Greeting everyone! And a special welcome to everyone who signed up for my newsletter at San Diego Comic Con. Here is a run down of my stuff for you new folks:
- The City Between is my webcomic about werewolves in the future. It updates Wednesdays. The current story is titled Glass Diamonds. It is free to read on my website, or you can follow my patreon to get it emailed to you.
- Blue Moon is a werewolf romance graphic novel I’m writing and Meredith McClaren is going to draw.
- Cautionary Fables and Fairytales is a kid-friendly folklore anthology series I edit and organize for Iron Circus Comics. Each volume focuses on a different continent.
- Sorcery 101 is my old webcomic. It is finished and is about an inept sorcerer learning magic from a grumpy vampire.
I have two day jobs. One is as an editor for Seven Seas, so I’ll occasionally share manga I’m editing for them. I’m also the managing editor at Iron Circus Comics. I like folklore, fantasy, and especially like werewolves.
The biggest thing I’m doing this month is I’ll be at Worldcon again! Mostly I’ll be on or attending panels. I rather liked Worldcon the last to times I attended. Its panels were more focused on craft and talking themes in ways that are pretty rare at comic conventions. So I’m excited get more involved in it in the future. My schedule is posted above, but if the screenshot is too small to read, here it is typed up.
- Thursday 4:30 pm – Current Landscape of Speculative Fiction Comic and Graphic Novels – It’s gonna be a discussion of how science fiction and fantasy are handled across comics as the medium has grown to have a much wider variety. I’m moderating and did so last year. I love talking about what makes comic unique as a medium.
- Friday 12:00 pm – Queerness in Comics: Representation vs Metaphor – Another panel I’m moderating. I’m gonna pick the brain of several creators and academics about how comics handle queerness and when metaphors aren’t cutting it.
- Friday 6pm – The Indie Comics Panel: The Big 25% – This is myself and several other indie comic creators talking indie comics. Pretty straight forward.
- Saturday 12:00 pm – The Comic Book Sommelier – This panel is myself and a couple of other well read folks in the comic industry making recommendations to the audience. I did it last year and it was a lot of fun. Basically members of the audience get up and say “I really liked x book” or “I am a big fan of x movie” and the panel tells them comics to check out.
- Saturday 9:00 pm – Table Talk – this is basically anyone can sign up and have a semi private chat with me about whatever. If you are going to Worldcon, please sign up and talk comics with me!
- Sunday 3:00pm – Life Goes One: Profit vs Sustainability in Creative Projects – This is the last one I’m moderating. It’s about making a living off art in our current capitalist hellscape. This one isn’t just comic people, it is a mix of different types of creatives that are all fighting to keep afloat.
So if you are going to Worldcon, give my panels a look.
On Saturdays at 11 am PST, I usually watch a movie in my discord. They are all movies I haven’t seen. Anyone can pop in and watch along. This month we are watching:
- Aug 14 – Eyes Wide Shut
- Aug 21 – Fatal Attraction
- Aug 28 – No movie because I’m at Worldcon
I’ll also be streaming on these dates and times:
- Tuesday at 7pm – 10pm PST – Art times
- Wednesday at 7pm – 9pm PST – Art times
- Sunday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Disco Elysium
Join me on my twitch!
And one August 20th from 5:30pm PST – 8pm PST, my twitch will be hosting a countdown stream for Iron Circus’s current Kickstarter Unsounded book 3 and 4. I’ll be talking to Unsounded’s creator Ashley Cope and S.E. Case the creator of Rigsby, WI (which will be Iron Circus next Kickstarter). That talk will also be on my Twitch.
Glass Diamonds is almost done, there’s like 10 more pages. So right now my creative focus is mostly on writing the next story Brittle Beast. It’s gonna be about Jeff and Sina from Better to Find You With. I think it is gonna be 100ish pages.
I do need to play a lot of catch up because of time off for San Diego Comic Con. I mostly had a good time but it takes a lot out of me. Alina and Sam who I share a table with always do Gencon right after, and I don’t know how they do it. Sales were a little down, but I kinda expected that since the economy is in the toilet and everyone is tightening their belts. I appreciate everyone that bought someone though. I saw some good cosplays. Above are two guys that did a great Smoke and Stack from Sinners. I showed some friends the Werewolf Bar in San Diego (the main image the newsletter is their signage). The food is so so but they have some fun deco. Wolves on all the support beams and the bathroom wallpaper is pages of the comic Werewolf by Night.
I drove to San Diego Comic Con. That is 2 days of driving both ways. On the ride down me and my copilot Grace listened to the first Dungeon Crawler Carl. I have heard a lot of people praise it, but Kate Ashwin’s rec pushed me over (check out her kickstarter by the way). She had the same reservations as me, basically a lot of books that run on videogame rules are a bit samey and are mostly concerned with being a power fantasy. So far Carl hasn’t been too power fantasy focused, by being a death game to comment on the grim realities of capitalist exploitation. It stops from getting to depressing with over the top humor. It makes for a good mix, especially in the audiobook. The guy reading the audiobook had amazing delivery and comedic timing. I think I would have been lukewarm on the book if not for the audiobook reader’s line delivery.
Since I drove to San Diego Comic Con, there was time for me and my pal Grace to stop at that Academy Award Museum to see the Jaws exhibit. They had a lot of the concept art and storyboards. There was also several props and technically drawing of the shark. There was a collection of foreign movie posters. The museum also had exhibits on Marlyn Monroe, production design on the Barbie movie, and costume design in general. I uploaded pictures I took at the Jaws exhibit and the other exhibits to my google drive. There are also pictures of cosplayers too.
On the drive back from San Diego, Grace and I listened to A Stitch in Time by Andrew Robinson. It is a Star Trek novel about Garak from DS9 helping rebuild Cardassia after it was wrecked by the Dominion. Deep Space Nine is my favorite Star Trek and I had heard several Trek fans talk this one up. It is very interesting because while it’s about Garak realizing the fascism Cardassia engaged in is a dead end and self destructive ideology it isn’t a redemption story. So Garak still doesn’t think the murders he did for the State are bad things. It is a unique way of handling deprograming from a lifetime of fascist propaganda.
We finished our road time by listening to the start of The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer anthology. I enjoyed it but ultimately think I was missing something. Turns out I was. They tie into a movie I haven’t seen. So this one I’ll probably revisit after seeing the movie.
Last month while trying to get ahead for San Diego Comics Con, the discord movies were The Lighthouse and it was one hell of a ride. I remember people talking about how great both William Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in it. Watching them both lose their mind was a treat. I’ve had mixed feelings on Eggers movies, but this was definitely my favorite I’ve seen so far. I think in Nosferatu didn’t go weird enough and it was part of why I’m on the fence about his coming werewolf movie. But this movie really digs into the weird as Pattinson loses it.
Then we watched War of the Roses. I founded out about this movie because on stream I told my pal Joe about the episode of Always Sunny where Mac and Dennis move to the suburbs and go insane. They responded by asking if the dog eating joke is a reference to War of the Roses. After looking it up, sure enough the whole episode is based off War of the Roses. I was expecting a wilder movie, but I liked the War of the Roses starts more subdued. It makes the end when things get wild funnier by contrast. I had been told it was about a divorced couple fighting over who gets the house and neither of them can leave. The slow build up to the characters getting divorced paints a good picture that grounds the wild fight later. I really ended up liking it all around.
For now I’m off to continue playing catch up from San Diego combined with trying to get ahead for Worldcon. Thanks everyone for your support. Have a good one.