Mike Dawson Comics

Dylan Horrocks is my guest inside The Comics Journal TCJ Talkies Hutt this week. I was really excited to have him on for a chat. I looooooovvvve Dylan’s comics. I think his work has been quite influential on me. I was so happy last year when he agreed to write the blurb on the back of Troop 142.

Book blurbing is probably the least pleasant aspect of comics-writing I can think of, for all parties involved. There’s the part where I have to send out a sheepish request, there’s the part where the person feels pressured to consent to reading your book, then the part where I have to needle them to hurry things along. Ugh, it’s terrible. The only good part is when a blurb comes back and it’s so nice and complimentary and you feel great because one of your cartooning heroes has actually taken the time to sit down and read your story and then thought of a nice thing to say about it. That’s the good part, but all the rest, not so much.

I had an experience with Freddie & Me actually, where I approached another personal cartooning hero of mine, who (probably begrudgingly) agreed to read and blurb my book, and that one didn’t turn out quite as well. I couldn’t tell you for sure if the person ever actually read the story, based on the three word blurb they sent back. I couldn’t use it in the end. Ah well, like I said, it’s not a pleasant process for anyone, and I can’t fault someone for not really wanting to do some job for a stranger, but also not wanting to seem like a bad-guy by telling me no. I’m sure it happens all the time.

Anyway, this is all off-topic. Go listen to the Dylan Horrocks interview!

Another recent drawing I drew.

Also: I posted a new TCJ Talkies podcast over at The Comics Journal, featuring La Mano’s Zak Sally. I really enjoyed chatting with Zak – check it out.

Troop 142 got a nice shout-out on an NPR Best of 2011 blog yesterday, which did actually translate into some book sales, I believe. I don’t know what amazon sales rankings really mean, but I know that I jumped into the top 100 for Graphic Novels for the first time ever. Again, I don’t know what these numbers really mean, but it was all very exciting nonetheless.

(I actually suspect a lot of sales came from friends who’d forgotten that I’d recently published a book until I posted about the NPR list on Facebook. A couple folks responded that “ah, yes, they really oughta finally buy that thing off of amazon…”)

In other news, I’m not sure that I’m going to be posting anything new on this blog for the remainder of 2011, as there’ll be no The Ink Panthers Show! episode next week, and then before you know it, it’ll be 2012 already.

Also, I am not sure yet when I’m going to resume posting actual comics up on this blog again. I have to admit, keeping the work offline for the past couple months has probably been creatively beneficial. I’m happy to report that I’m knee-deep in a new story and I’m feeling generally very positive about it. A couple days “staycation” this past week, where I just holed myself away and just drew and drew, really did wonders for my feelings of momentum and progress. I’m excited about the work, and am thinking maybe I’ll have something I feel good about showing sometime soon.

Here’s a video of me lettering a word-balloon, to tide everyone over.

Next year, I don’t have a ton planned. I’m going to be attending the big Angouleme Festival in France at the end of January, and will be doing some signings in Paris following that. My wife will come join me out there after all the comics business is done, and we’ll have a little mini-vacation to celebrate ten-years of being together.

In terms of other conventions, I am not sure what I’m attending or not. I imagine I’ll still make it down to SPX in the Fall, and am hoping that TCAF in Toronto is a possibility.

Nothing is changing with The Ink Panthers Show! I think this past year was really great for the show. We had some wonderful guests, and I think really had some strong episodes with just The Panthers (Tony “The Desert Panther” Consiglio is included in that. We should change his name to The Honorary Panther). TIPS is continually a work-in-progress, and Alex and I are always trying to figure out what is the best balance of solo-Panthers shows vs. Special Guest episodes. I think it’s probably best we keep aiming for that pleasant mix of both.

TCJ Talkies will return in January. It’s probable that those are going to be coming out at a slightly slower pace. The biweekly schedule really began to catch up to me at the end of this year, and listeners may have noticed a bit of a slowdown. My plan is to roll them out at a more relaxed rate, but we’ll see. I’ve found that I feel worn out before I record an episode, but once it’s done I get all excited and motivated again. I think I just really like talking about comics!

Happy New Year everyone!!

Sarah Glidden joins me in the Talkie Hutt for a chat. Sarah is perhaps best known for her 2010 debut memoir, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, which was published by Vertigo. Since writing that book, Sarah has become more interested in comics journalism, and roughly a year ago successfully Kickstarted the funds to travel to Syria and northern Iraq tailing a group of journalists to write about the work they were doing.

Despite it currently being her most well known work, we don’t discuss How to Understand… too much in this interview. I really liked the book, and would have been happy to talk about it, but my sense is that it’s become one of those things where the author is starting to feel like The Israel Cartoonist (much in the same way I was once personally terrified about being known at The Queen Guy). I saw a particularly amusing interaction on a social network a while back where Sarah was soliciting ideas for superheroes she could paint pictures and sell prints of at conventions, and a ton of people suggested Sabra, as well as The Thing, and Shadowcat, and so on and so on. Y’know, because they’re Jewish.

Anyway, Sarah probably would have been happy to talk more about How to Understand…, but we just ended up getting onto other topics, which I found quite enlightening. Sarah’s process is incredibly different from what I do, and what I think a lot of other cartoonists do, so it was very interesting to hear her talk about how she’s making comics at the moment.

This is something fun. I was a guest on The Inkstuds Comic Book and Cartoon Power Hour this past week. Thanks to podcast rival Robin McConnell for inviting me on his show. I really enjoyed the conversation.

It actually was pretty great to talk to another comics-podcaster. I am hesitant to listen back to the audio, because I am pretty sure I am guilty of hijacking some of the interview and turning it around on Robin. I am not sure it’s something I can help at this point – I’m finding that hosting my own podcasts week in and week out is making me a compulsive interrogator.

But, in a way, I think that the fact that we’re putting each other in the hot-seat, probably makes for a pretty interesting discussion. We talk a lot about the reasons why we’re making podcasts, and how doing all the research and thinking about comics in terms of discussing them publicly is having an effect on our abilities to continue to enjoy reading them personally. This is something I wonder about a lot. At the moment I’ve really focused on guests for TCJ Talkies whose work I was already very familiar with and a fan of. I have not yet tried bringing someone on whose work I hadn’t already read. I am not sure how that would change my enjoyment of their work – if I needed to cram and read the material to prepare to talk to them. Robin on the other hand (who has interviewed a ton of people) is in a completely different boat – reading comics to get ready for shows. He even talks about reading Troop 142 the day before our conversation, while sitting on a bus going to work.

Also, if you want to hear the audio of my first appearance on Inkstuds, back in 2009, I’ve got the link here.

On November 5th and 6th I attended the Minneapolis Indie Xpo, and while I was there I moderated a live TCJ Talkies panel, spotlighting two cartoonists: MariNaomi and Noah Van Sciver. It was interesting to interview two cartoonists at the same time, especially in this case, as their comics are quite dissimilar. I tried to talk about areas where their work overlapped as well as places where they approached things differently. It was a lot of fun, and I think the sound quality is quite good for this kind of thing, thanks to the expertise of the A/V guy running the panels at the show, who had the good sense to actually plug my MP3 recorder into his sound board to get the recording directly. (Usually, I just sit the recorder on the table somewhere and hope for the best.)

The MIX show itself was an great experience for me. Here is Tom Spurgeon’s collection of blog reports and photos filed by the various attendees after the fact, including my own. I liked visiting a new city and getting a feeling for its cartooning community. When I’m at a conventions, I always wonder what exactly is the point of going to them. If the point of going to a con is to spend time talking to and hanging out with like-minded people, and getting inspired and motivated to make comics, then MIX was a raging success. In that sense, most of the conventions I attend are successful. It’s only when the whole “making-money” factor is added to the equation that some shows seem better than others. In that regard, MIX was fine, but I just get so tired of sitting at the table and worrying about money. Can’t I just enjoy the social parts? Do I really have to use up all that mental energy worrying about covering the cost of my plane ticket? Can’t I just hang out and have fun and not be thinking about whether I’m talking too much or not enough to a potential customer? Do I really have to worry about how I’m arranging my facial expression, so as to appear friendly and engaged but not so friendly that I look desperate and needy? Ugh. Who wants to think about this stuff?

I’m back from the Minneapolis Indie Xpo, and in keeping with tradition here at Mike Dawson Comics, I have almost no pictures to show for it. I’m going to post what little I’ve got, and assume that some of the other cartoonists who were there this weekend will pick up some of the slack.

I’m thinking about one event in particular, where a group of us all went over to Zak Sally’s studio to see his printing press. That woulda’ been a good time to take out my iPhone. But, I never got it together. I saw other folks snapping photos though, so I’m sure the event will get covered elsewhere.

Here’s what I have!

This is a photo taken from my point of view at the airport gate in New York with a box of Troop 142′s sitting in my lap. See, another thing I never get on the ball about is shipping my books to the show ahead of time. So, my solution is to always stuff a large suitcase with as many books as possible, and just bring the bare minimum’s worth of other items, such as say, clothes and toothpaste and that sort of stuff.

With MIX and also APE, my suitcase weighed about 80lbs. Different airlines have different rules about baggage. I flew Virgin America out to APE, and the nice lady at the check-in desk gave me a break on my heavy bags, and just charged me a $25 additional bag fee. I flew Delta to MIX this past weekend, and their approach to luggage is to charge you 25 bucks just to bring anything at all. When I heaved my suitcase onto the scales at Delta, they basically said I could pay $100 in a heavy-baggage fine, or lighten up the suitcase. Thus, the photo of me sitting with a box of Troop 142 graphic novels on my lap, treating it as a carry-on item.

I guess truthfully, once I was on the plane it wasn’t so bad, because I just shoved it in the overhead, but it was definitely a pain as I waited in the loooooong security line…

The above three pictures were taken at the Friday night show pre-party. In picture one, that’s Jim Rugg and Dustin Harbin, in picture two we have AdHouse head-honcho Chris Pitzer and his lovely wife, and in picture three we see Grimalkin Press publisher, Jordan Shiveley, and rival comics podcaster and cartoonist, Rina Ayuyang. Well composed photos, one and all.

I never really sell full pages of original art, but this year I’ve been bringing a little Apple-Jacks binder filled with small images and scraps from comics. You can see, there are panels from my Ace-Face book there, as well as odds and ends from Troop 142. I think a couple of those visible there are panels that did not actually make it into the book.

Anyway, it’s nice to have a little something for people to pick through, and a way for me to make a few extra dollars, but my word of advice is to not use an Apple-Jacks binder to display such stuff, but rather to invest in an actual real-binder thing with plastic sleeves that can be turned and easily flipped through. It’s just tough for people to pick through the pile when it’s all stacked all higgedly-piggedly like I have it here. It might be a passive-aggressive I-don’t-really-want-to-sell-original-art thing on my part, because not selling much of it is surely the outcome!

Julia Wertz gave me an elephant cookie! That is some heavily applied frosting right there…

View from my Table 1: That’s Top Shelf’s own Brett Warnock talking with cartoonist and upstart publisher, Tom Kaczynski.

View from my Table 2: Tom is giving Kevin Huizenga the hard sell.

Tom K. is a Minneapolis native, and generously allowed me, Kevin, and fellow Secret Acres artist Eamon Espey (not pictured) to crash at his place. There were a number of other groups of cartooning friends also staying nearby, so the evenings were these great gatherings of funny, interesting people. I think one of my favorite things about MIX being a smaller show, was that it was easy to talk to all the people you wanted to talk to, and actually feel like you had a good amount of time together, as opposed to a show like SPX or MoCCA, where it feels like you barely spend four or five minutes in conversation with people you really enjoy talking to, and even then realize after the fact that there were a ton of people you didn’t even say “hello” to at all. MIX was a much better pace, socially. I mean, that’s from my point of view. Maybe all those other cartoonists are going to write con-reports that say stuff like “one downside to MIX being so small is that it was impossible to get away from notorious comics-chatterbox, Mike Dawson”. We’ll see.

I ate some of the cookie! Yes, that sure is some generously applied frosting, indeed.

This food truck outside had the most delicious vegetarian curry, which I ate for lunch both days. It was pretty much the perfect savory food to eat after consuming ten pounds of sugary elephant cookie frosting…

And finally, here’s a photo of the live TCJ Talkies podcast I recorded on Sunday morning. It was a spotlight on cartoonists Noah Van Sciver and MariNaomi. I think it went well. I listened back to the audio recording, and I think a combination of my nerves and the chilliness of the Soap Factory at 10AM (note the woolly Jets cap atop my head) made me a little manic, so we moved through an hour’s worth of questions at a clip which kept the panel under 45 minutes, but I think that was alright. There were a lot of laughs, and I think some interesting back and forth between Noah and Mari. I think it went well, and will of course eventually post the audio recording.

So, that’s really all I have. It was a great weekend. I sold a lot of comics, and came away from it amped up to get back to work, which is always the best outcome you can ask for. Here’s hoping MIX comes back in 2012!

I’m heading out to sunny Minneapolis, Minnesota this weekend, for the second annual Minneapolis Indie Xpo (MIX)!

I’ll be manning the Secret Acres table with Eamon (Wormdye) Espey, and we’ll have all those good books for sale. Come find us! Just like at APE, Secret Acres trusted me with their special custom convention flag, so we should be easy enough to spot.

Also: On Sunday morning, at 10:15AM, I’ll be hosting a TCJ Talkies LIVE panel, with guests MariNaomi and Noah Van Sciver. I’ll talk about their respective work, and also plan on asking questions about format – working on full length graphic novels versus serializing comics as floppies or minicomics. Mari has been posting comics online at The Rumpus recently, so I’ll ask what it’s like working for the web. Come listen to us yak, won’t you?

In addition to Troop 142, I’ll be bringing a handful of Freddie & Me’s & Gabagool!s, as well as my Apple Jacks binder filled with cheap original art.

See you there!

Julia Wertz is my guest in the Talkie Hutt this week. Julia is the author of The Fart Party, two volumes of which have been published by Atomic Books, and Drinking at the Movies, published by Random House. On the show, we talk about her early minicomics and webcomics, her feelings about interacting with an online audience, and the creation of Drinking at the Movies, as well as the subsequent ambivalence she feels towards that book for a number of different reasons.

This interview may also be kind of amusing for revealing how difficult it is for me to talk frankly with someone about “taboo” subjects such as alcoholism and addiction. I hem and haw and skirt around the edges of the topic for most of the first half of the show, before I finally take a deep breath and talk properly about the things Julia clearly wants to discuss. I can’t help it! It’s my English heritage. It makes me all uptight and reluctant to talk openly about tough topics in mixed company. So, in a way, this episode was a breakthrough for me. I am really happy with the results.

I’m back in the Talkie Hutt, speaking with long-time MOME contributor, Kurt Wolfgang! Check it out.

(side note: Eagle-eared listeners may notice that if you pay real close attention to the first ten minutes or so of this chat, you’ll hear a child screaming in the background. That’s my daughter, putting up a fight about going to bed. I did my best to remain engaged with the conversation while that was going on, but I gotta admit, it can be hard to stay focused… “Oh, what’s that, they cancelled MOME? Oh wait a minute, did my daughter just fall out of her crib? No? OK, go back to what you were saying…”)