Mike Dawson Comics

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…”)

A brand new TCJ Talkies episode! Well, not entirely brand new… not to anyone who came to see it happen live at the Small Press Expo this past weekend, but new to the rest of us! I sit down and TCJ Talk with my Ink Panthers co-host Alex Robinson, all about the creation of his very popular series and later collection, Box Office Poison. I think it’s interesting to discuss the different approaches to writing long-form comics – moving from the serialized floppy to the all-in-one-go Graphic Novel, and how that affects you creatively, as well as practically.

Also, a few thoughts on Dylan Williams, the cartoonist and publisher who passed away unexpectedly over the weekend. Frankly, I am shocked at how sad it has made me, as we weren’t personally close. But, Dylan was someone I liked and admired, and I feel terrible for his friends and family and their loss.

Tom Kaczynski is my guest in the TCJ Talkie Hutt this week. Tom is well known for the excellent run of short stories he created for the MOME anthology, while that was still a going concern. I hear he has a story in issue 22, which I’ve yet to see, so I am looking forward to that. Tom’s comics have also appeared in The Drama and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009.

I had a lot of fun with this chat, but I may have broken a few cardinal rules of interviewing people with this one. 1) I kind of glossed over a lot of the biographical background and Tom’s early interest in comics, though I did my best to get back to it later on in the conversation. I think I was just too excited to talk about communism, so I kind of dived right on into it. And 2) I referred quite heavily to pages and quotes from Tom’s minicomics, “The Trans Series”. These comics are fascinating reads, full of any number of interesting ideas, each of which could lead to a conversation or a debate. But, unfortunately, as is the nature of minicomics, this stuff isn’t widely available in stores (though they can be purchased online here). So, I worry there may be many listeners who aren’t intimately familiar with the work.

If it’s some small consolation, I clipped a couple of jpegs from the minis, which you can see at the TCJ post. These are some of the pages we talk about in the conversation. I do urge everyone to pick them up if they can, or hold out for a collected edition, which I am sure is somewhere along the pipeline.

Lisa Hanawalt joins me in the Talkie Hutt for a chat for a very entertaining discussion about her career.

I love Lisa’s comics. They are laugh out loud funny. I was interested to hear she has aspirations towards performance. She posits that many cartoonists wish they could be stand-up comedians. I am not sure what the numbers are, but I’ve talked on The Ink Panthers Show about how maybe it would be nice to do stand-up as a “fall-back” career, if cartooning doesn’t pan out. It’s funny, I get very nervous before I do any public speaking. I even get nervous before I record podcasts with cartoonists I don’t know very well (such as Lisa). But, I feel so good afterwards, in both situations – it’s why I keep doing it. Anytime I’ve ever done a live reading or podcast, and felt like it went well, it’s been like a natural high afterwards. Lisa seems to be able to relate. Have a listen.