Alex Heberling

Peguicon 7.0 took place at the Crowne Plaza in Romulus, MI last weekend.  This was my first Penguicon, and I really had a great time!

I’d looked in to going last year, since they were having an Artist Alley for the first time, but since the AA was only scheduled to be open for a few hours on Saturday, I had to pass on it, since I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to break even or not.  Luckily, the Artist Alley was all weekend this year, the tables were cheap, and even better, there was a whole slew of webcomic programming!

I really was looking forward to Penguicon.  I’ve been getting kind of burnt out on anime conventions, since I haven’t been able to break even on several of the recent cons I’ve been to.  I think my glory days of anime cons are over.  I had two good years at Ohayocon, but the rest of them have been a long string of disappointments.

A big part of that is the shift in focus that Artist Alleys have had since their original inception.  From what I understand, Artist Alleys  started out as places for doujinshi creators to sell their work, but these days it’s almost nothing but people hawking fanart.  Which is fine, if fanart is your thing and your passionate about it, but unfortunately it’s the case that unless that is your thing, you don’t make as much money from your work.  Independent comic creators, unless they are already very successful webcomickers (for instance, Megatokyo, Applegeeks, and any number of others I could name off) don’t get a whole lot of attention at anime cons.  Not to mention I don’t even like anime that much anymore, and I no longer relate to the demographic (teenagers) that floods these cons.

Whoa.  I think that’s the first time I’ve actually ranted on this blog.  Anyways, I think you can see why I was looking forward to Penguicon.  It’s a bit of an older crowd, right off the bat, and the focus is on science fiction and all things geeky, including a great webcomic presence.  It also seemed like a really fun convention to conclude my 6-week convention binge, with programming I’m interested in and an atmosphere with which I would fit in well.

Chris and I got into Romulus around 4:30, got checked into the room, and got our badges.  Attendees were given a paper badge in a plastic sleeve, and then allowed to choose a lanyard in one of many colors!  Though a simple thing, I thought it was cool.  My lanyard was light blue and glittery, and Chris chose red.

The first thing I did was scope out the place a bit.  I’d been under the impression that the AA didn’t open until Saturday, but apparently that was not the case.  Despite that, we stuck with the original plan to just have fun on Friday night and go to panels and such, and didn’t worry about setting up the table that night.

I also checked out the ConSuite, since I realized I was really hungry.  I was surprised to find out that Penguicon had taken over the hotel’s restaurant, and had a very impressive buffet of cold cuts and snacks!  I got to have a delicious sandwich, and even a slice of tiramisu.  It was pretty great.  That ConSuite saved me a ton of money on food over the weekend, despite it being crowded sometimes, and just having that option made the $45 I spent on my badge seem more worth the price.  They were not messing around in there!

The first panel we went to was “We Can’t All Be Penny Arcade, But That Doesn’t Make Us Bad,” which was about obscure webcomics that deserved to get more readers.  It was hosted by Tanya Higgins of the Webcomic Beacon, as well as several other webcomic folks, some of whom I knew and some I didn’t.  I wrote down several new titles to check out, so it was definitely a successful panel, and reminded me I need to get back into Sarah Zero.  I’ve read some of it before, but since it doesn’t have an RSS feed, it fell by the wayside, along with other webcomics that don’t have RSS feeds.  ^_^;  (I’m a slave to my Google Reader.)

After that was the opening ceremonies, where it was confirmed that Wil Wheaton was too sick to come to Penguicon.  Apparently this isn’t the first time it’s happened, so now it seems to be becoming a running joke.  I was looking forward to being on a panel with him, but it’s possibly good that it didn’t happen, since I would have gotten a whole lot of unintentional fangirl on him.

Chris and I split ways for the evening, and I went to a panel called Chocolate Ritual, where there was a big crazy ritual about chocolate, and much free chocolate was to be had.  There were homemade truffles that had Tequila Rose in them!  I also got my first Con Ribbon, which said “Chocolate Fathagan”.  I think fathagan is a Lovecraft reference, but I’m not entirely sure.

This inadvertently triggered a manic quest to get more ribbons.  Once I started, I couldn’t get enough of them!

So, from the top:

1. Chocolate Fathagan (Chocolate Ritual panel)
2. I’m Interested In… (Denoted I was interested in making Friends, and interested in Ladies and Gentlemen.  The other letters represented sex, cuddling, kissing, relationships, monogamy, and polyamory.)
3. Milliways (for going to the Milliways room party)
4. The Crimson Chain (sponsor of the Milliways party)
5. Michigan Linux Users Group (also went to the room party)
6. Who Is the Rebuilder?  (I’m not entirely sure, but I think this was a person I was in a panel with.)
7. InConJunction
8. I Travel In Time (a stack of them were on the table in a panel I was on, and of course I HAD TO HAVE ONE)
   The ribbons below, I found stuck to the sole of my shoe on Saturday morning, lost from someone else’s badge.  The sticky strip on the first had lost its stickyness, so I fastened it to mine with a safety pin.
9. “And all I got was this lousy ribbon.”  (????)
10. Drag Show 2010 QUEEN (WHOO!  That is totally not illogical.)
11. Limey’s Harem (whoever that is)
12. Another InConJunction

Anyways, after the chocolate panel, I wandered around abit.  I ended up at a panel about scotch whiskey somewhere in there, which was very informative, and made me want to drink scotch like a tenured English professor.  I also went to a few room parties to mingle a bit, and I tried a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster from Milliways.  I tried to get to bed relatively early, since I wanted to set up the table early the next morning.

Saturday morning, we got set up in the AA.  I was in a pretty good spot, right between the elevators and the stairs, and the general area was outside the main ballrooms and Dealer’s Room, so there was a lot of foot traffic.

I had my first panel at 10, which was a workshop on ComicPress, the comic publishing plugin for the WordPress blogging software that I and zillions of other webcomic creators use to manage our content.  (Including this very blog.)  My fellow panelists were Megan Gedris and Dave Adams.  We covered how to change the basic elements of the out-of-the-box ComicPress themes, such as adding a header image and changing backgrounds to something more interesting and unique to one’s comic.

It’s unfortunately the case that a lot of ComicPress users don’t do this, and since the default ComicPress theme is so bare-bones and sparse, it results in a lot of boring-looking webcomic sites.  I’m actually guilty of this myself in Jigworthy’s case, since I haven’t had time to customize the theme to Jigworthy yet.  Obviously, I went to great lengths to customize Garanos, and I hope to actually put together a new design for it in the coming months.

My second panel was at high noon, and was about Self-Publishing (with the byline “How to Not Get Totally Screwed.)  Megan Gedris and I were representing self-published webcomics, but the rest of the panel (which was quite large) were writers and podcasters, along with one woman who was a traditionally-published author, and represented that side of the industry.  This was the panel that Wil Wheaton would have been on, and I ended up sitting next to his editor, who sat in on the panel in his place.  Even from a panelist’s point of view, the panel was extremely informative, and I left with more knowledge about self-publishing than I had when I walked in.

I passed the rest of Saturday away at my AA table, hawking my wares.  I was happy that lots of people were stopping to look through my comics, and even though it wasn’t an anime con, some younger kids came by and bought a bunch of my Pokemon gym leader badges.  The sushi buttons also sold very well at this convention, better, in fact, than they have at any convention since I started selling them.

Unfortunately, Chris started feeling rather dizzy and light-headed that evening.  He went back up the room for a little while to wait it out, but was feeling better a little later and rejoined me at the table.

Much later that night, a group of pirates descended upon the Artist Alley area with a pirate ship that played music and dispensed alcohol.  By then, I was the only table still open and selling things, so in an effort to not be too annoyed at the pirates, I stood up and waved my spare “Draw Your Face For A Dollar?” sign at the crowd for awhile while the pirate dance party went on.  Luckily, towards the end when the crowd started thinning out, a group of four girls came over to get drawings!

On Sunday morning, I had my first ever Photoshop panel.  In the wake of my ingenious April Fool’s Day prank on Garanos readers, I drew a full-length picture of Garanos in the Starfleet miniskirt uniform, which I decided I would save to color at the panel.  Thankfully, I had the foresight to do several of the steps beforehand, like getting all the colors blocked out, since I actually ran out of time to completely shade the whole picture!  For being at 9AM on a Sunday morning, the turnout was really excellent, and I was very happy with how it went.

Later on, a couple of the people who attended my panel came to ask me some more questions, so I was happy to be able to help them out with some tips and tricks.

Chris was nice enough to set my table up for me while I went to the Webcomic Brunch, which was a group excursion to the nearby Jordan Family Restaurant II for brunch.  It was really fun, since I hadn’t had much of a chance to just hang out and chat with the rest of the webcomic folks, and I managed to get everyone’s signatures on my famous t-shirt.  Dave, the coordinator of the webcomic programming for the con, was even nice enough to pick up the bill!  All in all, it was an excellent breakfast.

When I got back, Chris was unfortunately feeling a bit worse.  He woke up feeling much better, but then was forced to transport my table supplies to the table using the stairs, which took three trips, which took a lot out of him.  Thankfully, I was only going to be at the table for a couple of hours, and our friend Zach, who had been sharing our hotel room, joined him shortly after I left for my final panel at 2, and they were able to get the table packed up.

My final panel was “Webcomics– It takes a village (Or does it?)” which was about doing webcomics as a team vs. doing it solo.  Two of us were Team-Gone-Solo, and the rest were either Solo-Gone-Team or Team-From-the-Start, which was a good mix and made for a good panel.  After that, the Artist Alley was closed, so we skipped town!

To round out my shoutouts, I wanted to say thanks and nice-to-meetcha to Fes, Mark Savary, Rob Balder, Eric Millikin, Adam Smithee, and Jason Dunstan.  I don’t think I missed any of the webcomic people there, but if I did, I hope they do not take offense!

I will definitely be going back next year.  ^_^