davemerrill

We went to a "comic con" last weekend; the chair is an Anime North director and that's how we got some passes. It was out in Kitchener, it's the Kitchener/Waterloo Comic Con, a show that started pre-COVID and was run by locals who were always crab-bucketing with each other and with bigger Toronto cons (read: Anime North, none of these people ever say bad things about Fan Expo because Fan Expo is what they want to be). Anyway, now Charles runs it and is trying hard to NOT be a crab in a bucket.

That being said, it's a "comic con" in that it has funko pops and gaming and costumers and cartoon voice actor guests. There was one comics vendor, the rest were toys, gaming merchandise, figures, Pokemon cards, one guy with DVDs and blu-rays and VHS tape. If you're my age and you think of "Creation Con," that's what this is, if this was the 80s people would be calling this a "Trekkie con." But for whatever reason, the term everybody uses for this kind of show these days is 'comic con.'

Anyway, we got there by 2? 2:30? Immediately we got the full convention experience, which is to say an older lady with bad eyesight and a young lady with better eyesight tried valiantly to find our names on the pass list. Eventually they found us. We got badges and were offered plastic shopping bags emblazoned with the con logo and T-shirts with the con logo. I took a bag but did not take a shirt. Inside the bag was a package with stickers and pins with the con logo.

This is an inordinate amount of branded merchandise to be handing out to comp pass holders for a mid-market two day rec center "comic con." Because this event was not fully packed. It wasn't even half packed. It was not crowded. There were people strolling around the vendors hall, there were people upstairs in the other function room, there were people listening to voice actors in the panel room, but at no point did it get anywhere near full.

The lack of paying customers really made the amount of staffers stand out. The hockey arena venue had their own staff there, watching doors and hallways and stairwells, and the KWCC had at least two staffers at every single point a staffer could be at, and there were a lot of those points. What I mean to say is that this thing was over-staffed. Maybe if there had been more attendees it wouldn't have been so noticeable.

Vendors were wandering around chatting with each other. The ones I spoke to seemed to be waiting out the clock. I saw a lot of expensive merch and I didn't see a lot of money changing hands. I genuinely don't understand how these people turn a profit at these shows. The comic book show we were at two weeks ago? People were leaving that room with armloads of expensive comics. Anime North attendees were barely able to haul their piles of manga out of the AN vendors hall. The KWCC, on the other hand, seemed to have a crowd of browsers and window shoppers.

I will say this; the voice actors gave a great panel, they could spin a simple question into a twenty minute discussion on approaching characters or finding the rhythm of a dialect or how they can't remember the name of the cloud character they portrayed in an episode of "Care Bears."

We went through the artist alley aisle with Grafficker Alley flyers talking up the show, and people seemed interested, except for the person who asked 'what's a zine?" One artist had been at Grafficker Alley last year and loved it, which was really nice to hear.

All in all the experience was OK. We got to get out of town, experience a show we hadn't been to before, get some lunch, tool around the countryside a bit. I don't know if KWCC made a profit or not. The venue was expensive, that merch isn't free, guests cost money, it didn't seem like they were getting enough attendees to cover the spread. Maybe the trick is corporate and local government sponsorship, I don't know.

It kind of reminded me of the local comic/fantasy/trek shows I was going to as a teenager in the 14-16 year old range, those two-day off ramp hotel shows with one or two guests, a room screening Blake's 7 episodes, a vendors hall with comics, space toys, paperbacks and trinkets, and just enough people to make it worthwhile; I'd recognize one or two people in the crowd and be able to have some good nerd conversations, spend a little money on vendors hall stuff, and then call Dad for a ride home. If I spent more than two hours at one of those conventions I'd get bored and fidgety, and then I'd either volunteer for a staff position or start vandalizing something. Turns out I went with the "staff position" option. I am not sure what Kitchener's nerdy 14 year olds are doing. They didn't seem to be at this comic con, though.

And I wish they were! I want these shows to succeed, I think they're necessary if we want younger people to get into fandom and start replacing the generations of fans who are now needing mobility scooters or who are just plain dropping dead. New blood is what we need, and we get it by getting teens to drop into their local Bi Mon Sci Fi Con and be interested enough to stick around but still kinda bored and wanting to make something happen. That's where the magic is.

one of those days where one of your FB friends asks for updates about what's going on with a mutual FB friend, and you don't know what's happening with that mutual, and so you look it up, and you find out that their pretrial hearing for attempted murder is coming up soon.

https://crimewatch.net/us/pa/bucks/central-bucks-regional-pd/17396/arrests/mcnamara-robin-mcclain-attempted-murder-third-degree-f1-and-5-additional-charges

https://youtu.be/xokBbM9keh8?si=Mm6kNsbP0meSjsE0

We had Myrna and James over for US Thanksgiving (Saturday) here! I wound up with some extra days so I took Thursday and Friday off. It's a good thing, too, because I got my covid/flu shot on Thursday and as is typical with me, twelve to fourteen hours later I was feelin' it. I didn't get past that until Friday night. By Saturday the turkey was in the oven and the sweet potato casserole was warming and the pies had been cooked Friday night. It was a nice evening and we all ate a lot. Sunday Shain wasn't feeling great and is still head-colded up today. I spent the day getting Anime Hell started and am halfway done at this point. Which is good, because there's this week, and then there's next week, and then I get on a plane for Atlanta.

Weekend prior there was a collectible vintage toy show at the RAID gallery on Queen at Roncey, that's Royal Academy of Illustration and Design, one of the schools cranking out talented artists here in Toronto, they have a little cafe and event space in the front of the building and the back is studio spaces. Anyway we got there right as everyone was packing up. The website was pretty vague about times, but I figured they'd be going until at least 4? No sir. Apparently the event started at 10am, which is, like, you want people to be somewhere on a Sunday morning at 10am? I'm not going to be anywhere on Sunday at 10am, sorry. I feel bad for the vendors, they had to be there at 8 or 9, if they came from out of the city that means they're rolling out of bed at 6 or 7am on a weekend. Maybe this is natural behavior? Maybe every Ontario native was raised to get up at the crack of dawn to go out ice fishing or snowmobiling or hunting or whatever?

I dunno, maybe this is a me thing, maybe being a night owl and a late riser puts me working at a tangent to the rest of the city, this city might just have a early to rise vibe that I'll never be in sync with. I will say there's not much to do here after 10pm that doesn't involve drinking beer.

Anyway, we did not buy any overpriced vintage collectibles - the one guy still boothing was mostly selling Funko Pops, so there's that bit of data - but we went next door to West End Comics and pulled some comics out of the $2 bin. See, when you stay open past 4, you make money.

I know Friday the 21st was the library sale we biked across town to; nothing really worth the trip, but it was an interesting experiment to see if I could get from home to Yonge & Bloor via bike in an evening and make it back in time to go to work. Saturday we went out to the outlet mall and I got some new shoes that seem to be working out OK. I still need a new winter coat.

It's December 2, we had some snow last night, it's supposed to be below freezing and occasionally snowing a bit for the next week or so. I'm hoping for a few more mild days before the January freeze sets in. We'll see, I guess.

So this zine show happened! And it went pretty well, considering everything! Gonna do it again, I think!

This whole thing came out of us moving to Toronto right out of publishing JUKU and being accustomed to regularly getting behind a table and selling our comics and zines. It's easy when you're the con chair, or you know the con chair, or your convention has a table at the convention, you have an automatic "in" and can make it happen easily. When you are new in town, it's not so easy.

The established big zine show up here was Canzine, run by the magazine Broken Pencil. Shain and I tabled at one pretty soon after I got up here. Might have been that first November. It was at either the Drake or the Gladstone; tables were in the tiny rooms and hallways of a downtown historic building. We had a third of a six foot table. Do the math. Crowded in like sardines, half of what was being sold was fabric art or crafts or, you know, not zines, it wasn't great. Hard to get attention or get your work noticed.

In subsequent years I went to other Canzines and they weren't as cramped, but still kind of small. TCAF started soon after we moved here and that was a much better show, in a better space, comics-focused, with guests and programming and everything. In fact TCAF became a world class event attracting talent from around the globe, and as such got real hard to get a table at.

We spent a while simply focusing on webcomics, so tabling at shows wasn't that important, but the thing about print is, people like it. We like to make comics, people like to buy print comics, it's fun to table at a show and sell comics and see the other work and talk to other artists.

So I started paying attention again to the zine world, to the shows, trying to find out when the upcoming shows were happening so we could try to snag a table. Tried to get into TCAF a few times and didn't make the cut. Began thinking about renting the back room at Eyesore, which can fit eight or ten tables, and doing a zine show there. Then COVID hit and nobody was doing anything.

After the lockdowns ended I says to myself, I says I need to do that zine show, and I need to do it in a larger space than the back room of Eyesore. So I did some research and found some community centers and event spaces and started sending out some emails. Most of those emails did not get replies. The one reply I got wanted to know my budget, to which I replied, well, I am asking how much your space costs, so I know how much to charge my artists for tables, which will determine my budget... and I never got an actual number out of them. So whatever.

COVID shook everything up and one of the shakeups was that when TCAF came back in 2022 we somehow managed to get a table. Well, half a table. I didn't need to start my own show any more! So that's what I did a week after my mom died, I was behind a table in the library at TCAF selling copies of that SOUVENIR comic. And it sold pretty well, it didn't look like anything anybody else was selling, nobody's working that 'war comic' angle in the self published comic field. I didn't sell enough to make back my table fee, which was $225 (!!), but I sold enough to be happy. If Shain's bicycle hadn't been stolen right in front of the library, the experience would have been wholly positive.

Still had that idea in the back of my mind to do a zine show, and I was still keeping an eye on zine shows, and Canzine came back around and we got accepted to the 2024 Canzine. And then the guy behind Broken Pencil / Canzine decided that the Gaza war was the hill he was going to die on and he made a huge unnecessary fuss about it and as a result most everyone else that was making Canzine/Broken Pencil happen said "we quit" and Canzine guy took his ball and went home. The longest-running zine event/magazine in Canada, one with a great deal of grandfathered-in arts funding that no organization will ever be able to get again, just out like a light.

So when THAT happened, I was like OKAY GODDAMNIT, IT'S TIME. And I mentioned this to Donald, who's on the team that runs Anime North. And Donald replied with the fact that there are hundreds of Anime North artist alley applicants that get turned away every year because AN simply doesn't have enough space, and that AN was thinking of doing a separate event just for artists. So we figured we could put the zine show and the artist alley show together, and (and this is the important part) Anime North could finance it.

We put a little team together, we came up with a name for the thing, which is Grafficker Alley, hopefully one that splits the difference between the zine world and the artist alley world. We looked at some locations, did the math, nailed down the Small Arms Inspection Building in Mississauga. I built a Google Forms questionnaire, a website was constructed, a domain was bought, social media accounts were acquired, and we went "live" in July, which was really too soon before a September show. Our social media guy had a heart attack while going to a Weird Al concert, and we really didn't want to bug him for passwords while he was getting bypass surgery.

We commissioned a poster and a logo and once we went live I printed some out and spent some time staple-gunning them to various notice boards around the city. We got flyers and postcards into some shops and we got out onto the social medias, and all 30,000+ people on the Anime North email list got emailed an email about Grafficker Alley.

Every single time I went out to do street postering I'd see even more places to staple flyers, every time I did a social media post I'd think of somewhere else I should be social-mediaing, it's a never-ending road of promotional work.

So the event did happen on September 6. It went... really well, I think. We sold 107 tables. Everybody got set up without too much hassle. The event was never crowded, but there was a steady stream of people coming through the building all day long. I sold more than enough zines to pay for my table. And here's the big thing, the table fee was $50, for a full six foot table. You don't have to sell a lot of zines to cover your table at that price point. I think this is why a lot of the artists seemed happy with the day; they covered their investment and had a pleasant afternoon in a pleasant space with fun people.

Grafficker Alley 2025 was a first time show that got a late start. I think when the show comes back in 2026 we'll have a proven track record, we'll be something people remember and have had in the back of their minds for months, and we'll have more artists and more customers for those artists.

The one big quibble is that the area is kind of a food desert. The SAIB is in a former industrial neighborhood that is slowly turning residential. Two towers are going up across the street, and there's a convenience store a block down, and then that's about it for a mile or so. The food vendors we tried to reach out to simply didn't return our contacts, but we have some new connections and we'll make food and drink happen next year.

I had fun, sold some comics, saw some friends, and generally am still kind of stunned there wasn't some sort of last minute disaster or flip out. I'll admit the last minute email questions were getting to me on Friday, but that's why I took the day off work. Next year I plan to have more zines and better table displays (that easel isn't gonna cut it). Honestly all I want is a regular show where we can get together and show off our latest work, one without the distractions of big name guests or big-time publishers, one where we aren't jostling against each other crowded into a too-small venue, and I think that's what we accomplished.

It got hot, it cooled down, it got hot again. The Honda Indy happened and this year that means the unit next door got air bnb'd out to some party people, who started partying at 2pm Saturday, went on until about dinnertime, started up again at 11pm and went on until midnight, and then stopped. After the construction noise that destroyed us when they remodeled the place last spring? I'm callin' the cops if they go past midnight.

Traffic was terrible this weekend - which is only like the second weekend of bad bad traffic this whole summer. A definite improvement over last summer, where construction on King meant everything was routed right through our neighborhood and it was repeated gridlock every single weekend.

We got the bikes out Saturday and rode across town to the new park by the new path of the Don River, which has been rejiggered to flow more naturally instead of the weird angle past disused port lands it used to be. It's a great park, there's a zip line and a giant owl kids can climb around inside, people were kayaking and paddleboarding on the Don, which is, let me just say, not a thing you ever would see before.

Sunday we went to the drive-in to see the Superman, and it's good, probably the best Superman movie thing in forty five years? It gets pretty deep into the lore, we're just thrown into things, and it's hard to say if that would have worked in 1980. It works fine in 2025, the pop culture has been infested with super people on movie screens for decades, viewers either already know what a Green Lantern is or are just gonna roll with it. Don't know who Metamorpho is? Here's a line of dialogue, we're good.

The next big project is... where am I with my projects.

I wrote 200 words on a favorite OVA (Devilman: Evil Bird Sirene) for Zimmerit.

Kicked out a Let's Anime on Robotech II, which is terrible.

Finished coloring and laying out my next comic book, going to get that printed shortly.

Am halfway through the next Let's Anime column.

Did a podcast talking about the 1979 Anne Of Green Gables anime.

Uploaded a VHS rip of a 1982 episode of the CBN Japanese culture-news magazine series "Beyond The Horizon" that talks about Japanese animation and interviews the head of NYC C/FO who shows off some amazing early 80s anime stuff. The episode came from Steve Harrison, who thought he'd lost the original tape, but managed to find it, and also managed to buy a working DVD recorder from a thrift store to get it onto disc. (All *my* DVD recorders eventually died)

Our anniversary is this Sunday and we're going to Niagara Falls and spending a couple of nights in a retro motor court style motel and seeing the sights. I took the rest of the week off and I think Neil is going to come visit the weekend of the first, which is a holiday here, so I don't go back to work until August 4.

The next event here is... I was talking a lot pre-pandemic and post-pandemic about how tough it was to get a table at the local zine shows and how I ought to start my own zine show. In 2021-22 I went so far as to start contacting venues and trying to put a budget together. Most places wouldn't even return my emails. Fast forward to this year. As it turns out, the Anime North gang were talking about how they always have hundreds of applicants to the artists alley that have to be turned away because of lack of space, and how a separate show would be great. So we combined the two and the comics/zine/arts/manga show is happening September 6!!

Wow, that's a long time between posts. Let's see. Got the rear shocks done on the car. Visited Boston and saw the MAD Magazine exhibit at the Norman Rockwell museum. Anime North went great and we're doing the Halloween show this Friday. Gundam III is in theaters and we're seeing it this Sunday.

Attempted to get out to the beach this summer, but every time we went the weather didn't co-operate, it was either bizarrely windy or raining or cold. The idea is that we'll just visit one of the public pools in the winter, dang it.

I put together an Anime Hell Treasury Edition, a big zine filled with all the Anime Hell flyers from the past decades - at least, all the ones I could find and identify which show they were from. I brought them all to Anime North and sold out of all of them in about a minute, which was... I knew they'd sell, but that fast?

Neil gifted me a new Linux PC that I haven't switched over to yet, but none of our PCs will handle Windows 11 so... good bye Windoze, I guess, at some point. My work has officially switched over to being fully run by the new employers, a Canadian printing company instead of our previous owners who were the Canadian branch of an American company. The plant that has merged into our plant was union, so we're all union now, I have a union card and pay dues and everything. So far it is OK, our hours are a little less, we get a little more money, benefits are better and are all paid for. We didn't get the kind of wild increases the press guys got, because the union was like, we aren't really sure what digital operators are. We renegotiate our contracts in June and there will be some negotiating, to be sure. Our department is way behind on raises. Before COVID we were always told "once this merger is done" or "once this reorganization is done" or "things are tough right now, so here's a one percent raise," and then COVID hit and we all basically took pay cuts for two years, and then COVID went away and we went back to regular hours but inflation started slapping us in the face. Anyway, this is all talk for next June.

AWA is in December and I'll be down there for the con and a few extra days to see friends and family and then we'll be here for the holidays proper, and then 2025 here we come.

Yes, I have voted already. Fingers crossed.

Looked at the calendar and noticed that it's 2023 which means twenty one years ago I was part of a group that put together what we called a "comics album" in an attempt to become published cartoonists and get our work out into the world. It was called JUKU and you can still find it via resellers on Amazon for wild prices. It came up in a conversation about printing on the Bluesky and Elin W. was complimentary about it, which was nice. After it came out in 2002 we sold a bunch, and then when we did the next round of conventions in 2003 everyone asked where the next one was. There wasn't going to be any next one because finishing that thing simply blasted the desire to make comics out of three of our five JUKU participants. That's part of why Shain and I started Mister Kitty, was that we wanted to make comics and get them in front of others, not sell buttons and t-shirts and stickers and magnets.

Wow, it's November already! That JUKU thing has been sitting in my "drafts" here for two months.

YES we went to AWA, that was my home-to-Atlanta vacation for the year. The con went well, people were happy to be there, the reg lines were a lot shorter, events went smoothly. It's the last AWA in that Galleria/Waverly facility so there's some bittersweetness to the show. Lots of memories in that place. Got to visit with a bunch of friends and do some shopping and walk in the woods in the warm weather.

I came home with a good solid case of the con crud. Actually I've been sniffling and sneezy pretty much constantly all summer and fall, always worried I was going to get sick, so actually getting sick was kind of a relief. Not COVID, I tested four times. Probably got it from my brother, who'd been at a show in North Carolina the previous weekend.

We aren't going south for Xmas this year and it is like a Xmas gift I gave myself; not having that trip hanging over my head is a blessing from Santa Claus.

Had a great conversation on the Bluesky and I want to detail this while it's fresh in my mind; the marines are recruiting at NYAC and people are miffed about it, and I said something about now that anime cons are the size of state fairs the same kind of slap-chop aluminum siding hot tub salesmen are there to sell stuff to crowds, it's what happens when you get big crowds. And some stranger wandered into my mentions to drop a load of anger about back when SDCC send C&D letters to conventions that were also calling themselves "Comic-Cons." And when I said, yeah, conventions should come up with their own names, well, he didn't like that.

Anyway the gist of the debate was that I was questioning this dude's statement that "dozens" of conventions had had to close down and lay off "tons" of staffers because of SDCC's legal action. Because I simply don't think that's true. Dude was not going to be bringing any examples to the table because he wanted to remain anonymous. And okay, that's fine, but when I'm showing up with my real name and real conventions I'm staffing in my bio, and with specific examples of conventions that had to change their names because they wanted to call themselves Anime Expos and Otakons, and they changed those names and kept right on chugging along, and this dude is all "I work for a show but I won't tell you what it is," well, sir, as I said, you have me at a disadvantage.

Some OTHER total stranger wandered into the conversation to deduce exactly what convention this dude was talking about and how it was killed by COVID, not SDCC. Which dude did NOT like. That was after some legal-twitter names like Akiva Cohen wandered in to explain how SDCC was legally correct. Did not expect to see him in the conversation.

Anyway the conversation is over, I'm sure dude is still angry about his show that got smashed by those a-holes in San Diego, whatever, buddy. Next time come up with your own name.

Jeez, I didn't even mention this. So what happened towards the end of May was that our domain registration for mister kitty dot org came up for renewal. We renew it through our web host, GoDaddy. Well, for some reason GoDaddy didn't send the registration in on time, the web address became available, and somebody else grabbed it. So everything that was on mister kitty dot org became unavailable.

This was kind of bad. We've had mister kitty dot org since what, 2006? 2007? A long time. We have a lot of readers for Stupid Comics that we've built up over the years who have bookmarked the site, who check it every week, who, you know, are there for us, and suddenly we're not there for them.

GoDaddy could not get the dot org address back. What they did do is get us a dot net address. We're now at www.misterkitty.net So Shain had to spend a weekend going through the entire site and changing all the addresses to misterkitty.net anywhere there was a web address. It was a complete pain.

Of course it happened right before Anime North so every panel I had a Mister Kitty slide inserted into, well, that had to be changed. The promo postcards all got thrown out and I printed some new ones. Every bit of social media had to get updated.

Our numbers haven't recovered and I don't think they'll ever get back to where they were. The internet was a different place 15 years ago, it was a lot easier to get the word out and get people to look at your site and come back to it on a regular basis. All we can do now is to try to let people know we're now at www.misterkitty.net instead of the dot org.

At some point the .org address might become available (we did grab the .ca address as a pre-emptive strike). Until that day we're going to be constantly reminding everybody that we're at mister kitty dot net now.

It was a long day of conversation about whether or not we wanted to keep doing the site at all. The temptation to let it burn down and start over was pretty tempting. To just publish on the Patreon or just make it a substack or a wordpress blog? It would be easier. But I'm glad we kept a website. Too much of the internet is owned by two or three corporations all churning out the same corporate content, and having a space where we can publish whatever we want is still pretty attractive to old zine-makers like us.

Anyway, remember, we're now misterkitty.net. Bookmark the site, post it on your socials, tell your friends and family. Seriously, tell people.

I was digging through my old posts to try and find the last time I had a GOUT ATTACK and I can't find it. Let's say it's been ten years. Well, I got one today, my right ankle is swole and hot and painful. Been trying to figure out what I did or ate or drank to deserve this, and I figure it's a combo of not taking my allopurinol for three days before my colonoscopy, and having a drink on Saturday? I dunno. I don't think I ate anything in the past week or so that triggers me. Anyway, it's a literal pain. That'll teach me to not ditch my meds.

Wow, so Easter weekend came and went and we didn't do anything holiday related, we couldn't make Passover with Shain's family, so we just had a long weekend without any gotta-be-there-on-time commitments. And it was GREAT. Next, I plan to expand this policy to Christmas.