done a great job (past pairings have been UBER awkward) - Holly especially in bringing some heart and feeling (and hella knowledge about historical clothesmaking) to the show.

Stuff You Should Know - A classic, general informy podcast on a wide range of topics with a HUGE back catalog. Josh & Chuck do a good job of balancing hardcore facts with rambly tangents without being annoying. Their banter is genuine, and funny, and rare.

I also go back and forth on WTF, Welcome to Night Vale, and The Daily Show Podcast. What are YOU PEOPLE listening to? I always love trying out a new one to throw in the pile!

 

Bmore Into Comics #5 - THIS SUNDAY!

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It's time for another edition of comics creators hanging out in a local bar in Baltimore, drawin' things, drinkin' things, and selling their books for all to enjoy!

Come on down to The Wind-Up Space this Sunday, December 14th from 12:00 - 5:00pm for the fun and squeeze in some holiday shopping while yer at it!

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Penny Wonderful

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I recently finished watching the first season of Penny Dreadful, which I've managed to drag out over the last few months. I liked it right away, mainly due to the cast and the moodiness of it, but then another characteristic of the show popped up that i found interesting. From the onset it seems very League of Extraordinary Gentleman, and it's tempting to do (which I totally did) the game where you spot the vampire, and the werewolf, and the frankenstein, etc. Ho hum, boring, we've seen this before. Look! Even a Dorian Gray thrown into the mix.

But what this show does differently, which I came to appreciate, is that it doesn't make a huge big deal of "GUESS WHAT ONE OF OUR CHARACTERS IS A WEREWOLF". The werewolf reveal isn't the point. The point is the character behind the werewolf, and how he's behaving and managing his shit and all the other aspects of his personality. So that once the werewolf is finally revealed, there's a LOT more to pull from his character (and be curious about - how does he have priest powers, for example?) and you don't have to just rely on BOOM WEREWOLF for all the character drama.

I haven't really witnessed this approach before - it's usually been the instant reveal, meant to surprise, and then backtracking to develop the rest of the character behind the werewolf. I really appreciated that the paranormal alter ego was almost an afterthought.

The main character Vanessa has power NOT as a vampire or werewolf, but in so much as things don't fuck with her because she's already possessed by something really awful. Something which she continually wrestles with and beats down by force of will. As horrific as her encounters with her possessor are, I do appreciate having a character who isn't known for her overblown outward powers as much as her inward strength.

It's an interesting thing to think about in terms of story development, and since I'm currently immersed in coming up with new ideas to pitch around, I appreciate finding shows like this that screw with boring ol' tropes.

Well . . . I'm never gonna be sick of werewolves, that's just a fact.

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Yet MORE Goddess Prints

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. . . Because you can never have enough drawings of Greek Goddesses, right? Or, like my classmate in college said when I turned in yet ANOTHER Greek Mythology-themed piece - "Typical Gallagher subject matter". ALL THE GODDESSES ALL THE TIME!

You can find all of these Power Ladies in either my Etsy Shop or my Storenvy one!




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Sales n' Things

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I know you're all being inundated with CRAZY FRIDAY POST-THANKSGIVING FOOD COMA SPEND MONEY NOW offers, so allow me to quietly, respectfully, slip this into your discount pile ...

It expires at midnight on Tuesday, December 2nd to, y'know give you an extra day to relax a bit.

And hey, if you're a Patreon person, you get even more off! Check out the activity feed for deets.

(if you're not a Patreon person, it's super easy to join in the behind-the-scenes comic talks we're having!)

 

ComfyCon!!

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Hey guys, I'll be hosting a panel for this year's ComfyCon TOMORROW!

(if you don't know what ComfyCon is, it's a fabulous webcomics creators convention run by comics peeps from the comfort of their own beds/pajama pants, created by Randy Milholland and Danielle Corsetto!)

The con is going on all weekend, so make sure to follow @ComfyCon on twitter to get the youtube links as they go up - also, here's the full schedule.

I'll be hosting the Making Comics Around a DayJob panel tomorrow at 2:00pm with Jeff Zugale and Gordon McAlpin! If you'd like to know how we juggle comics n' jobs, or what the interior of one room in our house looks like, or want to witness Google Hangouts in their purest awkwardness, join us!

***EDIT: In case you missed it, you can check out the panel here!

 

On Anxiety and Cake

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I borrowed a copy of Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half book a while back from a friend of mine, who recently reminded me that I still hadn't returned it. I figured it would be just another in a long line of books I borrowed from people - intending to read it, and then realizing I am really bad at reading/finishing books that aren't audiobooks.

And this isn't because I don't LOVE Hyperbole and a Half - I not only do, but also think Allie Brosh is uncannily brilliant at drawing facial expressions not seen on any human but likewise deeply understood in the human brain. (In my whole life, I will never create anything as perfect as The God of Cake)

Unfortunately, I have this thing where if I think something will affect me in a specific negative way, I avoid doing/reading/watching that thing entirely. Like my emotions are controlled by a series of buttons and once the wrong one is pushed it's impossible to pop it back out again and return to neutral. I mainly do this just in case they reiterate feelings of anxiety. I have gotten a LOT better about managing my anxiety in general (getting older helped a lot, as did volleyball, weirdly) but sometimes I forget all the work I've done managing my anxiety and worry that one little teeny tiny thing will push it back all up in my face. Because that's what anxiety does - it stays hidden in the corner with its ears pricked up, waiting to see if you'll fall for any of its filthy tricks again. Anxiety is those ghosts in Mario that follow you around and only stop when you look directly at them.

So when I read Brosh's strips on depression, outlining her experience drudging through it, and then heard Terry Gross bully her into talking about her suicidal thoughts on Fresh Air, I worried reading the whole Hyperbole and a Half book would make me too upset. (I'm not even linking to that crap interview)

Dumb, right? Yeah, reading about other people's struggles and hardships might upset you, yeh toolbag.

But then yesterday, while cleaning out my old podcasts on my phone, I discovered Marc Maron had recently interviewed Brosh and gave it a listen. The two of them had such a wonderful, caring, complete conversation not just about her depression, but about her life and experiences and intelligence and brilliance in general, that it was the perfect palette cleanser after the crap Terry Gross put her through. Yes, Maron can be a bit of a blowhard who loves to hear himself talk, and even though they still touched on a lot of really, REALLY, difficult stuff, I felt like this time it was more at Brosh's own speed, with someone who made an effort to understand an inkling of what she was talking about.

Which made me finally buck up and read the book, which is AMAZING and HILARIOUS and thought-provoking and I'm so glad I did.

So I think my takeaway from this experience (and the reason I've decided to bring it up here) that I've learned is that hey - talking about this stuff, whether anxiety, depression, mental illness, weird cravings, whatev - may actually make it a wee bit better! Maybe I shouldn't be so scared that just by saying the word ANXIETY three times I'll invoke the creature out of its corner.

Now -- my fear of invoking Bloody Mary just by THINKING about her name three times whilst in the bathroom -- that one I'm pretty sure is conquered by drinking Bloody Mary's every chance you get.

Maybe now I can move on to listening to the "How Panic Attacks Work" podcast from How Stuff Works that I intentionally skipped over ...

 

Boring Post-Wedding Blog Post #2: Table Decor for Days

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In Part 2 of my boring post-wedding recap, we get to the part I was most excited about … the DECOR! Well, excited when I wasn't paralyzed with overwhelming fear at how to put it all together. First I casually browsed some Pinterest ideas - specifically, looking at things like this and this, but THIS one is where I got my main inspiration from:

So rather than having table numbers, I decided to do drawings for each table, each one an interest of mine, or my fiancé's, or both - which lead to these:

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Next I needed to figure out what ELSE to put on the table. Since we knew it'd be outside in Fall, I was happy to do minimal runners as tablecloths (plus, hello - just renting table linens, I found out, was hella expensive). For a while I considered these tablecloths from Susty Party because they were simple, cute and cheap:

But we ended up throwing out that idea as being too unpredictable in a possibly windy outdoors. We were all set doing only burlap runners until the caterer and my fiancé convinced me that the tables needed full coverage, not just for aesthetics but because the uneven, splintery wood bits might snag the guests' clothing. So now we had white tablecloths with burlap runners as our base. Good deal.

We rented stemless glasses and linen napkins from the caterer too, but instead of using their dishes we found some super cute compostable dishes from Verterra that we wanted to incorporate:

Unfortunately, they were all sold out of their cute cutlery by the time we got to them, but luckily we found this place that had a similar alternative.

Next I had to figure out how else to fill up the tables. I'd seen on Young House Love a long while back that they'd used recycled wine bottles as water/lemonade/tea servers at their wedding, and figured maybe there was some way we could use our *ahem*MASSIVE*ahem* collection of empties at ours. I didn't want to use them to serve drinks, but thought it'd be fun to have them serve as vases. I spent a LOT of time trying to use this method to soak the labels off of the bottles, while my fiancé rubbed them with olive oil and then scraped the label off. Neither method was perfect, but both eventually worked. I threw some wheat stalks in them that I found at Michael's (and kept hidden in a closet until the wedding so my cat wouldn't continue to be mesmerized by them) so voila - more table stuff.

Next I convinced my parents to pick up a zillion flameless candles they found at Costco, which ended up being not only perfect for table decor, but also for port-a-potty decor, bar decor, and now for all-over-my-house-decor. They even have remote controls and timers, so you can have a BAM ROMANTIC atmosphere greet you whenever you get home from work! (which may or may not feel appropriate EVERY day)

These things and these cinnamon-scented pine cones I also picked up at Michael's really saved the port-a-potty experience, too. You feel less like an ass asking people to use a port-a-potty on a cold November day when at least it smells like cinnamon and has some candlelight ambience.

The only thing left to throw on the tables were some mason jars, because hello - rustic wedding, of COURSE there had to be mason jars! Which turned out to be a good thing, since the metal rods I'd gotten to hold the table cards immediately fell over, and needed to be braced within a mason jar in order to stand at all. They still tended to lean off-kilter, but maybe people would assume that was on purpose. Wouldn't want the drawing of the Muppets to be perfectly straight and upright, where's the fun in that??

It was pretty funny, the caterer had some design helpers who took it upon themselves to decorate the tables for us, using gourds and tree stump things and pumpkins from the venue. But we blew in, all "HOLD YOUR HORSES, WE'VE GOT EMPTY WINE BOTTLES AND DRAWINGS OF CATS WE NEED TO USE - I HAVE A PLAN". They stared at us and our wood cutlery and fake candles, but somehow throwing everything together worked out.

Here's what the final table setup looked like:

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Boring Post-Wedding Blog Post #1: The Where's

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And thus - let the blogging about my wedding last weekend begin!

When we first decided to get married, we had zero idea of where we wanted to do it. Our favorite bar? Too small. Our local supercute restaurant? Also too small. An old mansion? The zoo? The list was endless, though the prices/capacity SUPER varied.

Plus I was having trouble with the triple threat that hits you in the face immediately upon planning a wedding - which comes first: The date, the venue, or the guest list? You can't have a date if you don't know if a venue will be free on a particular date. You can't choose a venue until you know how many people you're inviting ... and how the hell can you invite anyone when you don't know when you're going to have it??

I was stuck at this, the very initial phase of planning, until my photographer friend Amanda mentioned this super cute outdoor venue we could consider:

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. . . RIGHT?? Cute, oozingly RUSTIC (which in this case wasn't a keyword for "crap" like Emily Gilmore thinks), and most importantly available in the fall AND customizable to however many people you wanted. SOLD. Plus we could have it all weekend, and since we'd chosen Saturday, November 1st as our wedding date - that only meant one thing - HALLOWEEN PRE-PARTY BOO YAH.

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Hemlock Farm is the name of this amazing place, which comes complete with a faux barn-hotel-B&B-thingie attached that you can rent out just for some fun, beautiful vacay's close to downtown Annapolis. It's gorgeous, and the owner Jen not only designed it but has a KA-BILLION ideas on how to change/alter/design it some more for whatever you want. When we rolled in Friday afternoon with our cars weighed down with empty wine bottles, wheat, and drawings (more on the decor in a post to come!) she already had a fun set of lanterns, tree stumps, and gourds for us to play with if we wished. Available gourds!

Which you can make the most of, by posing awkwardly in front of everything!

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(all photos credit: Matt Hollis)

And no, we hadn't yet considered what a wedding outdoors in November in Maryland (Maryland Weather is a crafty creature who combines humidity + frost + CRAZY WIND TUNNELS to keep us all looking wind-blown and moist and unprepared for anything) would be like, nor how many other things (tables, tents, bathrooms, food, etc) we'd have to find with an outdoor venue. More on that in a later post on this, when the Boring Post-Wedding Blog Post RECAP series continues!

Up next ... DECOR!

Part-Time Princesses Party Preview Party YAY

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AHOY-HOY!!

I'm using Mr. Burns's phone answering technique to excitedly share with you guys that my NEW book Part-Time Princesses (penned/drawn/stressed over by me, published by the amazing Oni Press) is now in Previews for pre-ordering!

(Yes, when this comes out it WILL have a title and my name on it)

I've illustrated a comic for Oni before (Glitter Kiss by amaze-tastic Adrianne Ambrose) but THIS one will be completely my fault! My wonderful, princessy fault, all powdery because it's stuffed full of funnel cake (spoiler - it takes place in an amusement park).

If you're a comic shop, please go forth and pre-order and support! If you're not, looky - the thing I've been mysteriously alluding to (who are we kidding, complaining about the work of) is finally going to be released!

MARCH 2015. Mark it, dude!

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Adventures in Hand Lettering

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I loooooove hand lettering. I'm obsessed with how messy and flawed and carefully crafted it looks.

I think I've been obsessed with hand lettering since before I realized it, back when I used to inhale as many Baby-Sitters Club books as I could. And what did they have every time there was a super special combined book that featured every BSC member getting their own chapter? A sample of their hand-writing!

Although I was a preteen and therefore kind of stuck in Stacey hand writing mode for a while - upright curvy letters and circles dotting the i's - I slowly gravitated toward Dawn's more tilted, casual script. Eventually it evolved into the messy, unattractive handwriting I still hold onto today, crafted by years of taking notes in college and work meetings. Speed became way more important than how it looked. I've never been a fan of my own handwriting, but lately I've gotten sick of how much it's devolved and have been consciously trying to spruce it up.

And what better excuse for testing out some handwriting skills? Wedding invitations, of course!

When we first started planning the wedding, I knew invitation design was one of the few things I'd really get into (not terrified by, such as catering and venue holding and money spending). The invitations themselves were cobbled together in a collection of handwriting-like fonts (I'll post those post-wedding -- actually there's a BUNCH of stuff about the wedding I will be posting once it's all over and I can get back to breezy, casual reality!) because I was too chicken to try my pen at them, but I decided to just go for the gusto with the envelopes.

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That's right, no pencilling beforehand, straight up ink! I wanted some way of combining the big and the swoopy with the thin and straight - so I decided on swoopy for the people, and organized for the address. However, it wasn't long before I abandoned doing the address part and outsourced that to my fiancee - he was much more concerned with being neat than I was, and it was way more fun to make it a team event.

I was quite pleased with the messy result, and it was so much fun I decided to extend it to the table decor as well. I knew I wanted each table to hold a drawing of one of our interests. At first I envisioned (as I usually do when starting a project) that the drawings would be very neat, precise, and I would draw with very thin, detailed, simple lines using only a tiny Micron pen. Of course that didn't happen, because like most things I do I end up working larger and messier than I plan and things take on a loud, weird life of their own.

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So I abandoned tiny neatness and went for mimicking the swoops of the envelope handwriting. This time I used a brush pen for the swoopy, which defeated the purpose of the thin spidery lines I like, but was fun nonetheless.

Here are how some of my favorite ones turned out:

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Now, I anticipate EVERYONE will want to sit at the Muppets table and I'll be the sole nerd at the Greek Mythology table . . .

Inktober Week 1

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INKTOBER!

Inktober is that magical time of year when fabulous artists all over participate in doing an inked drawing each day for the entire month of October. You can pencil and then ink, as long as the final output is in ink, but I decided to make it a personal challenge and JUST ink my drawings. I'm a very heavy penciller, so this has been a pretty big challenge for me. Also, I decided to mark the days in my moleskine ahead of time so I couldn't cheat and give up on a drawing I'd started and screwed up.

I know it's already the 13th (EEEEEEK!) but here's a recap of my first 6 days of Inktober realness! (and if you want to see them in real-ish time as I post them, be sure to follow my twitters/instagrams/tumblrs!) Follow a bunch of amazing artists out there by following the #inktober!

What I learned this week: I'm not confident of where I start to put my brush down, and I have a hard time re-evaluating onced I start drawing. But all in all, not bad as I expected!

It's also been a fun snapshot of what I've been up to day-to-day so far this month. Watching a LOT of Gilmore Girls (obvs), seeing Gone Girl, starting to watch Penny Dreadful, having a Haunted Bachelorette Party .... my life is very full .... of TV, apparently. And I've been highly advised to start watching Twin Peaks too, so LOOK OUT rest of Inktober! :) More to come as I post 'em!

 

In the Slowness

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Watching The Shining last night (on the big screen for once, ow owww!) made me realize how much I love the sloowwwww build up to impending doom in stories. I've been criticized a bunch of times for how slow things progress in a lot of my comics *ahem*especially Gods & Undergrads apparently*ahem* and I kind of knew I liked that style, but I didn't realize how often that pops up in some of my faves.

Seeing The Shining in the theater obviously took advantage of all of Kubrick's big, empty rooms and loooong shots cycling behind Danny in the Big Wheel, but it also gave the audience a LOT of time to take in all the little things that were slowly happening. My friend and I used to laugh at the subtitle screens shouting TUESDAY at us, after a particularly long shot of Jack doing nothing but staring out a window and drooling.

We thought it was there just to provide absurd drama for no reason. Really it was breaking up the hypnotic shots of calm eerieness that we'd been sucked into - and didn't even realize we were being sucked into -- until TUESDAY or SATURDAY rolled around on the screen and we snapped out of it. It's a perfect way of showing both just how quickly the meltdown starts to occur in the hotel (only a month, and what - a week into their 5 month stay?) while also making you feel like - as it says at the end - that Jack has always been there.

And I was just realizing that - as much as I adore Jack's wacky insanity from the get-go in the movie, his over-the-top goofiness combined with those endless open spaces make the climax all the more terrifying. After running around with a bat through endless corridors swatting at imaginary threats, Wendy is finally cornered into a cramped bathroom and the impossibility of fitting through an even cramped, tinier window as her only escape. There in that tiny space she has to confront all of the suddenly lethal (and only mildly funny) rage of Jack and his axe. All of the terror and buildup of the movie is suddenly all up in her face, and it's terrifying to see her complete meltdown.

But then she still manages to hack at him with her knife, get out, rescue her son and leave him to freeze to death.

 

Comparing Local Cons

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Now that my last two comic conventions of the year are over and done with (*sniff sniff*) I wanted to take a moment to compare and contrast these two mutually awesome but SUPER different shows. Since I'm a Baltimorean, both Baltimore Comic Con and SPX are local and driveable to me (although next year I think I'm going to finally throw in the towel and get a hotel room! Boo hour drive each way!) which makes it even more interesting how much they vary from one another.

BALTIMORE COMIC CON

A fairly typical, big convention you'd expect from a city -- hosted in a convention center and chock full of retailers with back issues, Dr. Who stuff, cosplay, and a section devoted towards "kid's comics". But still boasts the most diverse audience I ever see at a show, which is HUGE.

PROS: No big push for the "CELEBRITY GUEST" and "POP CULTURE" nonsense you tend to see at most big comics shows these days. They have a pretty sizeable Artist Alley as well as an Exhibitor pool full of a lot of comics people too. Lots of comics retailers and just COMICS everywhere in general.

CONS: Long wait lines, high fees to get in, LOTS of ground to cover to get to see things. (one of the reasons I started up Bmore Into Comics was to make it easier for people to happen upon comics, rather than slog through all the line waiting/exorbitant door fee nonsense) Also, this year Artist Alley was wedged in the back, so there was a lot of retailer/merch stuff you had to wade through before even encountering the comics creators. Also - and this is a common complaint at a lot of shows - no navigation to tell where you actually were in the convention center. I would love to see conventions as a whole adopt little fun arrow signs directing you at every intersection (see: SPX's GENIUS solution for this below)

AUDIENCE: I'm beginning to realize just the term "comic con" in your name now implies a certain thing to the masses. More people who've never been to a comics show or picked up a comic will come out for "comic cons" because the assumption is that these places represent comics as a whole. As depressing as that could be, I think it provides an opportunity for smaller indie comics creators like myself to reach that larger market. Over the years I've seen more women, families, and teens show up at comic cons like visitors to a strange planet - they've heard tales about the grown men who exist here in superhero costumes and places where nothing is too nerdy - but they didn't quite BELIEVE it until this moment. I love these first-time con goers because no matter how foreign the experience seems to them, they're always expecting a POSITIVE one - and that's huge. Somehow the message has gotten out to a lot of people not picking up comics that they should expect a GOOD TIME at comic cons - and I love that.

Ultimately, I love Baltimore Comic Con for a bunch of different reasons, but this year I really felt like its main treasure is that it gets comics out in front of a lot of people who don't know (yet!) that they'll love reading them, not just basking in all their character cosplay glory.

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SPX

SPX was RIDICULOUS this year. I've been going since 2002, and each year the show just gets more and more well planned, executed, attended, and well - ADORED by its attendees and exhibitors alike.

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Like many others, I don't have any pictures of the actual show (but the SPX tumblr is a GREAT resource for all the post-con lovefest recaps right now) because I was mobbed with customers. I'm not someone who ever gets mobbed with customers, so this wasn't only a super successful show for me, but validated me as a comics creator in a number of ways.

See, it's a common thing for a lot of us creators to zig-zag back and forth between being incredibly encouraged by and then horribly negative about comics, and a lot of times it just whittles down to a show-by-show experience. Do REALLY BAD at one show and throw away all your pens, then go to another one and plan on quitting your day job on Monday. Constant wiggle-waggle of emotions that a lot of us (even though we even it out by encouraging eachother and remembering that we LOVE DOING comics anyway) have learned to deal with over the years, but they can still get to us. Especially as we get older and our friends/families keep staring at us with a "you do what with your free time?" glance. I mean, I'm sure they think we're cool. They think we're cool, right?

PROS: SPX brings in tons of people by getting the word out like a CHAMP. And these people know comics and read them and love them and appreciate them. My three top selling items were COMICS, which also never happens. SPX also somehow cultivates a really cozy atmosphere that just feels comfortable and inclusive and snuggly. It could be all the gold decor and spaceship lights, I don't know. No matter how jammed that exhibitor floor gets, I never get my NYCC people panic. Also - THEY HAD AISLE LETTER BALLOONS THIS YEAR. Nailed it.

CONS: I know the lottery vs. the legacy table assignments this year was a source of panic for a lot of creators, but I just think that means - we need MORE SHOWS. More ways for indie creators to showcase their work. More Bmore Into Comics-style shows, but EVERYWHAR! The more we can create shows like SPX (or casual, tinier ones) the more people might expect to see comics and keep an eye out for them on the regular.

AUDIENCE: SPX still doesn't really reel in those people who don't know anything about comics as much as generic BIGGO COMIC CONS do, but I do think that's been changing over the years. There's always a tendency with indie comics shows to get REAL inclusive and kind of precious art-y, but SPX has managed to still be welcoming and all-inclusive, which is amazing to see.

All in all - I had a blast, I LOVE conventions in general, and I love being delightfully spoiled in particular by these local ones. BIG CLAPS TO CON SEASON 2014 Y'ALL!!