Photo taken by Michael Neno

Since I’ve been hanging out at the weekly Sunday Comix meetings, and therefore Bob Corby, the mind behind SPACE, I got the chance to show some of my work at a Chili Cookoff last weekend! The deal was $15 for a half-table, and all the chili I could eat.

I’m like, helllll yeah.

So I made a little money, got some chili, and got to talk to a lot of folks. ^_^ It was an interesting task to try to pare my display (which is usually a whole 6-to-8-foot table) down into half the space.

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Ohayocon's vendor room. You can see us waaaay off in the distance, the last Artist Alley table at the end of the balcony. Photo by Lady Wolf Star.

Ohayocon was about a 10 on the awesome scale. I had a lot of misgivings going into this show, since for the first time, the artist alley was put in its own separate space, not in a hallway or on the way to another destination like it was in years past. The alley was placed in a U-shaped balcony/mezzanine area in the Battelle Grand ballroom of the Columbus Convention Center, while the dealer’s room was on the floor of the Battelle room.

But it turned out I had nothing to fear from the location, since foot traffic was pretty great all weekend. It seemed like the staff made a point of directing people up to us, and I suppose that the artist alley is more of a hotspot at Ohayocon than it is at some other conventions, so there you go.

This Ohayocon toppled the previous year’s record of Best Con Sales Evar, too. We saw a lot of friends, I got a few more people added to my Epic Shirt, and all was well.

Alex and Jon had the most epically tech table I’ve ever seen! Jon’s iPad was showing off NNFB pages, and he had this little attachment that let him take credit card sales, as well as an app that kept a tally of his sales. After boggling at that setup, I slunk back to my table with my quaint little paper tally sheet, feeling like a bit of a luddite.

The only disappointment I suffered during the weekend was that I missed out on saying hello to the Foglios, who author Girl Genius. Hopefully they’ll get back to this part of the country sometime soon so I can rectify this!

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The convention changed venues this year to the Detroit Renaissance Center, which is a huge facility of maze-like catwalks and elevators connected to a high-rise hotel. For having so much space, however, the areas the convention used seemed unusually packed. It’s wonderful that Youmacon is growing, but the artist alley in particular was way too crowded, and made it hard for people to actually stop and look at a comfortable pace because people would be lurking behind them, wanting to get by.

I made less than half of what I did in 09. I attribute it equally to the crowding, the location of my table, and the fact that my across-the-aisle neighbors, The Beargieful Empire of Creative Enterprises, were like a black hole of button sales, so I didn’t sell many buttons myself. It’s certainly not their fault, it just happens. I experience a similar phenomenon whenever I’m placed next to Disjointed Images. ^_^;;

And of course, I can’t go without mentioning the horrendous elevator clogging that goes on at conventions of this size. The task is tripled in difficulty when you’ve got a dolly of artist alley supplies to take up to the 35^th floor of a high-rise. On Sunday morning when I was trying to move my car to a nearby garage for a quick getaway after teardown, I ended up walking down the 35 flights of stairs because the elevators were taking too long. ^_^;; The next few days, my legs were like clay.

But there were good things about Youmacon, too! I got to debut the Corn, for one! And I also met more than a few readers, including some new faces, who now read Alex’s Guide. I also got to hang out with Kelly, Amanda, Natalie, and Trae, better known as OLAC, all weekend. ^_^ Since Sunday night was Halloween, I also stopped in Toledo on my way home from the convention to hand out candy at my parents’ house.

I’m not sure if I’ll be going back to Youma this year yet. I’ll definitely keep it on my radar, but I’m really hoping they go to a different venue this year, or alternately, plan the artist alley space better so everyone has room to breathe.

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Time to catch up on some con reports.

So!  The Festival of Cartoon Art is a triennial event held by the OSU Cartoon Library and Museum.  I missed out on going in 2007, when I could’ve used my student status to get a huge discount on admission, so I was not going to miss out on it this time around.

Thursday was full of academics presenting their papers on various subjects about comics, followed by a celebration of 100 years of the comic strip Krazy Kat. There was also a reception down by the Cartoon Library, so I got to say hello to some of my old coworkers. ^_^  I caught up with Paul Fell once again, and got to rub shoulders with some pretty huge giants.

Friday was the first day of speakers at the Festival Forum: Tony Cochran, Jen Sorensen, Dave Kellett, Paul Levtiz, Dan Piraro, and a couple others whose names I can’t recall.  Dave’s talk was especially relevant to me, being a fellow webcomicker, and it is fortunately all on YouTube!

That night, there was another reception downtown at the Hyatt!  I ran into Tom Richmond, who introduced me to several other people who were starting to put comics online, so we got to talk shop about it.  I took my Epic T-Shirt with me and got several more awesome people to add their signatures to it, including Dan Piraro, who was nothing short of hilarious.

Saturday was the second day of the Festival Forum: Steve Breen, Jan Eliot, a Tribute to Jay Kennedy, Gene Luen Yang, and Roz Chast.

I really loved hearing Jan’s talk about cartooning for the New Yorker, and Gene Luen Yang’s comic “American Born Chinese” really needs to get onto my reading list like NOW.

The climax of the evening, of course, was an Evening with Matt Groening at Mershon Auditorium.  It’s old news now, but they discussed the then-recent Simpsons couch gag that was directed by Banksy, as well as a preview of that year’s Treehouse of Horror episode.

Sunday’s big event was the Art Spiegelman talk!  He spoke all about his various publications and such throughout the years, from Maus to Raw to the New Yorker.  I totally brushed by him at one of the receptions over the weekend, so my cardigan had Art Speigelman molecules on it.  Brrrr.

Probably the most awesome thing that came out of the weekend was getting to hang out with Max, Canada, and Kira a little bit, and getting a more official invitation to join Sunday Comix, which I’ve been attending almost weekly ever since.  ^_^

You can see the rest of the photos I took here.

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The atmosphere of the event was really nice. I haven’t gotten to hang around a large group of body-positive people since the Fatshionista meetup I attended last year. I made up my display to showcase my OOTD illustrations, and they got a very good reception. I made prints of my 6 favorite drawings, a few of which I even sold! I also designed a set of body-positive slogan buttons to debut at the event.

I sold a few copies of Alex’s Guide, several dollar drawings, and even a few buttons. Amanda’s got video of all the speakers up on her blog if you want to see them, too!

(scan by Wednesday Lee Friday)

My neighbor in the row of artists was Wednesday Lee Friday, a local author, who also bought a color drawing from me!

I must say, it was liberating to not be afraid/hesitant to draw someone fat, as it is at pretty much all of the other conventions I show at.

After the show was over, I drove back to Toledo for the tail-end of my sister’s birthday Trek Move Marathon, which was a joint effort with her BFF, Amanda. (I saw Star Trek IV for the first time!)

Pretty good weekend. :D

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Intervention was last weekend.

It’s a first-year convention, so I have a lot of thoughts about it.  This may be more critical than a lot of my convention reports, but I feel that a brand-new convention like this will appreciate and benefit from constructive criticism more than just a rundown of what I did and when.  So here we go! I’m going to start with my criticisms and concerns and then end with the positives.  Afterwards, I’ll talk about the events and stuff that I went to, as well.

Cons (heh heh)

First and foremost, attendance.  I didn’t hear any confirmed attendance numbers, but it was very low.  I would be very surprised if it was over 1000, including staffers, vendors, and artists.  It seems like this event was promoted very well among comics people, since I heard about it constantly from my fellow webcomics… but the promotion among people who would actually have liked to attend this convention was lacking.  Of course, being scheduled against Small Press Expo was probably a huge huge HUGE factor in this, so I can’t necessarily fault them too much.  I heard from the conchairs directly that it will not be on the same weekend as SPX next year, so that’s good news.

Related to attendance, I’m very surprised that there weren’t more people, considering the guests they had.  Fred Gallagher, Pete Abrams, Brad Guigar, Dave Willis, Mookie, Steve Napierski, T. Campbell, Ben Kahan, Bill Holbrook, Shawn Handyside, and Hawk were all in attendance.  These people are gigantically huge in this industry.  The disconnect between the talent they were able to procure and the absence of the crowds you’d expect to show up for such people is astonishing.

And in light of all of THAT, I think that the various pricing for tables and registration were rather high for a first-year con.  Granted, it was a risk I fully took on.  It seemed like the convention was aiming high, which is great, but in light of the disappointing attendance, I’m interested in seeing a reduction on table price and/or registration.

This may be purely semantics, but I was expecting a little more diversity in the programming.  The whole idea of “Your online life in person,” is awesome, and I’d been under the impression that the convention was gearing towards creation of all kinds of online content, be it blogging, music, comics, or anything else.  Something like ROLFCon, really.  What really took place, though, was pretty much exclusively a webcomics convention.  I can totally get behind this, but the convention may want to adjust its marketing one way or the other on this matter, or alternately, bring in those other elements of online content creation with a stronger presence.

And on a purely logistical note, I don’t understand why there weren’t any printed schedules available at the convention.  We either had to refer to large print-outs of the programming schedule that were placed around the convention rooms, or look at it online.  This was just annoying.

Pros

On the flip side of above, the fact that there weren’t a lot of “muggles,” as it were, meant that it was possible to actually converse with a lot of these big names in webcomics.  I was a correspondent for the Webcomic Beacon at this convention, and on Saturday and Sunday, I interviewed just about everybody in the vendor/artist room for the show, and was able to do so because it was very easy to get to everyone.  And as another artist pointed out, the weekend really drove home the point that we are all our own biggest supporters and inspiration.  The great thing about webcomic creators is that nearly 100% of the time, they are also rabid webcomic fans themselves.

The hours for the vendor/artist room were great.  I like open hours a lot of the time, but 10-8 was a great chunk of time that didn’t start too early and didn’t run too late.  We got to bed at reasonable times and got sleep and such, which, as I pass into my mid-twenties and therefore become old, is more important to me.

The hotel was in an awesome location.  There was a grocery store across the street, a gigantic Target a few blocks away, and an abundance of restaurants of every kind.  Chris and I ate very well, all things considered, and we didn’t have to spend a ton on food.  The parking was also very cheap, all things considered: $12 for three days with in-and-out access.  The room (which had two queen beds) was spacious enough for an air mattress one night, and then we were able to request a cot for the second and third nights for our extra person.  There wasn’t wireless in the rooms, but it was free in the lobby, and was accessible from seating areas around the atrium even on the upper floors.  So big kudos to the Rockville Hilton and to the con for choosing it.

The crowd that did show up leaned a little older, which I always appreciate.  It’s a nice break from the anime cons filled with teenagers for three days.  And of course, with a webcomicw focus, there’s always a higher chance that someone who has actually read my work will come visit me, which did happen a couple times.

And as has been reiterated by tons of others, this convention was actually ORGANIZED.  Having been on that end of convention production, I’m very impressed at how the show was run.  I don’t have a single complaint about the staff.

The Bottom Line

Intervention had some scope problems, but still managed to put on a great convention.  I’m personally going to give them another try next year and see how it pans out, because I believe with some changes, this could be one of the next big cons that becomes a major destination for a lot of creators and fans alike.  I feel a little excited to have gotten in on the ground floor of this event, with the hopes that it does take off and become successful, like it should!  I’d recommend that anyone who has the means to do so, check into it for next year and keep it on your radar.

Now for your regularly-scheduled con report

This weekend was hot on the heels of Chris’ birthday, so it was half business and half a birthday trip for us!  We drove to Maryland on Thursday so we’d be all fresh and ready to go on Friday.  My weekend of magic and mystery really started on Thursday night, when I went to the Rockville Target down the street for some supplies.

There were… two floors.

It was amazing.  Mind = blown.

One funny thing that happened right off was the “continental breakfast.”  There was a nice little spread of breakfast stuff right off the lobby, which Chris and I grazed over for breakfast, but it wasn’t until later that we found out it was actually set up for a group that was meeting in one of the conference rooms.  Oops.  :D  The real breakfast was downstairs in the buffet area, and was not free.

Friday was pretty slow, so we didn’t really do much but sit behind the tables and hope that people would come to the con.  After the AA closed, we did a little walking around the place, checking out what was going on.  Almost every conference room in the hotel had wall-to-wall whiteboards, which got a whole lot of use over the weekend.  We also drifted into the 24-hour dance party room and danced for a little while, which was fun, but all in all, we got to bed pretty early.

Saturday picked up a little bit, and I went to a couple of panels.  First was the Megatokyo Q&A.  I haven’t read Megatokyo in years, but it seemed like a good opportunity to listen to a guy who’s done really well for himself, so I thought I check it out and see what he had to say.  The other panel was about Autobio comics, in which I have a vested interest, of course.  It was an interesting panel put on by Bree, Ami, Phil, Travis, and Foley.

But the highlight of my convention experience by far… was Super Art Fight.

Back when I saw SAF at ConnectiCon, I was like, “I HAVE TO DO THIS.”  So I sent an email to the team a few weeks ago, and they were able to get me in!  I was in the 1st round, which is a 4-person Battle Royale, and it was epic.  Just look at this picture:

Epic.  I can’t wait until I get back to the east coast again, because I want to do it again!  I’m going to try to nudge some of my favorite cons out this way to invite them out as guests.  (Ohayocon and Penguicon, I’m talking about you! XD)

Though I have to say, in the days since my fight, I’ve been really sore!  All that jumping on and off stage, crouching, and kneeling took a lot out of me.  I was arting as hard as I could!

There was more dancing and a little drinking on Saturday night, but I got to bed relatively early again.  I stayed up a little later to do a sketch commission of Power Girl for an attendee who would be leaving first thing the next morning:

On top of that, I did get to meet a couple of readers of Garanos, which is always a pleasure. ^_^  Thanks to everyone who came by my table!  It was also great seeing Pete and Katie, Kez, Mike, Allison and Melody, and Christiann again, too.  All in all, despite not making much money, we had a great weekend, and I can’t wait for next year.

The rest of my photos can be seen here on Facebook.

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Matsuricon this year continued the tradition of surpassing itself again!  Unfortunately, it’s been a month since the convention, so this will be a more barebones con report taken from some notes I wrote during the weekend.

First thing, I participated in the Matsuricon Sketch Battle, which was run by several members of Studio Akumakaze.  I tend to run into SA at just about every convention I go to in and around Ohio, so we’ve got the running joke going that we are all stalking each other. ^_^  I did my battle against Julie Wright, artist extraordinaire and colorist for The Dreamer!

I also gave another Photoshop demo on Friday night, which seemed to go pretty well.  Though I’m coming to the conclusion that I don’t really like giving PS demos. ^_^;  But that’s a subject for another time.

While I was gone doing panels, Chris was, as usual, wearing the Stylish and Informative Hat of Knowledge.  Our neighbors across the aisle, The Guild of Mallow, made Chris this button!

But by far the coolest part of the weekend was getting to meet Doug Walker, also known as the Nostalgia Critic.  He came through the AA on Saturday and looked at just about everyone’s stuff, which was really cool!  I also went to his Q&A, which was pretty hilarious; it started out with a Tommy Wisseau skit and involved many props.  Turns out, he used to be an artist and graphic designer before he got into making videos and such, which was pretty cool!  Then he dropped the lovely bomb that he wanted to start a series of videos highlighting the artist alleys at conventions, and he would be shooting his first video the next day.

Oh, Doug.  Are you TRYING to make me crush on you even harder?

Anyways, here’s the video:

Like I’ve said before, Matsuricon gets better and better each year, and I will continue to make a point of including it in my convention list.

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Glass City Con was last weekend, in Perrysburg, OH.  It was a very good trip, and I have to thank the con staff for taking care of us all weekend.  Granted, my sister and several of my friends were part of staff, but everyone else was still awesome too! ^_~

As I’ve shared on my blog before, I’m the convention artist for Glass City Con, and I did all the artwork that appeared on badges and signs this year, as well as two t-shirts.  I did everything but the program guide cover, which was submitted by another artist, and since I ran out of time, gave my blessing for another artist to grace the cover. ^_^;;

Anyways, one of my t-shirts was the Fuku Fight logo for this year, and the other was this awesome sketchy version of my Doujin BUF.

I ran a Photoshop panel on Sunday morning that went pretty well, considering it started a little bit late.  I did a coloring demo on the 3D Glasses Fuku, and about 10 people were in attendance!  After last year’s turnout of 2, I was thrilled with the attendance.

The only thing I will complain about with this convention is that the air conditioning in the entire building was AWFUL for some reason.  There were short periods where the temperature went down a little bit, but for the most part it was ridiculously hot. ;_;

I also forgot my corkboard in Columbus, so I had to go to Meijer on Friday night to get a temporary replacement.  The trouble with bulletin boards these days is that they’re a thin layer of cork over cardboard… that means they’re fine for straight-on puncturing with thumbtacks and the like, but for my buttons, which are pushed in at an extreme angle, they fall apart rapidly.  My other corkboard is older, and is made of half-inch-thick cork with a backing board, so it’s more resilient than the cardboard types.  It still looked okay, but I would’ve preferred my black one.

This convention also had 8-foot tables as opposed to the 6-foot tables we’re used to in the AA, so it was nice to spread out a little bit. :D

After two weekends of traveling and eating fast food, I’m ready for a few weeks off.  ^_^;; Thankfully, I have a break until Matsuricon in August, so in the meantime, I think I’m going to have some carrot sticks and detox and pass out.

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I attended ConnectiCon again this year, and it was a rousing success!

This year, instead of the madwoman drive I did last year, we carpooled with Pete and Katie Tarkulich, of Bardsworth and Fairy Magik.  Chris and I drove up to Rochester, NY, where we all piled into Pete’s station wagon. (Somehow, two artist alley tables’ worth of stuff, plus luggage, plus us, all fit at once.)  It was much much easier than trying to do it all by myself like last year and I can’t thank the Tarkulichs enough for agreeing! ^_^;;

Chris is VERY EXCITED.  We did a lot of bouncing, dancing, and flailing while sitting at the table, since conventions do tend to drag a bit when you’re sitting behind a table for three days.  Naomi and Alyssa from Prime of Ambition were sitting right across from us, so we ended up waving and flailing at them a lot, too. ^_^;;  I guess I wasn’t quite as silly last year, since I didn’t have Chris with me.  Hopefully I didn’t shatter what respect they had for me before!

Our other neighbors in the Artist Colony were Tina Pratt to the left, and Kevin and Blondie to the right!  So I was rubbing shoulders with good company the whole weekend. :D  I have come to the conclusion, after overhearing Tina’s Snickerdoodle plushies all weekend, I need to sell more things that squeek.

Some highlights from the weekend include my first Super Art Fight! I’d never seen one before, and now that I have, I really really ridiculously want to try it.  Before the show started, the Macarena started playing, and right on cue, everyone that I was sitting with immediately started doing the hand motions.  Then when Jamie Noguchi called up for a volunteer to do it on stage, I decided I needed to run up there to show them how it was done. XD  So if you’re wondering who the awesome fat girl doing the Macarena on stage was, it was me.

There were a couple blocks of nonspecific webcomic programming that I decided to check out, figuring that I’d just show up and see what happened.  The first one on Friday night dissolved into bad fanfiction readings, so I kind ducked out of that one.  The second, which was on Saturday afternoon, was titled “The Secret Webcomic Panel,” and was apparently so secret that no one was actually scheduled to run it!  So when I wandered in to check it out, there were about 20 people sitting in the panel room, waiting for something to happen.  I sort of slunk up to the microphone and sat down, introducing myself in a fake whisper, since it was the SUPER SECRET WEBCOMIC PANEL!

Eventually, a staff member came in and out, promising to find more webcomics to join the panel.  Meanwhile, I took some questions from the audience about the glamorous life of a lower-tier webcomic artist, and when the staffer came back, he said that some people were going to try crashing the Cyanide & Happiness panel, which was running next door, and that they had plenty of room for everyone.  He also apologized that no webcomic people had showed up for the panel.  I was like .___.

But thankfully, a few of the audience members pointed at me and said, “SHE CAME! SHE CAME!” so it was all good. ^_^  And lo and behold, like three Garanos readers were actually in that room!  All at once!  So it was very nice when they came up to say hello as everyone left the panel room.

Um… let’s see.  Saturday night, we made our traditional pilgrimage to City Steam Brewery, a restaurant and pub in downtown Hartford.  Chris and I were so tired and hungry that we decided to have dinner in a quiet part of the restaurant, but we then took a swing through the room where all the other webcomics were gathered to say hello before we turned in for the night.  I was delighted to find that Lar DeSouza remembered me from ISCA con!

Sales were awesome, and ConnectiCon is now a close second to Ohayocon for best con of the year.  The only thing that could have gone better were my Pokemon badges, which I didn’t really restock before coming.  By the end of the weekend, I sold out of all but two of the designs, so the board was covered in SOLD OUT notes like this:

I hadn’t really sold that many buttons at Penguicon, so when I was looking through my button stock, I saw the bag full of Pokemon buttons and figured it would be enough, not bothering to actually go through each design and see how many I had.  I could have easily sold twenty more badge sets, but alas. ^_^;;

I had Garanos Volume III debuting at this con, and it was really nice having all three books in a row on the table. ^_^

There were some problems I had with this convention, most of which revolved around the communication issues with staff.  I feel this convention has a lot of good things going for it in relation to the webcomics community, but staff communication has been really awful ever since I first tried to get involved with it in 2008, and this year was unfortunately no exception.  As a webcomic, trying to get in touch with the right liaison was a big headache, and we never did figure out what my tier status was, so I’m probably safe to assume that they’re just going to keep all of the $150 I paid to get my table, with no reimbursement based on my comics in any way.  My updated bio and picture for the program guide and website were also lost to the ether, so Alex’s Guide didn’t get any exposure that way.  As an artist, vital information like where and when to check in for Thursday night setup was not emailed out until the Tuesday before the convention, and I’m not sure if it would’ve been sent out at all if a few of us had not lost patience and raised a shitstorm about it in the forums.

But for all that, it seems like it was a very successful convention, and while there were problems, the staff were aware of them and said they were working to fix them, so I’m optimistic about that.

I leave you with two cosplays.  Axe Cop, and the yip yip aliens from Sesame Street.

Awesome.

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The strawberries in the consuite were HUGE! 8D

My third year going to Marcon marked my first attempt at doing a convention art show, as opposed to Artist Alley/Dealer’s Room.  I entered 5 pieces into the show: all four Shepherd goddesses, which I printed up at 16 x 20 and framed, and Garanos With Spines, which was in the Toon Award Exhibition.  I also put several prints in the Print Shop.

All in all, I think I had a successful taking!  Two goddesses and a few prints were purchased, and there were minimal fees since I hung my art myself, so I think this was a pretty good first try.  I recently put my art in InConJunction’s art show, as well, and I sold a similar amount.  Right now, it’s all about repetition and getting my art out to shows so I start building exposure and familiarity.

Apart from the art show, Chris and I went to a few panels, gave blood at the annual blood drive, and played lots of games.  We made a new friend, a fellow artist named Squish, who was running games all weekend.  One of them was Betrayal at House on the Hill, which is a really awesome exploration board game with a horror theme.  Another game I really enjoyed was Kung Fu Fighting, which is a card game.

Unfortunately, next Memorial Day weekend, I have a wedding to attend, so I will sadly miss Marcon 46, which is going to have a historical fantasy theme. Sad tears of sadness. ;_;

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