Seriously, what on earth was that Starfleet thing all about?

I wasn’t totally sure what was going on with this, but it looks like the Czech edition of Freddie & Me is going to be published soon

Super Heros, a comics shop in Paris, made this ex-libris bookplate to insert into French copies of Freddie & Me. They sent me a box of them. They’re really nice.

This is a picture I took at TCAF of my table. I never got around to posting any of my TCAF pics, but most of them weren’t very good anyway. I might need a better camera, or maybe I just need to read the manual to find out how to take less blurry photos.

Look how cute Orli is!! She drinks out of a straw!

So far, Rackham is the first publisher to radically alter the cover of the book, to make it more palatable to French tastes. The cover I made is very photoshop-y, I’ll admit, and they wanted to flatten it out a little. I like how it came out:

Robin McConnell interviewed me this past week for his excellent comics-related radio show, Inkstuds. We talk about my books Ace-Face and Freddie & Me, as well as my ongoing webcomic, Jack & Max Escape From the End of Time, among other things.

Unfortunately the last minute and a half of our chat got scrambled, so had to be cut from the online audio. This results in the conversation ending kind of abruptly, just as I started on some weird rant about my disgust at my former college-age self for being such Politically Correct drip instead of going out and partying for four years. Maybe it’s for the best that the majority of this screed has been lost to the ages…

It’s a great review, and I’m psyched they spotlighted it. I can’t help but assume the worst though, at the beginning where he mentions seeing the book on the shelves, noting in his “to check out one day” mental filing cabinet, and then a year later picking it up. Was it the same copy that he saw both times?

A not very high-resolution image of the cover of the Spanish version of Freddie & Me, which I believe will be out in a few weeks from Ediciones La Cúpula. When I get a less grainy version of the image I will probably replace this one.

Me and Orli in the swimming pool. She was a little freaked out when she first went in, but pretty soon she really loved being in the water. I am not sure when it’s OK to let them put their heads under, though. Do they learn pretty quickly to not breathe the water in, or do you need to wait until they’re old enough to understand you when you tell them to hold their breath?

According to the storyteller, he was doing very well striking up a conversation with the girl, talking about her book, which he had also read, until, he claims, he showed her Freddie & Me. Apparently, she saw he was reading a comic-book, and became repulsed and he ended up striking out. He frantically attempts to salvage the conversation, but the damage is done, and she gets off at the next stop.

Normally I would have a problem with this, because seriously, is this 1988, or 1995, or even 2004 or something, and comics still aren’t considered cool/acceptable by the mainstream? Didn’t she get the update? Hasn’t she ever heard of MAUS or PERSEPOLIS or even the Dark Knight or Iron Man movies? Does she think only creepy man-children are going to see these things still? Shouldn’t reading a “graphic novel” make you seem more interesting/sophisticated/with it/etc? Come on now.

But, I am OK with this, because whether or not she was wrong to dismiss the guy because he was reading a comic, according to the story he was very attracted to her, so it’s all fair-enough. I just feel bad that F&M was such a lousy wingman for the fella. Maybe if he was reading John Grisham’s The Firm or something, things might have gone his way.

Key quote:

In the first chapter, for example, Hallinan posits that people take information in on a purely need-to-know basis, without even thinking about it. He then mentions an experiment conducted at Cornell University, where participants were instructed to ask strangers for directions; the twist was that the conversation would be blocked, literally, by two men carrying a door. In that split second, a door-carrier switches with the stranger, and the directions-giving continues as if nothing went wrong. Hardly any of the experimentees noticed the change, and Hallinan follows with evidence that you, the reader, wouldn’t have either.

An interesting little anecdote. It made me think a little about character design in comics. I’ve sometimes worried about my own inconsistency in that area, especially because I tend to design the character “on the page”. By this I mean I draw them almost for the first time when I get to the page when they first show up, and develop/evolve their look as I progress. A particularly egregious example to my eye is in Freddie & Me, the character of my friend Rob in High School. He had appeared in quite a few scenes before I felt like I really got his design down, and the character started looking more consistent.

The quote above makes me wonder if readers even notice stuff like that though. They probably don’t. Nobody has ever asked me why the Rob character had a longer head when he first appeared, and a potato shaped head later on. I think as long as a reader can always tell who’s who, then the small changes in character design probably don’t register much at all.

Another sketchbook page. I think this one is interesting because of what I wrote on the right-hand side. This was back in 2004 or 2005, and I’d just started posting some pages from F&M online, after I’d been working on the book for a long, long, time. Heidi MacDonald linked to me from The Beat, and I was psyched that this sent a bunch of traffic my way, as well as leading to my first real publishing offer (which was from a French publisher who did a lot of US translations).

As you can see, I wrote “Have to remember that not every day is a positive day” underneath. This is a little embarrassing, but it’s was a good thing to remind myself. For me, writing could be tough, and there are definitely days when it seemed like a pointless thing to be doing. I think it’s important to never let those days overwhelm you, just as it’s important to not let the days when you feel like great things are happening go to your head either. Same thing with reviews. Don’t take the good or the bad ones too seriously (except for when I got a really positive review in the London Sunday Telegraph. That one counted!).

Finally, it’s kind of fun to see that I must have been gearing up for the scene in F&M where I imagine myself singing “Somebody to Love” in the cafeteria, judging by the doodles of me wearing Freddie Mercury clothes.

A few places posted online excerpts from Freddie & Me. These are the ones that can still be found online:

Pop Candy
NPR
Publishers Weekly

Here are some of the print interviews I took part in to help promote Freddie & Me:

The Comics Reporter – June, 2008
Newsarama – June, 2008
BlogCritics Magazine – June, 2008
The Daily Cross-Hatch – October, 2008

These are links to some of the audio interviews I did to help promote Freddie & Me. There were some others (including a bunch on the BBC radio, that sadly I may never hear again), but these are the ones I could find that are still online:

Pop Candy – May, 2008
Indie Spinner Rack – June, 2008
Comic News Insider – June 2008
Indie Spinner Rack – recorded @ HeroesCon with Alex Robinson, August 2008
Comic Geek Speak – February 2009

Photo by Seth Kushner

Freddie & Me was published in the Summer of 2008 by Bloomsbury in the USA and Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom. Here’s a slew of links, sampling some of the press the book received:

The Sunday Telegraph

Charming, sincere and, above all, expressively drawn, in an uncomplicated way it has much to say about what remains after we’ve gone.

Comic Book Resources

Perfectly captures the high drama of adolescence … encapsulates what it is to be a Fan of something, and love a bit of culture so much that you tie that love into the most meaningful moments of your life

Read About Comics
Entertainment Weekly
NPR

There’s a wistful air of self-deprecation in Dawson’s writing and illustration, as well as a killer backbeat.

Syndicate Product Covert HQ
Culture Catch
Booklist

This quiet, slice of life graphic memoir emphasizes the incredibly important role music plays in our lives, especially during our teen years. Dawson’s art is realistic and fearless–he isn’t afraid to depict himself in all his adolescent glory, bad haircut, braces and all.

Daily Cross-Hatch
Down the Tubes
Satisfactory Comics

Freddie & Me manages to deliver both the manifest awesomeness of Queen and the patent absurdity of an elementary-school boy who has given his soul to them, or a high-school boy whose emotional life is wrapped around the band he loves. In fact, sometimes it gives us both of these things (the sublime and the ridiculous) at the same time, in a way that seems totally appropriate to Queen.

Queenzone