JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

This was probably my best show ever, largely due to the intense socialising I did this year, in what was certainly the most tiring show I have ever done. I am still dealing with the cumulative sleep deprivation of a week of fun.

And yet, there is a strange love/hate aspect of going to Comic Con that is hard to pin down. Each time I go, I have so much fun, and yet it can be an overwhelming and even frustrating experience as well. I think that no matter where you are on the nerd-spectrum, from super-nerd to barely-nerd, there will be moments of joy and pleasure at Comic Con and moments where you have reached your threshold and want out, ASAP…

In the years I have been going, first as an attendee and more recently as an exhibitor, COMIC CON INTERNATIONAL has grown exponentially into a huge media event, and lately it seems that the hokey and home made quality that I used to love about it is being crowded out by the huge, the corporate and the slick.

While on the one hand it is wonderful to see nerd culture being embraced by the mainstream and even Hollywood, it also makes the event so huge that it becomes a chore to attend. Simply finding the booths that you want to see, even those that you have known about in advance, is so very hard that it sucks all the fun out of the room sometimes.

Moreover, The focus has shifted away from the comics and the artists themselves to media promotion, movies, games, celebrity panels, and limited edition collectibles. A better name for the show that Comic Con has become would be MEDIA CON. Comics seem to be the last thing on people’s minds these days.

But I love going there. I enjoy seeing certain friends who I only ever see at these events. I enjoy wandering around the hall and seeing the beautifully made figurines, the original artwork, the prints the life sized maquettes… I love all of it even though I am not a collector (I got more than my fair share of nerd genes but I did not get the COLLECTOR gene).

Even though I do not collect toys or artwork, I enjoy seeing them. Being able to go to a dealer booth and see original artwork, drawn by my art-heroes, and hold it in my own hands and see the brush strokes is a real charge for a comics dork such as myself. One of my favourite things in the world is to see the work of human hands, and for that reason, I love Comic Con. It also explains why I get a kick out of all the fans in costume, both the shoddy home-made and dorky outfits and the beautifully hand-crafted ones are both a testament to the fan-love that drove the event in the first place.

Some people I know have always expressed embarrassment at the fans in costume, as if they lower the tone, but for me that has always been the heart and soul of the event. Without them it is just a huge room full of people buying stuff. With them in attendance there is some sense of fun and pageantry and, more importantly, an expression of the joy of being there not for profit but just for fun.

This year Rhode and I tipped our hats to the home-made and hokey quality of con-culture when we adorned our booth with a giant home-made tin-foil robot and dressed ourselves in cheesy outfits with tin-foil trim and retro/future shades. It was very much the “plan 9 from outer space” aesthetic at our booth this time around.

Our concept was that we had brought the robot back from a future time where human beings no longer make comics, instead Robots do all the work and the handmade artwork is a thing of the past. We had no idea if this facetious and silly concept would work, or if we would just make idjits of ourselves, but we were gratified to see that many people actually got a kick out of the home-made and cheesy quality of our booth.

Rhode deserves ALL the credit for constructing the robot. Although we both hatched the concept on the drive home from the 2006 show (the show where we dressed up as sleazy salesmen) I was not able to participate in the construction of the robot. That was all done in Stockton by Rhode, while I was at my apartment in San Francisco, locked in a epic clash of wills with my stubborn printer, in an attempt to crank out prints to sell.

For all the reasons listed above, plus the escalation in costs of being an exhibitor (I have never even come close to making back my costs at Comic Con) Rhode and I are not sure whether we will continue to do the show in future… or perhaps we will opt for a smaller cheaper exhibition space next time.

Another brushpen doodle. Of Rocket Rabbit’s inventor/pal the PROFESSOR, this time.

Over the past few months, due to frequent travel, technical problems with my computer, work and other lame excuses that I haven’t even thought of yet, there haven’t been many drawings posted here in my BLOG. From now on, I will post more from my Sketchbook; this one of Sephilina in a mini-skirt, for example.

My sketchbook would be better called a “doodlebook” because it is full of stuff I see in my head. I rarely do proper sketches of things seen in the real world. I plan to fill my NEXT book with life-drawings and sketches done on location, but the one I have NOW Is page after page of silly characters, ideas for poses, page thumbnails for comics I will probably never draw and other meaningless thing-a-ma-jigs…

Oh yeah, and lots of drawings of pretty ladies… Wotta dork.

Last weekend I flew from Portland to Seattle for the Emerald City Comic Con. It was the first time since around 2002 that I have gone to a comic Convention as an attendee rather than an exhibitor and I had a lovely time. The inspiration for the trip was to see my pals Ted and Derek, (exhibiting at this particular show for the first time) but I was also keen to meet up with my old pal Brian who lives in Seattle and whom I had not seen in many years.

Everyone agreed that this was wonderful show. Bay Area exhibitors claimed that their sales were much more than they were expecting and that they all preferred this con over recent experiences at Wondercon… Apart from that, it was just pleasant to attend; lots of great costumes (Hellboy Jr, and Kid Abe Sapien were highlights) and a fun, cheerful atmosphere.

Cons are a great chance to catch up with people, even those whom I see often. I regret not being able to spend more time with everyone but you can only fit so much socialising into a weekend… In fact, we were already talking abut the logistics of socialising at COMIC CON which is only a few months away… Chris Turnham (a co-worker at LAIKA) was also exhibiting with his friend Kevin Dart and their booth was right next door to Ted & Derek’s. It was great to see their work. There were some also some OTHER familiar faces on deck:

Like all my exhibitor pals, Ted & Derek were pretty much chair-bound at the con. I saw them for Breakfast and dinner each day but in between times I wandered about the city, SOLO. The weather was so unbelievably pretty that I simply HAD to get outside (working in Portland has taught me to make the most of sunshine when it comes my way). A highlight of these explorations was the Science Fiction Museum, which houses the impressive memorabilia stash of Paul Allen (of Microsoft). The collection includes Captain Kirk’s chair, A full size Spinner (from Blade Runner) and blasters, phasers, and laser pistols from every Sci-Fi movie and TV show you could name. Luckily for me, Every nerd for a 500 mile radius was at the Emerald City Comic Con, so I more or less had the museum to myself and was able to take my time perusing a Billionaire’s geek-stash at my leisure..

Finding dinner without walking all over the place is hard at cons, and Saturday was no exception to that rule. I take some of the blame for it his time, as the first place we entered was wall-to-wall punch-able faces and I decreed that we would have to eat elsewhere… Thanks to Brian & Heather’s local knowledge, we were taken to a very cosy pub with great food. We all agreed that the long walk to SMITH was well worth it. The quality of the appetisers (Deep fried pork shoulder with chimichurri and a serving of Sweet potato fries) hinted that we’d be in for a treat when the main courses showed up… and indeed we were.

Seattle reminds me of other Bayside cities that I love; San Francisco, Vancouver, Sydney, Hong Kong, Macau… there is just something about Harbour Cities… Perhaps the rhythms of the tidal water gives these places a special vitality… When on the ferry to Bainbridge Island I had a visceral memory-flash of riding the Manly Ferry across Sydney Harbour… a journey I often made when I first moved to Sydney from my home town. But while the journey from Sydney’s Circlular Quay to the Northern suburb of Manly takes the passenger towards sandy white beaches, the Bainbridge Ferry is headed for snow capped mountains…

It also occurred to me, while wandering around Pioneer Square on Sunday, that it is EXACTLY 20 years since I was last in Seattle. March/April 1989… when I first came to the USA as a back-packing traveler. I hadn’t thought of the time-line until seeing some buildings brought some memories back to me. After tracking down one or two familiar places, I headed back to the CON to reconnoiter with my cronies. Selling out of their stock allowed Ted & Derek the luxury of an early departure from the CON and made it possible for us to have a leisurely FEAST OF CON-OVER with Brian and Heather at The Alibi Room down by the Pike Place market, before our respective flights left that evening. The delicious pizzas (Grape & Blue Cheese, and Chicken Sausage & Basil) were a very tasty end to a satisfying weekend.

Here is a Sephilina doodle from my sketchbook.

This year, I didn’t have a new book, despite my best efforts. That is two shows in a row I’ve exhibited at with no new product, so that trend has to STOP. A for my booth-partner Rhode, he’d planned to have some new sculpts for sale and got the sculpt and castings done, but technical difficulties (with the paint) made that product a non-starter too, though he had a great “coming soon” prototype to show off (Comic Con 2009, will hopefully be where the real thing will go on sale). This year Wondercon was fun, as it always is, and much better attended than expected, given the economy being in tough shape, but this time around the show was all about the food.

Thursday, just after setting up our booth and collecting our booth-badges, a group of us old con-cronies head off to Mi Lindo Peru in the Mission district for some tasty Peruvian food, chased down with a visit to the crowd-pleasing Mitchell’s Ice cream.

Friday, both attendance and sales were slow, but that was more than made up for by a meal at Henry’s Hunan and then a visit to the Cartoon Art Museum. I was geeking out hard on all the fantastic artwork on display; Gene Colan’s pencils, inked pages by Will Eisner and George Herriman… and then I walked around the corner and found the WATCHMEN display. Page after page of fantastic artwork from the comic book including some fantastic thumbnails that Dave Gibbons used to plan his black spottings PLUS some artwork, props and costumes from the upcoming film.

Saturday attendance was crazy; just like Comic-Con. Sales were good and we celebrated by going to Zante’s for some Indian Pizza. That place is great, but for the first time ever the restaurant was insanely crowded, due to there being a large group already there for a birthday party. The food was worth the wait, however, and we then went to Mitchell’s a second time. Later, in my stomach, the ice cream took on the role of Cobra and the Indian food became Mongoose, and they battled it out through the night.

Sunday was a pretty typical day of moderate sales, leaving me time to up some purchases of my own, including the new book from GHOSTBOT (first time exhibitors!)and CORA by Ted Mathot (both of which are great books). Rhode and I managed to pack down the booth and make our getaway in record time and a large part of our motivation was to be on time for a rendezvous at the Schnitzel Haus. What followed was a meal so hearty, fun and filling, that it became dubbed the inaugural Feast Of CONover. I look forward to the next!

This is a sketch I did during this year’s APE show. Rafael Navarro has been keeping a CAPTAIN AMERICA sketchbook where he asks other people to draw his favourite super-hero, and this was my contribution. In retrospect, I should have drawn Captain America with Barack Obama’s face!

Due to my continuing computer troubles (the meltdown of both my G4 laptop and my backup hard-drive in the same month) I was not able to reprint some of my old mini comics, nor do the scanning and formatting for a new comic that I had planned to release at this years APE convention. Despite all those let-downs I had an enjoyable show.

I spent most of the show at my table hawking the old wares, chatting with friends and doing some sketches and though I was mainly booth-bound, I did manage to pick up a few good books during my brief breaks. ROCKET TOWN by Bob Logan, both BOOK PLATE and BELLE DU JOUR by Bill Presing, DEREKMONSTER ANNUAL 2008 by Derek Thompson and also Keith Knight‘s THE COMPLETE K CHRONICLES.

The after-show socialising was especially fun this year. On the Saturday, a group of us went to HENRY’s Hunan, where we dined like Emperors, and then saw the CROM show at the nearby VARNISH gallery; an exhibition of artwork inspired by the movie CONAN. On Sunday night, we had dinner at ZANTE’s Indian Pizza in the Mission district, followed by Mitchell’s ice cream, and then walked to a nearby park where the Day of the Dead parade terminates. This event was much better attended than in previous years, and there was a LOT of creativity on display in the altars and people in skeleton costumes.. Perhaps this event has grown as the San Francisco Halloween festivities have gone sour…

Even though I heard some people grumbling about the date change (from April to October) in my view, the fact that APE 2008 took place on the same weekend as both Halloween and Day of the Dead was an extra special treat this year.