Aches and Pains

I'm still sore as hell from raquetball Thursday, which is pretty damned pathetic. On top of that my hyper-active niece jumped on me and put a kiddie Thai kickboxer-like knee to my mouth during a Mother's Day get-together, which has given me a serious headache and a clickety-clicking in my jaw. I love my niece, but she plays way too rough. Two Passovers ago she headbutted me in the face and cracked the lens of my then-new glasses. I should get them fixed someday, I look like a bumpkin nerd wearing them. All I need is some tape around the middle to complete the poor loser look.

Anyway, we survived the Hawthorne convention on Saturday and the family get-together on Sunday. Both were a lot of fun, but I'm wiped out having to get up on the normal side of noon both days. Now I'm napping to catch up on sleep and that always leads to schedule screw-ups, especially now that I have a ton of work running close to deadline.

Thanks to those who came by the table at the Hawthorne HS show. A low-key affair as I have said, but with very nice attendees and a very friendly air. Only a few minor downsides -- one being that a lot of guests showed up that we didn't know about from the initial press releases, (and who could have been advertised better), and that included Denny O'Neil (who everyone agreed wasn't coming, whoops), Murphy Anderson, Arnold Drake, basically, a half dozen stalwart golden/silver age DC creators showed up who I think people would have liked to meet. They also had that Babylon 5/Spider-Man guy J. Michael Stracymxyzptlx. Someone knew he was showing up because they had aquite a line and his donations to the raffle brought in a lot for the school's art dept. Very nice of him, I must say. Sad that school art dept's need donations, but that's life in these modern times.

Oh, the other downside was the odd behavior of two male attendees in their forties who were acting like socially ass-backwards Eltingville types. A grown man shouldn't go from table to table "blasting" people with his Star Trek phaser and flicking open his Star Trek communicator over and over. And the social skills of both of these comic book adult fans were sorely challenged when they engaged Sarah in "conversation" and just became creepy and slightly beligerent (sp) with their fan theories regarding Supergirl and Sarah's influence in the reworking of the character for the Superman animated show. Poor sweetie. I'm so glad I'm not a woman at comic book shows. I ignored the dealer who tried to get my attention by yelling "Merv Griffin" while I was leaving the room. Yeesh.

We met two nice guys who drove over from some podunk craphole in PA called Delps, which we all had fun making fun of. We also met illustrator Dave Devries who was set up on our left and was a very nice guy. And I'd like to thank reader John for giving me his copy of Popey vol 1 from Fantagraphics. Thanks so much, and I hope you are happy with the drawing I did for you as thanks. Very generous of you, I've been trying to replace that book for ages.

But. Minor Con Downside. On my right was a publisher of books about cartoonists who proved to be a bit of a rude fella. First he ignores the fact that he knocked over part of our set-up and sent books and a display clattering to the ground. Then, as the show was winding down and we were packing up, he asked Sarah if he could borrow our "desk brush" to clean off his set up and books. She told him it was packed away (it was) and was an art brush not for use to clean dust/dirt, so sorry, no can do. I come back to the table and he asks me the same thing (I hate when people do that, as if the "woman" cannot speak for the "man", like some old movie bit in a department store or soemthing). I had to explain to him three times that this wasn't a brush for sweeping table dirt, but my art brush which I used to clean off eraser crumbs while sketching. He seemed very confused and put off by this. What was annoying was he kept pestering us for the brush, and we told him what it was and why we couldn't have it rubbed in dust and dirt and then put on clean paper -- and he was acting as if we were just clueless and/or rude. So here's this guy printing books about cartoonists and artists like Nick Cardy and Carmine Infantino (both of which I own, btw), who doesn't understand that a cartoonist might not want their art supplies rubbed in his dirt. Sheesus.

Anyway, like I said, minor silly stuff at a very nice show. We donated a bag of Cartoon Network and Adult Swim promotional items to the raffle and they seemed to do well in selling tickets. I heard two kids talking about the fund raising and one said someone donated a thousand dollars. If true, tres cool. Maybe it was J. Michael, he was the only rich guy at the show. The drive was nice, although everyone seemed to get lost on the way there (we had one mis-turn going, got lost for a while on the way back, after leaving Hawthorne we hit some Paterson, NJ streets which were missing signs and wind around and criss-cross like a an orgy of tarmac snakes). Next year Alan Rosenburg promsies there will be a dedicated website for the show, it just eldued him time-wise this first time around. SO, we exect to attend again next May and will certainly plug the show as soon as it's announced.

Speaking of shows, our next scheduled appearance is for the ORCA con in early June upstate in Syracuse. We haven't heard anything on accomodations or anything, so hopefully that will be worked out and we can confirm that asap. After that we have the first two-day MOCCA event, which looks like it'll be a lot of fun.

Okay, gotta run and do errands and clean up the office and get back to work on the Bill and Ted cover for the second trade. It's going rather well, I think, I'm drawing most of the characters from the series and it's been fun to revisit them again after nearly thirteen years. Thirteen years. Oy.