Onward to Oogaly Free

New Entry Here: http://sadcircusbythesea.typepad.com/the_sad_circus_by_the_sea/2005/07/oogaly_free.html




Ooohhh, oooog, bloooog, etc.. Comic Con, oh Comic Con I’ve been meaning to write about you. Although you were kinder and gentler this year and your air conditioning worked thanks to better display placement by monster booths, and although we had much fun with our friends and fans, and I got a real kick out of seeing Jhonen with a HUGE panel (for those who like to brag about their panel size, Mr. Vasquez kind of, you know, I believe as they say in gamer-speak, he has purchased your buttocks), and although all these pleasant things occurred, fan-hands were shook and handy-wipes applied to the gooier ones, despite all the goodness, you Dear Comic Con destroyed our legs with your infernal distances, and it has taken us four days to recover. But it was fun at least.


You can go here to Christopher’s Journal to see more of what happened around the Slave Labor Graphics booth — and at Jennifer deGuzman’s journal too.


Here are some things we did at Comic Con International in San Diego:


-I started Writing the second Ranklechick novel in between moments of lazy calm, which all took place very far from the Con, at the “Hotel de Scharmen” where we stayed in Hillcrest, that is to say, our friend John Scharmen’s house.


-We saw the GoComics/Tokyopop panel. GoComics is the company that will somehow be translating ShutterBox to some kind of format that is maybe readable on cell phones. My thoughts on this: we’re not a society in transit enough for this. In Europe and in Japan, people read comics and stores on their phones because they spend a lot of time commuting on trains or subways, but not here in America. Here, we have our comic strips in the newspaper and now online. Either way, these are sit down at the table, coffee in the morning experiences, not transit experiences. I can see people downloading wallpapers and such and paying for them but full comics? I dunno. I think we’d have to prepare a side story especially for the phone that’s scaled to fit the window. Even if we did, would people pay for this? I have my doubts but I’m prepared to wait and see.


-We haven’t seen the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie yet. M. Alice Legrow (Bizenghast) invited us to a Wonka outing, but we had to decline due to previous commitments and then promptly got lost all over San Diego trying to make those commitments a reality, ended up at Italian restaurant with Ami and her Aaron A., Crab Scrambly and his Ish, and Jhonen. I later got horribly ill as what always happens when I eat Ilallian food. Actually, I don’t know if it as the food or the drink, which was some kind of beer/wine or brine. Don’t drink the brine.


-We did an interview with Toon Magazine which became a MMORPG rant on my part, where I railed against what is wrong with all of todays online RPG’s: turn based fighting, bad design outweighing good design (often in the same game), and lack of conststant, reliable, and “play house” features (like sitting in a chair). In short, I want a game with the beautiful character designs of Final Fantasy II and Guild Wars, the super powers and open character design of City of Heroes, the environmental interactivity, quest system, crafting system, and wealth of items of World of Warcraft, the interstellar vastness of Eve Online complete with space ships (but ones you don’t have to spend eighteen hours mining for only to have them shot out from under you in five minutes), and the twitch-based fighting of Half-life 2, with no experience point punishment system for getting killed, and finally: no leveling. Someone get cracking! Please? And while your at it, transfer my conscousnes into a robot body. I want to be Hinokio, please.


-On Saturday, Tavisha’s art was stolen. It was a painting, a commission she promised to a client three years ago. A witness saw the art pad it was being kept in snatched up by a kid who noticed it peeking from behind the Slave labor Graphics booth’s curtain. The next day, one of the Elite security guards saw the kid looking at the painting in the parking garage. The elite Elite gauard remembered the description of the missing piece and asked the kid, “Did you draw that?” To which the kid said, “Um ... yeah.” The guard replied, “I don’t think so.” The piece was returned unharmed. What I want to know is, what was the kid doing looking at the image in the garage twenty four hours after he stole it?


-The Slave Labor Graphics party was relaxing and enjoyable, a stark contrast to the Buca di Beppo dinners that Tokyopop usually has. Not that I don’t like Buca di Beppo. I think it’s an amusing genital-obsessed place (The photos of kids peeing everwhere that were hanging in the mens room let you know that this is a peeing place, no doubt about it), but I needed to be away from noise. So we took off to dinner with Mike Vega and his lady fair, and Diana Sprinkle, Glennn and Kristyn Schmall, ET and Liz Bryan, and found a nice sushi place. This was where more of the convention weirdness unleased itself. The fellow at the table next to us recognized me from Corona Highschool, circa 1985. We used to play Traveller together. A game I was intereted in because my uncle, Jim Cunningham used to write game suppliments called High Passage (published by Fasa). Very strange. My old school friend wasn’t even in San Diego for the convention. Later, Tavisha and I made it to the Slave Labor Graphics party where Tavisha happily and innoicently said to Jamie S. Rich, “I know who you remind me of! Dilbert!” I’m glad Jamie had a sense of humor, especially when Jennifer deGuzman bent his tie up Dilbert style.


-We discoved that Tokyopop had many many copies of ShutterBox 3 for sale at the con. Some fans stood in the booth and read the whole book, then turned to the cashier and asked when ShutterBox Volume Four would be out. ARGH!


-Signings at the SLG booth happened throughout the con and I was really happy to see the reaction to the Ranklechick Novel. I’m always very surprised by that. I even got to show a few bits of it to Chris Gore and his daughter when they stopped by the booth. That was very nice, indeed, as I really enjoy Gore’s witty reviews of bad movies.


-On one of the days, Lea Hernandez found me waiting for Tavisha outside the lady’s restroom. Actually several people on several occasions found me waiting for Tavisha outside the lady’s room. This is what I mostly do at conventions. I wait for Tavisha outside the lady’s room. Cosmologists the world over wonder about this dark matter, this missing matter that cannot be accounted for in the Universe. But I say look no further than me. Scan me with a spectrometer while I’m waiting in front of the lady’s restroom and I’m sure you’ll find Doppler-like streams of light moving out and connecting me to every point in time to when I am waiting for Tavisha outside the restroom and thus I am most likely always there, waiting, in every quantum state, all the time, even when I’m not. I am a pocket universe of waiting and thus, I apologize to the scientific community, as my time is converted into mass and these bags I hold get heavier and heavier ... .


-So, yes, the waiting. In betwen the waiting we saw lots of people. Talked to Carla Speed McNiel, then Elin and Pat and the Radio Comics bunch, talked to Chynna Clugston Major and got her to sign the Blue Monday books we bought, talked with Landry Walker and Eric Jones about doing more Disney stuff, talked with FSc and Serena Valentino and her husband Eric, John Ott gave me a signed copy of his Let’s Draw Manga: Using Color book, and talk, talk, speaky-speak, talky, poo. There was a lot of talking everywhere. I sang Roman Dirge a song with Christopher that rhymed with splurge and purge. Joe Nakamura manned the SLG cash register and suggested his window was a kissing booth. I tried to offer my butt up but he would have none of it. Some kissing booth!


-It’s getting so Jhonen can’t move through any convention without a body guard now, and nothing seems to satisfy many of the fans who want to get close to him. In order to keep Jhonen’s signing line from spilling out of control, SLG had to implimemt a system of handing out free tickets in order to maintain control for the convention staff. Impossibly stupid people have already began posting now about how this ticket system was somehow an extension of Jhonen’s ego. There’s something very sick and hideous that happens to otherwise normal people, even the normally idiotic ones, when they con’t get what they want and in their frenzied tunnel vision they take it out on their idol. In order for Jhonen to look at anything at all on the convention floor, he has to make quick, perlious dasshes to and from the spot he wants to explore and back to the SLG booth. Somew of the morse persistent fans hover beyond the perimeter of the booth waiting for him — and here’s the really maddening bit: Jhonen wanted to show me a very cool figue of an armored man and he had about 20 minutes to do it in. We walked as quickly as we could away from the SLG booth and immediately the hidden fans began pouring out of their hiding spots and following. One or two at a time they would race up to him and stop him, sometimes with parental exasperation, and ask him for a photograph or a signature. And every time when Jhonen would kindly explain that he couldn’t, it has to be reserved for the signing, because if he does it here in the middle of the convention floor, a line will form - but this explamation never satisfies and the pleading becomes demands and reluctanly Jhonen gives in, and of course, in the end we don’t get to where we were headed in time. That’s not the hateful part. This is: the people who stopped him, the ones who could not be told “no, please come back wto SLG when their’s an official signing time,” and the ones who got rude and demanding when they weren’t getting their way — THEY WERE BACK IN THE OFFICIAL TICKETED LINE THE NEXT DAY! So I guess tackling him in the hall wasn’t that urgent after all, was it? Please, people, if the guy you’re hounding says he can’t sign for you at that moment, don’t try to force him, because despite what you may write on your LiveJournal or message board, you’re the hateful one if you do that, not your quary. Just show some common human courtesy to Jhonen. You can bother me if you like. Nobody wuvs me. Boooohoohoo.


-We bought a lot of books too,too many to post, but my favourite of which was the Maakies hard cover. What a beautifully grotesque monster.


-On the last day of the convention, as I spiraled lower to the ground, and I thought more and more of just why I hate gravity, it occurred to me that publishers are sort of similar to different science fiction movie starships. Most are either like the Valley Forge garden ship from Silent Running, moving a precious life giving forest to safety through the soundless vacuum of space, or are sort of like the Nostromo from Alien, just a big tug pulling nondescript ore from one part of the galaxy to the other, hoping its crew isn’t devoured by some parasite brought on board. Tokyopop is sort of like the Rebel Blockade Runner from Star Wars, except none of the crew really knows how to use the guns and the engineer for some reason keeps shoveling coal into the reactor core, while the pilot is gunning his engines full on ... to where? Dunno, but it does seem rather urgent. Slave Labor Graphics actually is more like an artificial planet than a starship, more like a Dyson Sphere constructed around a faint red star. The inhabitants of the Known Universe aren’t really sure how long the sphere has been there but everyone knows its ecosystem securely functions and that many fabulous restaurants and libraries have been constructed on the inner surface around a patchwork of alien forests. Oni is sort of similar to SLG but hasn’t been around as long so it’s a bit more like Ringworld or Halo. Marvel and DC are the old battle scarred Battlestars (original Galactica series), but what’s strange is that all the scars are from friendly fire. DC’s Battlestar keeps a little Hitchhicker’s Guide Heart of Gold in one of its hanger bays. It’s called the Heart of Vertigo. It escapes quite a lot but for some reason always returns. Viz is the Pan AM shuttle from 2001: A Space Odyssey — it is very graceful and pleasing to the eye and does what it’s designed to do. It probably inhabits a universe with a Monolith master too.


Now I must return to writing ShutterBox Volume Four for the impatient kiddies.

-Rikki