Cheshire Cat Art

Dallas Comicon 2012: The Whole Bloody Affair

A week back I went through what I jokingly called the, “If you can dodge a wrench then you can dodge a ball” method of preparing for this year’s Dallas Comicon: I had a few of my friends sit around a table and toss suggestions for characters I might not have considered at me.  My logic was that people will like my art, and invariably I’ll be inundated with people requesting a variety of commissions, and I’d have to knock them out quickly and skillfully.

The result? I hit the nail pretty hard on the head for every challenge I was faced with.  I was pretty proud of the end results, and this boded well for the convention.  I spent the rest of last week purposely not drawing.  More than anything I didn’t have time to draw, as I was a) prepping signage and promotional material b)cutting signage and promotional material c) polybagging 200 comics d) inserting bookmarks and postcards into 200 bags e) inserting business cards into 200 bags and f) heat shrinking 200 bags.

My thought process was that not drawing for the week would make me really want to go nuts at the convention.  My evidence for that belief is that  usually that’s the case when I draw at home.  It’s an itch, and letting it burn makes the scratchin’ all the more worthwhile.  Unfortunately, either due to lack of sleep, nervousness, or not drawing and keeping warmed up, the morning of the con did not bode well. My shapes felt weak as did my page composition for an initial sketch to get the ball rolling.  My cousin Brooks came along to help back me up, and both of us where trying to suss out the convention game.  Do we work the crowd? Can I just draw and let him bring in customers for me to finish off the sale?  Do I chat everyone up about every franchise I know and love and forego drawing until I’m paid to do it?  We didn’t have a clue.

I’d heard from some other sources that the con crowd was difficult to predict: sometimes people would buy comics. Another con original art…and another con nothing but prints.  At about midnight the night before the con, my other cousin Matt volunteered his printer for bringing some of my pieces to life.  We managed to print a good twenty or so of mine and his favorite pictures.  I went with alot of original stuff, as well as a few I just wanted to see make the jump from  a digital picture to a real world 3-D space occupying masterpiece (alright, not masterpiece).   With my friend Josh programming his brains out for a special project that’s hopefully coming up, we worked late into the night.  I think lack of sleep was what put me in a terrible headspace for my first morning.

Standardly, I’m an unrelentingly optimistic guy, knowing the depths and horrors and terrible things about the human condition makes people’s day to day niceties all the more overwhelming.  My goal for this con was (jokingly) “Please don’t get burnt at the stake naked.” Anything shy of that would be a success, I decided.  Clothed stake burning? Lucky!

A quick rundown of my six month prep work leading in to the con:

1. Design new front and back covers for Deluge, The Devil and Dr. John, the Ferryman, and Neverender.
2. Design three artbooks, Hajime, Manaka, and Owari, filled with my favorite 72 pieces. (The Gary Friedricks case nixed these as Ka-blam shies away from printing copyrighted material in artbooks now, so I instead released an original artbook ‘Neko’ with the three other artbooks as free digital downloads.) Four artbooks means four front and back covers.
3. Redraw the panels I was losing sleep over in all four of the comics
4. Draw new material for the artbooks
5. Reletter the four comics
6. Get everything print ready
7. Setup my website to be able to accept some sort of payment if a customer is interested in purchasing some of my comics
8. Make some of my comics available for instant digital download (this also meant designing the store)
9. Design: signage, stickers, banners, postcards, bookmarks, business cards, etc.
10. Reorganize portfolio

There was more to it than all this, but all of this prepwork factors in to the moral of the story and the odd heart of my mistake: I was trying to sell original comics (/intellectual properties) at the comicon.  Now I’m not naive, or at least my naivety factors in the belief that I’m not, so I knew that Marvel and DC characters will outsell original material 3 or 4-1.  No question, hands down, marketing 101.  In my head that meant that I use the big guns to pull people in, then turn them towards how the big guns influenced me to make these small arms.  People see a Sandman picture, I reel them in, chat about how Neil Gaiman influenced me to write the Devil and Dr. John, and I either make the sale or give them enough free shwag to at least have trouble throwing everything away (I accomplished this by handing everyone who so much as came within seven foot radius of my person a business card, a postcard, and a bookmark: the holy trifecta).

The Dallas Comicon had an outstanding showing. I don’t know the numbers, and I don’t really truly care.  There were boatloads of people a few hours early when we were setting up. It was an absolute madhouse.  Moving around became difficult, and I think this year they had to ‘firecode it’ and send one person in as one person came out.  So packed.  Lots of foot traffic, lots of people stopping by.

I was sandwhiched between two seasoned vets who make their living off of traveling from con to con and show to show selling their fanart (Jon Hughes) and (Mike Mayduk) who where up to their necks in customers.  Partially for the quality of their work, but also because they emphasized what I mentioned earlier: known characters sell well.  Mike mentioned wanting to push original characters, but it’s a tough sell to a crowd that desires the familiar.  Once my cousin and I figured out this was the game, we put more prints on display and they began selling pretty well.

My dream was to sell out of all of the comics I printed (200 copies total, 40 copies each of five different comics).  I realized going in that that was unlikely, but as I am attending two or three more cons this year, it never hurts to have more comics to sell.  My initial order was 30 copies per comic, but I upped the order to 40 out of fear that I might sell out.  When all was said and done and the dust settled, I sold 38 copies of my comics, breaking down thusly:

• Neverender 8/40
• Ferryman 10/40
• Deluge 7/40
• Devil and Dr. John 10/40
• Neko Artbook 13/40

And just for me I picked up Batman: Hush: Oops all sketches. It’s kind of cool to dissect Jim Lee’s stuff and separate the man from the myth (and the penciller from the inker).

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