Mike Dawson Comics

No, it’s NOT more readings of the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy, it’s plain-old Alex and Mike yakking it up alone in the Lair, just like old times. We address the fact that Tony’s tour-de-force is gonna be a tough one to follow up on, and it’s almost like we don’t even try. Hear about our recent con experiences (TCAF, The Wild Pig Show in NJ), seeing Marvel’s The Avengers, getting cable installed in the house, adopting children and changing their names to something more suited to their social standing, and murdering buckets full of frogs.

Comments welcome!

This week’s illustration of Inky the Domesticated Panther supplied by Josh Bayer! Submit your own illustration of Inky to inkpanthers@gmail.com

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I was at TCAF this past weekend, and it was a swell time. However, I am burrrned out, I think probably like 80% because of all this moving house/being unsettled/etc rigmarole, and maybe 20% just worn out on conventions for a while. I did a ton of them since SPX last year: APE, MiX, BCGF, Angouleme, and now TCAF. That’s a lot for me. There was also the Game Developer’s Conference in California that I went to, which wasn’t comics, but was still a week-long event. I just want to be home, getting my head down and making comics. Thankfully, I have no plans to go to any other shows until SPX in October, by which time I should be ready to get back into it.

Also, I decided that A) since I don’t really expect to ever make a living writing my books, and B) since I have no plans to leave my publishers at Secret Acres, and C) as long as they stay in business, then I really don’t need to be as informed about the comics industry as I have been. Blissfully ignorant: that’s my new goal. I want to write what I want to write, and read comics that interest me, and that’s it. We’ll see how I do. Twitter is probably my biggest nemesis in this regard. I do like talking about the industry, and it’s pretty much a perfect place for that sort of chat, because it’s the thing that gets conversation going the easiest. And I love twitter. I can’t see quitting, but I have plans to put the drawing table and the computer in totally different rooms in the new house, so Tweetdeck’s Siren’s Call is just that little bit harder to hear. They’ll actually be about as far away from each other as possible – the drawing table in the basement by the boiler room, and the computer upstairs by the bedrooms. I’m really excited about it.

This coming weekend, May 5 & 6, I’ll be present at the Toronto Comics Art Festival, camped out at the Secret Acres table. I’ll obviously be selling Troop 142, but will be bringing copies of Freddie & Me, Ace-Face, and Gabagool! as well. I think I’m going to be offering a sweet deal of a heavily discounted copy of Ace-Face and free copies of the Gabagool! Hedonism saga with every purchase of Troop 142. I am also going to see if I can rummage up a little original artwork to put on sale too.

I will be appearing on a panel on Sunday afternoon, from 2:00 – 3:15PM, called Making Comics: The Process along with Adam Warren, Cecil Castellucci, and Kagan McLeod. It’ll take place in The Pilot Tavern location. I’m looking forward to it.

I participated in a panel this past weekend at the MoCCA festival, called Memoir, along with Jennifer Hayden, Derf, and Peter Kuper. The structure of the talk had us giving lengthy introductions and offering some of our thoughts about memoir/autobiography. There were definitely a lot of provocative points made, and I wish we’d had an extra half-hour to get a lengthier conversation going between the four of us.

A point that was raised more than once was that there are too many boring autobiographical comics about boring lives. I take a little bit of exception to this idea, though I think I understand where the sense of it comes from.

I don’t think there are too many autobio comics at all. I love reading autobio comics! I wish more cartoonists did them.

Sure, there are poorly made amateurish autobio books. But, I suggest to you, there are no more of them than there are, say, poorly made amateurish space-adventure epics, or poorly made amateurish Love & Rockets rip-offs. There’s poorly made comics of all stripes and genres.

In my opinion, the sense that there’s too much of this sort of work, glutting the market, comes from the reader’s raised expectations when presented with memoir. The immediate question the reader asks is Why is your life worth reading about? Why are your experiences worth my time?

And it’s a fair question.

But, I don’t think it’s the same thing as there being this overwhelming sea of sad-boy autobio, threatening to drown us in it’s navel-gazing. I just don’t think that exists. No more than any other kind of comic.

A new trailer for The Dark Knight Rises was released today. I watched it, and am filled with conflicting thoughts.

On one hand, this movie looks totally unpleasant. I thought Batman II was grim, but this looks worse. To me it feels like all the bleak nihilism of the last movie, but without a charismatic villain. Does this even look like it would be a nice way to spend 2 hours in the Summer? This looks more like a visual endurance test than a summertime diversion.

On the other hand, how awesome is it to take something everyone perceives as a lightweight action Summer tent-pole type thing, and pack it full of all this awful horrible heavy stuff? Because it’s Batman, the movie is going to make a pile of money, which means a ton of people sitting in seats watching this thing. This unpleasant awful-looking thing.

It’s funny, sitting here on May Day, typing this. Helicopters hovering above the city, sirens blaring, as Occupy Protesters go back to the streets. I think history will be kind to Batman II and III. They are probably better capsules of the mood of this time-period than The Avengers will be. But, right now, if given the choice to go and see one of these movies, I think I’d lean towards Captain America and the Hulk…

The Desert Panther, Tony Consiglio, creeps once again into The Lair, this week to perform a dramatic reading of the erotic smash-hit Twilight fan-fiction book, 50 Shades of Grey. If any Books On Tape producers are out there listening, please hire Tony to narrate your recordings. Especially sexxxxy ones.

Comments welcome!

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No recent drawing to post this week, but a quick bloggy-blog update. Why no new drawing, you ask? Well, last Thursday my wife and I became first-time homeowners, and then spent the weekend moving all of our stuff down to sunny, peaceful New Jersey. I hate going so many days without drawing, but I think in this instance it’s all excusable. I might get messed up again this week, because there’s just such an endless amount of stuff that needs to get done. I gotta keep telling myself things will settle down, I will get back into a routine, just because I get disrupted from drawing for two weeks to transplant my entire life over to another State, doesn’t actually mean that I am no longer a cartoonist and should just throw in my Manga Deleter pens and nibs and resign myself to a life of picking out window treatments and area rugs.

A couple upcoming appearances and events:

This weekend is the MoCCA Arts Festival in New York City, held at the decidedly not-sunny, but undeniably spacious Lexington Ave Armory at 26th street. I won’t be present at the show on Saturday (see above paragraph), but will be there on Sunday for a panel at 2:15 and then signing and sketching at the Secret Acres table afterwards.

The panel I’m on is called “Memoir”, and it will be with Peter Kuper, Jennifer Hayden, and Derf Backderf. I’m looking forward to it. Speaking of Derf, I picked up his book My Friend Dahmer at The Strand last night, and read it all in one sitting. Totally absorbing comic.

I was interested in how part of the narrative had to do with the culture of parents in the 1970′s, and them being somewhat more absent than the parenting culture we have now. This is an interesting phenomenon, and from other things I’ve read, it’s totally true: parents were much more hands-off, (or I guess the better word again is absent) in the 1970′s for better or worse. Divorce rates were higher, and I believe the birth-rate hit it’s lowest point ever sometime around the middle of the decade. I was reminded of the movie The Ice Storm while reading the book – a similar sort of unsettling suburban environment, where the kids are essentially left to their own devices while the parents focus on their own dramas, completely oblivious to what’s going on with their children.

It makes me wonder, I feel like there’s a ton of criticism about today’s “helicopter parents”, and often people defend the parenting style of the 1970′s, suggesting a hands-off approach is ultimately better for the kids. I dunno. I don’t especially buy the idea that absentee parents led to Jeffrey Dahmer becoming a serial killer, because it’s not like he was the only one who had them. I was born in the 70′s, so didn’t exactly “grow up” in them, but I was close, and I feel like myself and most people I know seemed to turn out okay… but, how do we know that helicopter parenting is so bad for the kids? They haven’t grown yet…

But, as I type this, I think about American Idol, and the like, and every kid thinking they’re The Best and The Most Talented, and it’s their God-Given Right to have a career in the music industry (even though there is no music industry anymore… just kids on American Idol doing imitations of performance styles which came out of the 1970′s…) Maybe it’s better for a kid to get a healthy dose of 1970′s-style “the world doesn’t revolve around you” medicine every once in a while. I dunno, I dunno…

Anyway, sorry for the tangent! Following MoCCA weekend is TCAF in Toronto, and this convention I will be there the whole time! More about that next week, hopefully along with a new drawing or two.

It’s The Ink Banthas Show! Mike is wrapped up in house buying and moving mayhem, so it’s a Very Special All Star Wars Episode this week with Alex and guest host: Pete the Retailer. Hopefully this will become a recurring feature, as I (Mike) really enjoyed listening to the two of them talk about everybody’s favorite trilogy (and, I guess, uh, the prequels too). They make some very sound points, especially in picking apart Luke’s “plan” to save Han from Jabba’s clutches. Have a listen!

Comments welcome!

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Recent drawing, done using those new Deleter Manga pens that the kids are all raving about.

A busy week: Cartoonist Julia Wertz joins us on The Ink Panthers Show!, to talk about a bunch of stuff, including “Vajazzling” and “Brozillians”. I am disappointed in us for never making the connection between the two, and coining the term “Bro-jazzling”, which is for when a man shaves of all his pubes and glues diamonds there instead, in the shape of a heart, or a 4-leaved clover, or Mets logo, or whatever it is a man might want to stick down there. Maybe that popular automobile decal of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes taking a leak?

Also, the final episode of TCJ Talkies up at The Comics Journal – a conversation with Tim Kreider. I offer a ramble-y explanation of why I ended the podcast in the show intro, and everything I said there is true. Having had a few days to dwell upon it however, I’m realizing there were other things about the podcast that I could never get working quite right – the main one being my inability to produce shows on a more-frequent and consistent schedule.

I think a podcast needs to come out regularly and frequently, in order to build up a proper fan-base. In a perfect world, one where I could pay my rent on podcasting money alone, I’d put out episodes at least once a week, if not more. I think you have to, to build up momentum, and build up a listener-ship.

One thing I do mention in the show intro is an increase in non-comics and podcast demands in my personal life, and that’s certainly true. I think if things ever settle down, and I get the creator-interview itch again, it makes more sense to scratch it in the context of The Ink Panthers Show!, as part of the occasionally put-together PRO-T.I.P.S! series.

Have a good weekend!

Listen to me chat with Tim Kreider over at The Comics Journal!