April 9, 2006
After seeing the mini-comic awards, I began fantasizing about doing a mini-comic of my own. That would be a great excuse to pop out some Dr. DeBunko or Dick Hammer: Conservative Republican Private Investigator stories. And they would be relatively quick to produce. And then I could always print a dozen or so, sign and number them, and take them to cons. They’d be cheap and easy. And later, I could always republish the stories in a trade, once I’ve built up enough of them. Hm. Hmmmm…
I envision just taking a normal six-panel comic page, and making each of the panels one page for the mini-comic. The mini-comic could be twelve or twenty-four panels (pages), and it would only be as much work as a two- or four-page comic. I should be able to pop those out in no time.
At the con, Dan, the owner of my local comic shop, Bizarro World, popped by, and I talked about trying to figure out a format for my next Giant Monster book. When I originally conceived it, I’d tried to figure out a way I could print a few issues of stories, and then collect them in another treasury edition. But the only practical way would be to do sixteen-page comics. I didn’t want the commitment of doing 32- or even 24-page comics. That’s a real project, and too much work. But back when I was giving all this some thought, the problem I’d had with a sixteen-page book is that four or five pages would be artist pin-ups, and that only leaves eleven pages. I’ve used a format of five or six pages for each Doris Danger story, so that means there’s only room for two stories. Who the hell wants to only read two Doris Danger stories? It doesn’t make any sense to read two. You need at least three, otherwise you don’t get the joke (The joke being that each story ends with a cliff-hanger and begins with no mention of the previous cliff-hanger). And even worse, I would want to draw a few pages of splashes myself, and there wouldn’t be any room for these.
Alternatively, if I did three stories, there’s no room for any pin-ups. So originally I just decided, screw it, I’ll go straight to the treasury edition, and even though I really want to do issues first, I won’t.
Until I talked to Dan this weekend. Then I realized, I could still do four pages of splashes, and five pages of pin-ups, and that would leave an only minorly lengthened seven page story! It’s perfect! I guess I just didn’t do the math before, so I was resistant to it. But at the con, I realized, as long as the additional pages are nonsensical, non-consecutive events, it will work just fine. I could throw in all my side characters. The Republican scientist who was double-duped by the Army. The man who claims he became a monster. The monster-hating Christians. The redneck vigilantes. The old man who seems to know so much about the government’s mysterious giant monster activities… It’s the perfect format, actually!
So the only thing left to figure out is how cheaply I could get these printed. If I have to do a cover price higher than $2.50, no one is going to want to spend it on a weensy-little sixteen page comic, with only one seven page story. As it is, I’ll have to do everything I can to keep the price at $2, I think. Crank ‘em out on shitty newsprint or something. But for me it would be worth it.
So this is how the bulk of the day went by. With me scheming ways I can work on projects that get the most bang for the effort. Things I can package, and then repackage in different formats, and sell and re-sell.
I saw Al Gordon walk by, and called his name. He came over and I made him look at the giant monster book. He seemed to be really studying the art, and enjoyed the pin-ups. He asked, so you swiped all the Kirby art, and Dick Ayers inked them. I said, Right. Al started to tell me that he has a friend who buys a stack of comics at every convention, and sometimes they’ll get together over a couple beers, and they’ll go through the stack and try to figure out the inkers. I asked if his friend was Mario Hernandez (it was). Mario had told me Al could look at panels and tell the difference between inkers, just from looking at the rocks in the panel. Al said that the old comics, especially the romance comics, the work was put out by a bullpen, and you got the feeling these artists would get bored of the books they were working on, and swap. So often, different artists were mixed in page to page, panel to panel, and sometimes one artist would do a figure, and another the background, or things like that.
I asked him who he thought inked Fantastic Four #1. He said he thought it was the same person who did #1 and #2. I don’t know who that is, and don’t remember who he named. I said, supposedly that’s the big mystery. He shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t a mystery to him.
At one point, some guy was wandering by, and he slowed down as he passed my table, and came to a stop, and just kept staring at my prints of giant monsters. He kept staring, which I always take to be a good sign, because it means they’re interested by them. I said, Do you like the old Kirby-style giant monsters? He smiled and kept quiet, and after a pause, finally said, You spelled impenetrable wrong! And he thought he was so clever. He just stood there and smiled, and I didn’t say anything and waited for him to go away. What can you say at that point?
As the day was almost over, Mario Hernandez came by, and I broached getting another pin-up from him. He said he was going to ask, but he thought I had started working on a different book now. I told him that had been the plan, and I’d gotten in about thirty pages with something else, but decided to go back to the monsters. Mario said he’d totally do another monster, and he got kind of quiet about things after that. But I realized he was brainstorming in his head for monster ideas, and finally he said, Okay, I think I’ve got an idea for another monster. I told him I wanted to contact Gilbert too, but that Jaime was too expensive. He laughed.
I got talking with Mario about professional wrestling. He said he remembers matches like Pedro Morales unmasking some masked guy on live tv, back when he was a kid. Things like that used to be such a big deal. Talk about the ultimate humiliation for a masked wrestler. The ultimate e-MASK-ulation.
He said he used to study the wrestling interviews, before the matches. Each wrestler had a different technique for their interview. Hulk Hogan would stand quietly, and listen to his interviewer, maybe with his hands folded in front of him, like he really was concentrating, and interested in the intellectual discussion the interviewer was giving. Then all of a sudden he’d explode and shout, in his booming low, gravel voice, “WELL YOU KNOW MEAN GENE HULKAMANIA IS RUNNING WILD!” And just get shouting.
And then he pointed out how Rowdy Roddy Piper would shout so fast and hysterically and have so much to say, he would keep shouting while he breathed out or in.
I saw Dan Vado, who I knew was the head of Slave Labor Graphics, walk by. I ran out from behind my table with a Doris Danger book. I got his attention, and startled him a little. I told him he had given me a very nice portfolio review back when I was just getting started, and I really appreciated that. He looked over the book and seemed impressed. I name-dropped having done a book with Sam Kieth, and he seemed impressed by that. I wonder if people are really impressed, or if they just think I’m an asshole to be name-dropping all the time, and give the response they think will best alleviate my aggression?
When the con was just about finished, I had Elizabeth go to a few of the stores who had booths, and see if anyone would buy some Doris Danger books. She sold twenty copies between three shops. One of the sales was as a result of James at Isotope (whose party we’d been at last night) stopping by OUR booth and saying he wanted to pick some up. He was a lot of fun to visit with. He was the one who, back at Wondercon, had jokingly started calling my Tabloia book, “To BLOW ya.” I had sent an email to him about this a couple months ago, and when he popped by the table, he apologized, and said my email had been in his Spam filter all this time, and he had just found the email.
Overall, we made back our table, and that’s really all we can expect. Some embarrassments with Matt Groening and Chris Staros, but on the other hand, it was a LOT of fun visiting with Jim Williams and Mario Hernandez. I’m really fond of them both, and little things like that make the con feel damn fun.