Comics212

One of the things I was really looking forward to, when I got back from Japan, was the freeing-up of my schedule. I’ve been ‘in the shit’ as they say since June or July at this point. The lead-up to San Diego, the lead-up to TCAF, the lead-up to my Japan trip, and finally, the lead-up to Toronto’s The Word On The Street where I organised and co-hosted a full day of programming (with special thanks to the always-wonderful Mark Askwith, of course). With WOTS finally over (it went fabulously, thanks for asking) there’s now nothing on my plate, extra-curricular-wise, until Christmas. Business as usual at the store, no major changes coming up at home, things will hopefully be if not calm, then more managable than the past 4 months.

Meanwhile, comics has continued at an astounding pace without me. TEKKON KINKREET, my most-recently championed project, has done phenomenally well for us. I haven’t checked in with Viz yet, but here in Toronto it’s selling particularly well (although mentioning it in the blog 10-15 times probably didn’t hurt none). I’d say we’ve moved better than 20 copies at this point, and about 8 of the DVDs (which is by all accounts phenomenal, I’m waiting for a quiet night to enjoy it), and I’m pretty happy with those numbers, particularly as the velocity actually picked up, last week. I hope this isn’t a situation where what we do at The Beguiling isn’t reflected anywhere else in the industry, because at the very least this is a great book by a great creator, and it deserves an audience.

I actually read a LOT of comics last week, both getting ready for my “History of Comics” presentation as well as just wanting to catch up on everything I’d missed while I was away. The new issue of Giant Robot (an Asian culture magazine, not just about robots but also books/film/lifestyle/etc.) features a cover-story on Adrian Tomine in advance of his new graphic novel Shortcomings, and the interview and lovely cover art are worth the price of admission. Shortcomings is very good as well, I’ve even got a half of a review written on it that talks about liking a book even though you don’t like any of the characters in it. I might get it finished or I might not, we’ll see.

Actually it’s just after 2, I should probably get to bed early for a change. Tomorrow our orders are due to Diamond, and I’m only about 50% done at this point. I know it’s pretty late in the game to be complaining about the September Previews (the new one’s been out for a week already), but my god, there are a lot of crappy, crappy COUNTDOWN spin-offs coming down the pipe, aren’t there? Our COUNTDOWN sell-through has slid to about half of what it was at the beginning of the series (and about a third of our 52 numbers), so I don’t know who DC expects will be buying all of these terrible-looking mini-series, but I’m certainly not going to risk any money on it. Yikes.

Anyway, I’d rather go out on a high-note, so I’ll show you the lovely cover to the recent Giant Robot magazine that I was talking about. It’s by Adrian Tomine, and it’s available in better comic book stores (like The Beguiling) and on better newstands everywhere, right now.

- Christopher

So what are you doing on Sunday? If you’re in Toronto and you just said anything other than “I’m going to Word on the Street to see Chester Brown read from his new comic!” shame on you.

Yes, that’s right, Chester Brown, author of Ed The Happy Clown, The Playboy, and Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography will be previewing brand new comics work, and the subject is? ZOMBIES! Commissioned as part of the City of Toronto’s LIVE WITH CULTURE campaign, Chester has completed 6 of a proposed 12 short comics about a zombie invasion in the city of Toronto… and how it affects our arts scene! Of course, being Chester Brown, expect a pretty substantial tweak on the typical zombie book (Romance! Interpretive dance! Final Fantasy!) and Chester’s reading will make it more interesting still.

In a panel entitled Chester Brown in Conversation, Chester will be reading from his new comic strips on Sunday, September 30th at 2pm in the Comics and Graphic Novels tent.

This is just one of the 10+ pieces of comics programming going on this weekend at Word On The Street, a completely free literary festival in Toronto (as well as Calgary, Kitchener, and Vancouver). For more information, visit http://www.thewordonthestreet.ca/toronto/home.asp for more information on everything going down this weekend.

EDIT: I just remembered that I gave a great big interview on this weekend’s comics and graphic novels programming to Chris Randle at Eye Weekly, and lo and behold it’s online. If you head over to http://www.eyeweekly.com/ you can see me putting on my “I Love Comics” hat and talking about all of the good stuff going down this weekend. Hurray for good press.
- Christopher
(Art by Chester Brown, Copyright Chester Brown 2007, probably.)

A year ago this week, I did a little on-stage presentation for my first-ever published comics writing. Myself and my artistic collaborators Kalman Andrasofszky and Ramon Perez put together a ten-page story for an anthology that Image Comics was putting together, as a ‘tribute’ to the band Belle & Sebastian. The book was called Put The Book Back On The Shelf, and I was very proud of the work that my collaborators and I had done, and of the rest of the work in the book. The on-stage presentation was for Toronto’s “Nuit Blanche”, an arts festival where the whole city stays up all night and does… art things. We put the presentation together because it was a way to promote the work we did, and because I thought it all came together in an interesting way. I’ve been meaning for the better part of a year to actually share all of that with the blog, so seeing as our anniversary is only a few short days away, I feel like now’s the perfect time!

What follows is a short trip inside the creative process of someone writing their first comics story, and a short at that. It’s not the only way to do things, and probably not the best, but it worked for me (and the guys too). Oh, and I’m including the whole story here as jpegs, for you to read before I completely deconstruct it below. I hope you enjoy it.

(Oh, and though I get to it later, I want to thank Kalman and Ramon for doing a goddamned amazing job on my script, they knocked it out of the park and it was even better than I imagined.)

Expectations

PREFACE:

So I absolutely love the band Belle & Sebastian, love them. Their music is very inspiring to me, and especially when I had first discovered them, the alternatively mundane and fantastic qualities of their lyrics would inspire me to film little music videos for them in my mind… videos or comics, anyway. The song ‘Expectations’ from the album ‘Tigermilk’ was a particular favourite, and particularly evocative.

I also noticed that many of the songs seems to be about sad girls.

Granted, there are many haters who’d say the band themselves are nothing but a bunch of sad girls (touche!) but really, the band’s lead singer and lyricist would spend a few songs an album writing songs about girls that were sad and shit-on by society, but would one day overcome and be fabulous. If that isn’t the ultimate compliment to a sad, put-upon teenager (of any gender) I don’t know what is.

My friend [Oni Press EiC] James Lucas Jones and I were chatting one night about something or other when he mentioned that Image was putting together a Belle & Sebastian anthology, comics adapting and inspired by B&S’s music… and I became immediately and deeply depressed. James couldn’t figure it out as I’d never previously expressed much interest in creating comics, but I’d thought of doing B&S comics for years, only to be left out of the one project where that might be an actual possibility. “You makes your choices” and all that, being a comics retailer/support staff/critic/whatever instead of a creator, but every once in a while… I explain this to James. He text messages the project’s editor B. Clay Moore in another window. I’m in the book.

How do you break into comics? Just ask, apparently it’s quite easy. (hahahahahaha… sorry.)

So now I have to actually write a comic story.

The discography of Belle & Sebastian, circa June 2005.
OUTLINE: 
I decided that the easiest way not to fuck this up was to work from an outline, and then sort of fill in the details as I went. There are a lot of ways to approach a story, but I figured creating a rigid structure for the work ahead of the time would let me off the hook when it came to the heavy lifting later… I was mostly right, once I had that structure it was really just a matter of getting inside the mind of the character and filling in the details, but it also required some creativity on my part to get out of a few tight spots.
To start, I went to a Belle & Sebastian fan-site, and just started reading everything about the band’s CDs that I could. Release schedules, methods, lyrics, all of it. It helped that I could probably karaoke 3/4 of their entire output, if necessary (not that it would ever be necessary?!), but I realised that it wasn’t just my imagination–the sad girl archetype character made an appearance on more-or-less every album or single, and then some! I had my lead character.
I thought: “Why not make her the ultimate sad Belle & Sebastian girl? Push her right down as far as she can go, only to let her claw her way back up and come through okay. The whole story can be told in narration–it can be the terrible, selfish, whiny livejournal posts of a disaffected girl in her teens and then maturing into her 20s, incorporating song lyrics along the way. I’ll even draw it (have it drawn) in a hazy sort of shoujo style. It’ll be based on the song EXPECTATIONS, the first and clearest of the sad-girl manifesto songs. It’ll be awesome!”

I was trying to figure out a way that we could tell the story, and it just clicked that if every album had a sad-girl song on it, why not make the points at which we visit our protagonist the release dates of the various albums and singles?

The problem became immediately obvious, with Tigermilk released in 1994, we’ve sort-of predated much of contemporary internet culture, LiveJournal included. I dropped the LJ thing in favour of a diary (because who wants to read whiny emo LJ posts anyway?) but the structure of visiting her on those dates seemed perfect… We’d get a span of her life from early highschool through to being a professional woman, a ‘success’.
Then, a flash! The dates that were full albums, those could be full-page installments of her story, to better pace the huge duration of years that the story would need to encompass. And each page would also in some way relate to the sad-girl song on the album it represents. The EPs could be one panel on a page, one song as well, staccato bursts of time showing window into her world, a snapshot of her depression and loneliness.

How the albums fit together as comics pages. 1-1-3-1-2-1-3-1.
Yeah, Tigermilk would be our introduction, a full page of cooperative but distinct narration and action. The song? Expectations of course, and that’s the song that our story ended up representing in the book, and setting the tone for the story. Then Seeing Other People from the second album, Belle & Sebastian from the next EP, etc.
Artistically, I think the most amazing thing I thought up was the thing about the album covers. I wanted the art to relate to and evoke the band’s music as much as the story would, and I figured a good way to convey the mood and tone of the albums would be to steal the palette for the colouring on the pages from the albums. Originally, when the story was going to be shoujo-y and a straight adaptation, I was going to colour it using the cover of Tigermilk as a guide. The hazy silver-grey would play nicely to the strengths of shoujo art… But now that the story was encompassing the band’s entire output to that time, with a page or panel relating to a specific album, why not use all of the cds as visual inspiration? Silver Tigermilk, Angry Red If You’re Feeling Sinister, a sepia-toned Belle & Sebastian EP, etc.

Some examples of the albums and the colour design. Good job, Kalman and Ramon!

So now I knew exactly what I wanted. I wrote myself an outline of everything I’d been thinking. All of the info and research on the band, all of the important songs and lyrics, all of my ideas on colour, on structure, on everything. And once I had this and it seemed like it could actually happen, I decided I better find someone to draw it.

FINDING AN ARTIST:

Me: “Hey, Kalman Adrasofszky, artist of iCandy for DC Comics, amongst other things. I’m writing this story. Do you want to draw it? There’s probably no money.”

Kalman: “Sure, let’s do it!”

Me: “Great. Let me ask Ramon Perez also. Ramon, artist of Butternut Squash, I know you’re incredibly busy, but do you maybe wanna work with Kalman on this for me? Maybe like an pencil/ink/colour sort of split thing?”

Ramon: “Why not? Have you got a script?”

Me: “No, no. But I’ve got an outline and Eric Stephenson says he’ll publish it if I don’t suck. So all of the free work you do will likely at least get published, probably.”

Ramon and Kalman: “Well alright then, let’s get to work!”

(Don’t try this at home.)

ACTUALLY WRITING A STORY:

Despite having a cohesive structure and a ton of notes and knowing in my head exactly what I wanted… I had a really hard time putting pen to paper. I had never written a comic script before, though I’d read tons as well as read (and conducted) lots of interviews on craft and creation and all that. I knew what to do, I just wasn’t sure I knew how. So I procrastinated a lot, and didn’t do the work, and just convinced myself I could do it any time, when I needed to.

Then, I really, really fucking needed to get it done in a hurry because the deadline was here and I hadn’t written a fucking word and Kalman was like Get The Lead Out, Butcher. So I sort of freaked out and just started writing the script after Kalman’s “motivational” e-mail while I was at work one day. Surprise! The outline and all the research basically let the story write itself. I think I only made two or three changes from what I sent Kalman (below) on that first draft.

PAGE 1
3 roughly equal tiers of panels, with a large establishing character shot on the right hand side. Colour is sort of a bleached blue-grey like the cover of TIGERMILK. The over-all setting is in Toronto, in 1996. Our lead character is in grade 9. Feel free to use remembrances of your past freely. The beginning of the story especially should have a dream-like quality. Song: Expectations.

Character shot: 14 year old girl in a catholic school uniform. Skirt is longer than her friends, and she’s got a few little badges/buttons on her sweater. He shoes are big clunky things. Her hair just sort of hangs off her. She’s not unattractive, but she’s got lousy posture and a horrible look on her face. Who can blame her?

PANEL 1
Our girl, dead-and-centre sitting in class, people sitting behind her (a row of faces from edge-to-edge of the panel) chuckling, but not laughing out loud or anything as they don’t want to get caught. Our girl has her eyes closed, and is trying to keep expressionless.

CAPTION: APRIL 1, 1996

NARRATION: I’m a freak. I’m weird and I’m alone and my mom sends me to Catholic School and I hate it. I hate her.

PANEL 2
120 degree camera turn. We’re just behind-and-to-the-right of the girl sitting behind our protagonist, so that we can see the sign taped to her back. “CUNT”. People are still chuckling, except for the antagonist who just looks smug.

NARRATION: My teachers are bastards and perverts, and usually both. My peers are assholes. My day means getting shit on from the alarm buzzer until I fall asleep. I cry sometimes.

PROTAGONIST: (small) Bitch.

PANEL 3
Roughly the same scene, maybe pull back a little. Protagonist is freaking out, and has quickly turned and is moving towards the smug bitch, who looks quite a bit more surprised now. The background is mostly faded out at this point.

NARRATION: And when I lash out, suddenly it’s all my fault. Grade 9 can’t end soon enough.

PROTAGONIST: BITCH!

I was just writing and writing and sending it a page at a time to Kalman as I was going. And that’s what he worked from, and I got a bit of a deadline extension from Eric Stephenson after we sent the first finished page in, and that gave us enough breathing room to get it done, despite my fucking around. Lesson learned: Don’t fuck the deadline.

MAKING ALL OF THE ART AND STUFF

At the onset, Kalman was pencilling/inking with Ramon doing colours, but Ramon hit a wall time-wise and so Kalman ended up colouring the last of it. Oh, also, Kalman used his lovely girlfriend Cristina as the photo reference for the lead character, which was shocking when I met her later. Other than that, I have no idea how they did what they did, but it looked great, seriously. I was so incredibly pleased when I saw the pages come in, utterly unlike what I had imagined and much better… Again, I can’t say enough about how talented and professional Kalman and Ramon are. Hire these guys.

Here we see Cristina next to her in-book counterpart.

The first page of art, sans colouring. 

Here we see Cristina and Kalman, posing as characters on the second page of the story.

On the left are Kalman’s ‘pencils’, which are actually done via graphics tablet on the computer. Kalman integrates his photo ref and then “inks” the whole think tighter on another layer.

And, the final result. A sinister, angry series of reds.
After that I lettered it myself (I am occasionally a professional letterer). You know what they say about all writers being forced to letter their own work? I completely agree. I actually did a good solid edit during the lettering stage, and made the text flow a little better in spots (and fit in the balloon). I ran it by some friends for corrections, and we were good to go. It turns out in the end, that we weren’t even the latest story in the book! :)
TWO YEARS LATER

It’s a little over two years since I first roped Kalman and Ramon in, and two years on I’ve got a number of observations on the piece. For one, it reads a hell of a lot better if you linger on each panel… if you read comics the way I do (which is very, very quickly) then the whole thing comes off as really disjointed. I tried to make a point of showing a significant time jump between panels, but it’s up to the reader to notice and pause, despite the visual clues. I just read the story for the first time in at least 7 months, and I just zoomed through it, and it didn’t work. A slower read works better, I think. Ah well.

The other thing I’m noticing is that the narration for the first few pages is sloppy. I wrote it sloppy on purpose–it’s supposed to be a sort of a dramatic diary entry from a young person–but… yeah. I was trying to show a clear progression from angry adolescent to a smart woman with her shit together, and I think that’s there, but some of that is painful to read. Probably not as painful as livejournal entries though…

I think the art is still excellent though, all the way through. I really rushed these guys and it doesn’t show anywhere. Both Kalman and Ramon have gone on to better things, but I’m still happy every time I see these pages. If you want to see more of their work, you can find Kalman online at http://www.horhaus.com/weblogs/kalmangallery/, and more on Ramon at http://www.ramon-perez.com/.
As for reaction to the story? Critically it has been mixed, some good, some bad. Eric Stephenson mentioned to me that it was one of the favourites of the folks in the Image offices, which was heartening to hear. Doug Wolk tore the book (and my story in particular) apart on Salon.com. The first reviewer at Amazon.com ‘got it’ and liked it… But the best story? Two or three weeks after the book’s release I’m at a party, and someone asks me about the book and we’re talking about my story, and another woman turns around and says “wait, ‘Expectations’ in that new Belle and Sebastian comic? You wrote that? I LOVED that.” and she just sort of stares at me. That was weird, and great. I think I said thank you, and blushed. It was really great that a woman, about my age, who probably went through school at about the same time I did and listened to all this music as well… that she liked it, and that it spoke to her.

Because there are a lot of sad girls out there, and in the end they can overcome and be fabulous. :)

(Thanks for reading.)

(Also, I put the whole script below behind the “cut”. Just click on “continue reading this entry” to read the script.)

- Christopher

Keep reading…

DC’s online comics initiative, Zuda, have posted their creator contracts online. Following along with Joey Manley, I will at least congratulate them for being transparent, though much of that transparency probably came because of the yelling and screaming that went on… they kind of allude to that in the second paragraph on the site there, actually.

So I’ve gone through the contracts to the best of my ability, and looked at all of the stuff that’s been written about them–both publically and privately–and I’m kind of at a loss what to say here. Most importantly, it’s a contract that I would never personally sign, I’ll say that much at least. But I don’t really know what else I can say to communicate that this… really isn’t very good… without coming off like a nut, or a ‘hater’, or whatever.

“[The] thing that jumps out at me is that if you’re still up in the air about whether this company’s offers matches your own standards in terms of basic rights and obligations, you may be better off thinking about things in greater detail — and discussing it with that lawyer — than reading about it. There’s not likely to be easy consensus anywhere you look. Further, creators rights issues in comics are a close second to retail issues in comics when it comes to inspiring demented rhetoric. Discussion gets strident and defensive really, really quickly. You’re going to run into everything from angry jeremiads about big companies being unable to [not] screw anyone with whom they come into contact to exhortations that it’s okay to subject yourself to a crappy deal because you can always think up new stuff (after all, Jerry Siegel co-created Superman and Doris Evans), or, as it’s usually put, if you can’t think of more than one idea, you have no business being a creator. Stuff like that. So be careful.”
- Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter.

I don’t particularly want to get into the middle of another ‘thing’ about this, but… yeah. I don’t understand why someone who is smart and talented enough to create an idea from whole cloth, an idea that will be decreed as ‘good’ by both a large publisher AND the public at large, and not have the faith in it to see it through, wait for the ‘big money’ that could be down the line. It’s nice to be paid a page-rate for your work and all, but that $14,000 salary cap ($1000 purchase price plus 52 weeks @ $250/strip) seems to be pretty limiting, in terms of the potential revenue that could be generated off of a successful webcomic. It’s not bad money I guess, but here’s the thing… It’s less than the money you would make doing a half-page of comics art at DC or Veritgo even, and it also involves selling off the intellectual property for your work for an unlimited amount of time (seriously, at $500 a year, Time Warner could quite easily afford to pay you that fuck-off money forever). The idea that you should fully own what you fully create? It’s a good one, and one that I feel should be taken seriously. I also personally feel that every time someone takes a very bad deal like this, it makes it that much easier for publishers to OFFER very bad deals.

The one thing that everyone agrees with, even Zuda, is get a lawyer to look at the contract before you sign it. Hell, before you submit anything. The deal–to me–has a very “Siegel and Shuster 2.0″ kind of a vibe, where those fellas sold the idea for Superman for a weekly paycheck and a pat-on-the-back. Except this time I don’t see the industry rallying around you to be properly credited for the work, whether you “own the Copyright” (but not the Trademark or have any real power) or not.

Would you sell off Superman for $14,000?

- Christopher

From Dirk Deppey at Journalista:

Dirk pretty-much missed the point, as he is wont to do anytime anyone takes the argument to him. I like his writing and he seems like an affable enough guy, but he certainly does like to pout when when anyone calls him on anything. So for the record: Scanlations are not wrong; scanlations are the wrong suggestion for a journalist looking to recommend mature manga on a newspaper’s website. As for the critic’s-choice points? Completely besides the point, again, as it isn’t about which work is more indy or arty than which, but what’s going to open up the market for similar work; The one just solicited prior to release, or the one thats a few years old with the print runs set?

“Don’t get me wrong. Matsumoto’s comic isn’t by any means a bad read — as crime-themed fight comics go, it’s an enjoyable little bit of fluff — but if you’re going to hold a book up as an adult’s alternative to Naruto, shouldn’t it be something other than a mildly more mature version of same? You don’t even need to leave Matsumoto’s own back catalog to find worthier books for grown-ups; his Blue Spring is a dark and absorbing look at teenage restlessness that satisfies in ways Tekkon Kinkreet simply can’t match. Hell, even the out-of-print No. 5, while no titan of depth or complexity itself, at least offers a wildly inventive, surreal formalism that fairly leaps off the page, somewhat elevating the two-volume series above standard genre fare. Of the three Taiyo Matsumoto works to be translated for English-reading audiences so far, Tekkon Kinkreet is actually the weakest of the lot. I hate to break it to Butcher, but I strongly suspect that Guardian readers aren’t any more likely to consider this book an interesting alternative to prose literature than they will Naruto or Hot Gimmick.”

Blue Spring sold terribly, and the two volumes of No.5 are considered by Viz to be their worst-selling books of all time. I own and love them both, but when we’re having a discussion about reaching the broader audience with work that’s more mature, and opening up the market to more of that material, holding up two books considered as sales failures by their publisher isn’t the way to go. Especially because both of those books probably sold better than the majority of Fanfare’s output. What Tekkon has going for it is a massive mainstream media push thanks to a DVD release by the creator of The Animatrix, which sold a lot of fucking DVDs. While I love Tekkon and think its of high quality and recommend the hell out of it, I also recognize that there are other works that are more literary and of higher aspirations; I’m not an idiot. But I also think that getting behind books that do have the capacity for mainstream success, making the category more profitable (or profitable at all) is more important than bemoaning our lot or sending readers out to the grey market.

Having a Beguiling employee berating me for spotlighting “low-print run books with poor bookstore distro” over comics like Tekkon Kinkreet is the single most perplexing and dispiriting way to start a week that I can imagine at the moment. By this logic, Thunderbolts is a better introduction to the possibilities offered by Western comics than It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken, the latter of which cannot be found at either of the two chain bookstores closest to me — and you now know what that means.

I hope Dirk is well and truly recovered from being perplexed and dispirited, mostly because it was of his own doing. His example above is the best example of a straw-man argument I can come up with today, a few steps further afield than simple apples and oranges. If someone were doing a fall preview and I decided to push the new Thunderbolts collection instead of Shortcomings, that might be one thing, but the situation that went down was more akin to Dirk pushing those great, more-or-less out of print books that Zack Sally published (Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man by Porcillino, and his own Recidivist) and some random shit on scans_daily… instead of the Ware-edited “Best American Comics 2007″. The latter suggestion at least has a chance to sell, and a lot to recommend it, even though there might be better books coming out… the former two suggestions are entirely irrelevant.

(Besides that point, anyone who thinks that Tekkon Kinkreet is on an even keel with Ellis’ Thunderbolts simply hasn’t read one of the two books, or either of them. Not even Ellis would make this claim.)

Finally — and I realize that it might not occur to a brick-and-mortar retailer to think of it — the books published by Fanfare/Ponent Mon are in fact available online through such outlets as Waterstone’s and Amazon.co.uk. To get you started, here are the listings for Kan Takahama and Jiro Taniguchi. For that matter, I’m sure Forbidden Planet International would be glad to sell you a book or two through their website. Welcome to the 21st century.

Hahaha… Yeah, of course. Welcome to the 21st century, us brick and mortar retailers might not be able to figure out that Fanfare/Ponent Mon’s books are available online. Whatever, I’m glad the books are available to people who want them, but those print-runs are already set, and my friend Stephen at Fanfare has made it quite clear that the endeavour is a labour of love for him, likely to continue virtually regardless of sales (though he was quite happy at JAPAN and MARIKO PARADE needing to go back for new printings, recently). When it comes to publishers with deep pockets being willing to license and publish work for grown-ups, sales are king and it makes a lot more sense to push the books that are coming out… or books that are legally available at the very least, than to not.

Anyway, I’m glad that, at the very least, I “perplexed and dispirited” Dirk enough to actually do the work and send people over to Forbidden Planet to buy some good books… I suppose sending them to The Beguiling’s Book Store would have weakened his argument that The Beguiling (or the online-since-he-was-12 representative of said brick-and-mortar retailer) had no idea about online book sales. Ah well.

I’ll keep making noise about good books that you should be buying, and even picking my battles. Wish me luck.
- Christopher

The Word On The Street is a FREE literary festival held on September 30th from 11am-6pm in five cities across Canada*. I’m really happy to announce that Toronto’s Word On The Street event (held on Queen’s Park Circle) will feature an extensive comics and graphic novels presence in The Comics and Graphic Novels Tent, presented in partnership with The Toronto Comic Arts Festival. Featuring a full day of author readings, book presentations, and panels on comics creation and publishing, this is going to be a pretty outstanding part of an already massive event. I’m also very proud to say that I’ll be co-hosting in the tent alongside my good friend Mark Askwith, the producer of SPACE television and an excellent comics writer in his own right.

The line-up of panels and participating creators has been announced, and you can find an overview of the programming at the website. Participating creators include Chester Brown, Scott Chantler, Willow Dawson, Ray Fawkes, Stuart Immonen, Karl Kerschl, Jeff Lemire, Nadine Lessio, Brad Mackay, John Martz, Kagan McLeod, Jim Munroe, Ryan North, Ty Templeton, Noel Tuazon, Zack Worton, Chip Zdarsky, Jim Zubkavich, and many more in a host of panels. The Beguiling will also be selling books from all of the attending authors at the venue.

Also! The IdeaSpace Young Adult Marquee will feature graphic novel programming as well! Make sure to check out Eric Kim, and Svetlana Chmakova on the panel MANGA! MANGA! MANGA! THE HOWS AND WHYS OF THESE HOT NEW COMICS! at 12:30pm, and COMICS: DOIN’ IT YOUR WAY with Tyrone McCarthy and Arthur Dela Cruz at 4:30pm.

The Word On The Street is a huge literary event in Toronto which draws more people in than the San Diego Comic Con. It was a huge, huge thrill to be a part of putting together the comics and graphic novel programming for this year’s event, as I think it will continue the trend of putting comics and graphic novels out into the public eye in a way that can’t be ignored. Getting our own major venue to do so–alongside the integration of comics and graphic novels into other venues–is spectacular, and the fulfillment of a personal dream of mine. I remember going to WOTS for the first time nearly a decade ago, and coming home energized about the potential for comics in that sort of environment. I even wrote a column about it at the time that might be around online somewhere… I’m glad to see that potential becoming a reality, seeing that all of the crazy ideas I had as a 20 year old weren’t so crazy, and in fact, would be hotly in demand as I turned 30.

I sincerely hope that any of you reading this will come out for this (completely free!) event, and bring friends… The better it does, the better the next event will be, and so on.

Oh, and if you wanna spread the word, that’d be great too ;)

- Christopher

I’m actually typing up this entry on the plane ride home from Japan. I have mixed feelings about leaving… I’ve never really been convinced I could actually live in Japan until now, but at the same time, I’m looking forward to getting home and sleeping in my own bed and trying to get back into some kind of routine. I’m also going to try and incorporate some of the things I’ve seen and learned from the retail establishments (particularly the comics ones) into what I do every day. I think there’s a lot to learn from stores that are as well-run—and fucking busy!—as the ones I’ve been visiting. BUT ANYWAY, WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO SEE SOME MORE CRAZY PICTURES?

I don’t know if I made it clear last post, but NAMJATOWN is actually inside a mall. Well, it’s more of a huge city-block shopping complex called SUNSHINE CITY, which also houses another mall (World Import Mart, seen in the bg) and the 60-story skyscraped SUNSHINE 60.

Keep reading…

Oh shit… what’s this? Could it be? It is! It’s:

Yes, it’s NAMJATOWN, a multi-floor themed indoor amusement park. Sort of. While there are three over-riding “games” you can participate in (if you both read and speak perfect Japanese), really, you just go to see one of the most amazing, tacky, fucked-up places you’ve ever been. Seriously. It’s NAMJATOWN. I was first made aware of NAMJATOWN by my buddy Jim Zubkavich of Udon Comics. He, sleep-deprived and in total culture-shock, traversed NAMJATOWN within his first couple of days of being in Japan his first time, and found it thoroughly surreal, and dammit if that wasn’t an experience I wanted for Andrew and I. NAMJATOWN, by NAMCO, makers of Pac Man. Hang on to your hats, kids!

Keep reading…