Mike Dawson Comics

I’m very much looking forward to being at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival in Williamsburg, this weekend. This is the third year of the show, and the first time I’ve been sitting behind a table, which is nice. I’ll be at the Secret Acres Corral, between The Koyama Press Pavillion and the Drawn & Quarterly MegaDome. Lots of other Secret Acres artists are going to be at the show too, including, I believe, John Brodowski, who is debuting a new book. I loved his first graphic novel, Curio Cabinet, so am really interested to see his new work.

This episode is either super-fun or super-irritating, depending on your familiarity with all of the worst songs of the 1980′s and 1990′s and your patience for Mike and Alex’s poor recall of pop-culture facts. First up a discussion about the recent passing of one of the last surviving Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz, and some questions about how casually famous people have extended stays at one another’s houses. Then, we make our way through the Worst Songs list, and decide which picks are fair (The Macarena), and which are not (“What’s Going On” by 4 Non-Blondes. C’mon! Leave 4 Non-Blondes alone!!!). Also, buried at the back of the episode is a small item where Mike mentions telling his daughter that the full name of Ariel from The Little Mermaid is “Ariel Brownwater”, and her Dad is called “Triton Brownwater”. It would be appreciated if all parents of pre-schoolers who listen to the show could help propagate this piece of misinformation.

Comments welcome!

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

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Mike and Alex are alone in The Lair and they have a number of important things to discuss. First up, a revisit to Mike’s failed and now-it-turns-out backfiring raw food diet. He should just stick to his regular diet of locally produced cheeses and salted breads. Then, does anyone want to be told that they are a bad driver? Is it just one of those things that everyone just assumes that they are good at? After that, Alex has a spirited defense of our nation’s 39th President, Jimmy Carter. This one’s got it all!

Comments welcome!

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

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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.

Reliable cartoonist, David King, (Lemon Styles, Danny Dutch) calls into the Lair from his home in San Diego to talk “stud tails” and Ugg Boots. Mike tells everyone about his visit to the Occupy Wall Street protests, and smugly points out that he is a cyclist, thus putting himself in a higher category of human being than Alex and David. Alex discusses provocative in-your-face Fine Art, and then it’s time for a Public Service Announcement from the Ink Panthers about the dangers of sitting on one piece of furniture for too long.

Comments welcome!

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

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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?

This Friday, November 18, 6:30-7:30 PM
Midtown Comics Downtown
64 Fulton St
New York, New York

More information here.

Hope to see you!

It’s a very masculine musky Lair the Panthers are creeping back into after a week off. Mike is worried about turning into a straight-laced, uptight Dad, so does his best to make the conversation “raw”. This means mostly talking about “grundles” and other man-things. Other Slush Pile topics include: Having the same name as an unpopular video game protagonist, impressing strangers on a subway by bragging about your regenerative powers, getting people fired by lacing their food with drugs, and a Ruling on Twitter-Spoiler-ering. Then, we slow things WAAAAAAYYY down with a dry discussion/debate about the causes of World War II and the Holocaust, but don’t worry, we pick things back up again by the end when we determine whether we would or would not go back in time and brutally murder Infant Hitler.

Comments welcome!

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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 haven’t posted any new pictures in forever, and I’m not sure how I’m going to handle putting comics online for my new story… but, here’s a recent panel I drew. “Reservoir” is a word I consistently have trouble spelling (see also, “restaurant”), so putting it on the poster in the background of this scene was very helpful to me.

Hope to see some of you at MIX!