davemerrill

yes, Alcoholics Anonymous! No, wait, Artists Alley. I got a PM on the AWA board this weekend from somebody concerned about the tone being taken in a gigantic thread about the recent convention's artists alley. The thread has since been locked and vanished into the Negative Zone, but before it got gone I dug through it some to see if it warranted my attention. And it really didn't; what was done is what I would have done. They are quick on the trigger on the AWA message board.

And really, as I explained to the person who PM'ed me, I don't know enough about AA culture to make any honest decisions about anything relating to it, other than "knock off being a dick". The artists alley has turned into its own culture that has moved way away from where it was the last time I held down a table there.

I mean, during my time in AA, (I'm talking 1992-2002, intermittent) the tables were ten or fifteen tables slapped down wherever there was space - outside the dealers room, in front of registration, generally in unsecured high-traffic areas. Artists were mixed in with convention publicity tables, small press publishers selling zines, minicomics publishers selling their minis, and anybody else who could talk the convention into giving them a table. I fit into all those categories. There weren't a lot of rules and if you brought a bunch of junk from home that you wanted to get rid of and sold it, nobody got on your case.

The AA now is a completely different beast. It is full of professional looking booths with signage and giant prints and displays. The level of quality in the artwork has taken a giant leap forward (right alongside the giant leap in things like Photoshop, haw haw) and most artists have achieved a certain level of slick, appealing, van-art kitsch that would not be out of place in any suburban youth culture store. The craft quotient has risen and there's an increase in hats, shirts, costume jewellery, candy, and other hand-made items. The days when it was just a bunch of people sketching and selling zines is over, dead, and buried.

Now all you need to do is to check out the rules portion of any anime con's website to see how much the Artists Alley culture has changed. It's serious business now. In particular is the rule about how only a certain percentage of work on your table can be fan art. Right now at AWA the ratio is 80-20 - only 20% of work on your table can be fan art of copyrighted characters.

Now, I can completely understand the rationale for this rule: anime cons are becoming increasingly connected to the copyright holders and want to limit infringement. But I think there's another reason for this rule, and it's that when you're holding down a table full of drawings of your own original characters and not making any sales, and you're watching the table next to yours sell piece after piece of fanart of Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Naruto, Card Captors, Tenchi characters, you start to get annoyed and jealous and pissed off. You're doing your original work that you spent time and work on, are emotionally invested in, and it's being ignored in favor of an appeal to the lowest common denominator. I've been there and I understand those emotions completely.

I can't help but think that the fanart ratio rule is in place because of those feelings. It's an attempt to level the playing field, to reshape the market into something with higher aspirations than a room filled with bare-titty Dirty Pair airbrush T-shirts. And in principle that's a good thing.

None of the artists are really complaining about that rule. The artists spend a lot of time accusing other artists of breaking the rule (which is most of what made the AWA thread go on for 8 pages), but for the most part the artists are OK with it.

What the artists AREN'T okay with are poor sales. And if you know anybody who ever has any kind of table at a convention, they are NEVER happy with their sales. The AA has all sorts of reasons their sales are down - the room's too big, the room's hard to find, the table layouts are weird, those other assholes are selling too much fan art. And this is another reason that thread went on 8 pages.

Some of the artists were talking about how they are trying to make a living out of selling art at Artists Alleys. Now there's some wishful thinking. It's not impossible to make a living selling prints at shows - but you need to hit all the arts and crafts festivals in all the fairgrounds and city parks in America, you need to make the same circuit the folk artists and the landscape painters and the caricaturists do. Not anime cons.

Nobody addressed the fact that America is still in a recession and that people have a lot less folding money to spend on artwork. Nobody was pointing out that the AA this year was 20,000 square feet of full color glossy booths selling full color glossy fan art at full color glossy prices, to customers whose wallets had already survived the SHFS on Friday and the giant dealers room right next door.

And the kicker - none of the artists were pointing out that Joe Average Anime Con AA Customer thinks of the Artists Alley as a place to buy fan art. In his mind the two are inextricably linked. So we have two opposing forces coming into play - the artists want to sell their original work, but the customers want to buy fan art of their favorite characters. And as long as these two mindsets are in conflict we're going to see sparks.

And let's keep in mind that my appraisal of the situation is that of almost complete ignorance - I got to hit the AA this year for the first time in a while, and my knowledge of the issues involved comes from the anime con message board, which since the dawn of time has been the primary arena for gigantic flaming piles of drama to erupt after every single anime con artists alley ever.

So I don't really have any solutions, and I don't know enough about things to even formulate a solution, and that's what I told the person in the PM. That's right world, somebody willing to say, "I don't know."

Speaking of artwork - new ZERO FIGHTER this week!! Page 74 already. It's like I've been doing this every week or something.

This week I'm still on that schedule where I work 12 hours for 3 days and then am off for the rest of the week. In practical terms it means that you get a long weekend, but you can't stay up late, and the last day of your "weekend" you get up as early as you can and try to get all the things done that you'd normally do during the week, like laundry and shopping, because when you get home after a 12 hour shift all you want to do is fall over. On the other hand, I don't really mind getting up early and being out in the mornings. There are benefits to having a schedule that's more in line with the rest of the world. In other words, it beats third shift.

Nope, not going to San Diego Comic Con, or whatever they are calling it these days. The last time I went, 15 years ago, I already felt it was way too crowded and being overrun with movie studios, video games, and TV producers hyping their newest products - I can't imagine what it's like now. 7th circle of hell, I imagine. My requirements for a trip of that distance are probably going to involve a little more relaxation than the SDCC can provide.

To be honest I have neglected many conventions that I spent a good chunk of time 1998-2002 going to. But you only get so much vacation time every year, you only have so much disposable income to spend on travel, and if it's a choice between visiting San Francisco or a hotel ballroom, Vancouver or a convention center, or let's say, Tokyo versus a hotel ballroom, well, the convention is going to lose every time.

In keeping with my crazy new schedule (that this is the last week of) the update for Zero Fighter was a day late. On the other hand there is a whole whack of new inserted Element Of Surprise pages up that Shain did to flesh out her continuity. Found Sound will be up later today and Stupid Comics will be tomorrow and there will probably be one more Zero Fighter and then we're on vacation, and regularly scheduled updates will be happening sometime in August.

Went to the "fan appreciation" comic book show downtown yesterday. We went to the convention center, went up 3 sets of escalators, across the tracks via a pedestrian bridge, down 3 more sets of escalators, and into the south building which I had never been in, and which is huge. And subterreanean. There was actually some neat stuff at this show, we found some good old cheap stuff. Better than the last downtown show by far. I picked up a LOT of Harveys, more than I usually see at these things. Also one dealer had a big box full of original comic book art pages- some superhero stuff, but a big whack of Archie pages and original Stan Goldberg Millie pages. And some Sad Sack pages that got me thinking there might be some Little Dot or Little Lotta pages, but no such luck. I bought one page with two half-page gag strips, one by DeCarlo, one by Joe Edwards. There was an Edwards splash page for $90, I thought pretty hard about that one. The dealer is based out of a store in Hamilton, maybe we'll take a trip down there and buy it one of these days.

Came home and I did another Zero Fighter page. Actually I had one finished for yesterdays' update since before Anime North, but I pushed it back and replaced it with a new one, which I'm much happier with. After that we got some Pizza Gigi and watched some TV. We've been going through the Southern Cross set we picked up at AN and it's a much more entertaining show without that Robotech narrator and without it having to be shoehorned in as a bridge between two shows that didn't need a bridge and in fact are better off without a bridge. Also watching fansubs of the '68 Cyborg 009 series, which is primitive and energetic.

I'll probably be doing a few panels at Con Bravo the first weekend of July in Oakville. No Anime Hell, but I'll be doing an Old School Classroom thing and maybe sitting in on a classic anime panel or two. Will not be buying any LPs at that record store, though.

Haven't been posting a lot lately. It's not that nothing has been postworthy, but me, I been busy. There's a new Zero Fighter page up that will explain how I managed to get two pages finished week before last. This past week I only managed one page and an embarrassing amount of time was wasted trying to work out how car headlights would be pointing at the road surface. Still, the past Sunday update has basically all I want out of drawing comics - lots of thick brush lines and plenty of stars made by blowing white paint at the paper. As long as you give me those two things, I am a happy camper.

I am working on a flyer to advertise the Ozone Commandos screening at Anime North next month, and after two or three days of beating myself about the head trying to come up with a movie posterish image that (a) uses actual images from the film and (b) has a cheesy B-picture vibe to it, I might have something that I actually like. It involves the Death Blimp, and even sketching the thing out reminds me of how tired I got of drawing that thing and how glad I was to blow it up and never draw it again.

Thanks to Rifftrax we've managed to watch a lot of middlin'-to-terrible films that otherwise we wouldn't ever see. DAREDEVIL was a curious failure. ERAGON, while lousy, was nowhere near as bad as that DUNGEONS & DRAGONS movie. The remake of THE WICKER MAN was absolutely freakish in its badness. The TWILIGHT movies are actually entertaining with Rifftrax commentary. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was awful, if I'd paid to see that in a theater I'd be really mad. The Rifftrax version of PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE is entertaining, their take on MISSILE TO THE MOON has Fred Willard in it, and their REEFER MADNESS is a hoot. GLITTER is a really curious film, the kind of slow-pitch star vehicle they don't make often any more (for good reason).

Last Friday my impulse purchase of the week was a couple of LPs, VELVET UNDERGROUND LIVE AT MAX'S KANSAS CITY recorded live via Brigid Polk's portable cassette deck. I'd heard cuts from this record years ago on a college radio Velvets special, but it hadn't leapt into my hand until now. Tough, no-nonsense versions of Velvets hits and a guy in the audience asking for Tuinals. The other LP was Jefferson Airplane's VOLUNTEERS, a record introduced to me tangentially by cartoonist Terry Laban's CUD. Everybody's heard their two big hits and I'd even listened to SURREALISTIC PILLOW, an LP that contains their two big hits and what seemed to me at the time to be a lot of junk. In VOLUNTEERS you can hear the origin of a lot of music that I really despise, but the Airplane was ahead of the curve and is firing on all cylinders with tracks like "Volunteers" and "We Can Be Together", and the rest of the album isn't bad either. I can excuse the noodly digressions, it was 1969 and if I was cutting records at the time I'd be noodling away stoned out of my mind too. I'll be honest here, it's only recently that I've realized I only have two criteria for good music - if it works in the background while I'm drawing comics, and if it sounds good while I'm driving. Do these two LPs make the cut? Absolutely.

We rented GODZILLA VS HEDORAH (English title VERSUS THE SMOG MONSTER) and it's definitely a creature of its time. Lots of psychedelic go-go dancing, animated sequences, really disturbing Cronenberg style ooze. Fun!

In other news, the weather is nice, the cat is annoying, and there's a whole bunch of stuff happening in May that I am totally not ready for.

(Jeff Foxworthy voice) If you wake up in a hotel room after a night of pill-addled sex with your lead guitarist and you still have your roller skates on, you might just be in the 70s.
Yeah, we went out and saw THE RUNAWAYS last night and it's a good solid film, not a great film, but solid garish 1970s entertainment filled with earth tones and Stooges tunes and Rodney Bingenheimer cameos. Lil' Miss Twilight does a great job becoming Joan Jett (well, okay, granted, capturing the emotional range of Joan Jett may not be the most demanding task, but she does it well) and Dakota Fanning rides the "Behind The Music" rollercoaster of Cherie Currie's bad home life, escape into Bowie, shaped into rock star, can't handle the drugs and touring, escape back to normalcy. And whoever they have playing Lita Ford, well, that is Lita Ford right up there on screen. Film does NOT end with Kim Fowley dying of a drug overdose while riddled with syphilis and being destroyed with flamethrowers, as much as we'd like it to.

The movie condenses a lot of the history. Some scenes sort of peter out confusingly, and their Japanese tour lacks even one exterior shot of Tokyo, which would be nice to see, a 1977 Tokyo. Even though the band continued for 2 years after Currie left, we don't see it; it's a long falling action of mopey Joan moping and drug rehab, wrapped up with the triumph of MTV era Joan. I can't help but think this film needed a little more speed, maybe a little Julien Temple style bombast of pop cultural intercutting to give us some context (see: THE FILTH AND THE FURY). But as a document of disaffected, alienated rockin' youth, the film succeeds admirably; the dark, packed, grafitti-strewn nightclubs full of garishly-dressed people you only know because you see them at the show every week, the luded-up attempts to make it down anonymous hotel hallways, and the post-Runaways Joan experience of living the punk rock former star lifestyle of a house full of doped up freeloaders basking in your fame until you get pissed off and kick them out and get on with your life. It has the ring of truth.

New ZERO FIGHTER up at Mister Kitty, too! Went out and bought a bunch more comics from the guy with the comics at the Woodstock show, mostly 1968-69 era Archie books from the collection of a girl who felt the need to sign her name on each and every one, including a Josie with the first appearance of Alan M. And that was Sunday. Saturday I worked and then we bought some Ikea flooring stuff for the balcony, which looks swell but we need more of it. Friday I worked. It was a busy weekend. This week can be a little quieter, please.

Doesn't time fly. This week I got a haircut, and that's about all the non-work activity I expect to get squared away during the week. I needed one, though; my hair was Beatles level, it was approaching post-high school length and anybody who knew me back then knows how painful that can be.

I completely neglected to tell you about Sunday's ZERO FIGHTER strip, which is quickly approaching an extended dialog sequence where some of this stuff gets explained, and of courseFOUND SOUND is back with a record meant to comfort babies that features actual sounds of the human body, and ELEMENT OF SURPRISE updates as well.

I made up for my slack by getting two new Zero Fighter strips done over the course of the week and if I get one more done this weekend I will be ahead of the game. I'm kind of impatient to get the characters out of that field. Of course this Sunday is both the Oscars and the Woodstock nostalgia show which we will probably be going to. Woodstock is a little ways, but it's not too far for a junkin' expedition.

We got an official letter from the condo board and our yellow curtains officially have to officially go, condo rules state that only white curtains are allowed. So either we get different material and borrow a ladder to hang it, or call in the professionals, who probably have their own ladders. Or we just replace them with giant novelty flags bought from people in vans parked at gas stations, and wait for another letter.

If I knew what I was doing, I'd probably do it myself, but I prefer to push the envelope of knowledge on occasions when I'm NOT perched on a rickety borrowed ladder ten feet above the floor. I don't bounce like I used to. I got away with it once, and I could probably get away with it again if all I'm doing is swapping out fabric, but anything more complicated... not recommended.

We got like two inches on Tuesday night, which is the most snow we've gotten since Dec. 13. Nobody's really complaining, but at the same time people are kind of scratching their heads and wondering what's going on, waiting for the other snow shoe to drop.

Last weekend Donald and David came over and we exchanged Xmas gifts and watched MST3K and "The Day The Sky Exploded" off the 50-movie set of public domain SF "classics" we picked up during Xmas vacation. This weekend it's a little trip out of town due to the Monday holiday and the mild weather. If it was last year, we wouldn't even be thinking of going out of town.

In between it's been workin' workin' workin'. I have an article due on print anime zines of the "early days" very soon, and I'm still doing research, marvelling at how a really great looking professionally printed national club magazine can shift gears from translated anime theme songs to total fan politics editorial in the blink of an eye. Or the turn of a page, for that matter. I'm amazed when I read a fan club editorial (a different one from years later) that decries fan backbiting and name-calling while in the course of doing EXACTLY THAT, reciting a list of OTHER problem-plagued fan clubs while making the bold claim that their new, exciting fan club will avoid all those pitfalls. And they did, by not lasting nearly as long as some of the bad-example clubs mentioned in their newsletter.

And this wasn't via email or websites or message boards on the internets, either; this was all typed out on paper, photocopied or mimeo'd or printed, collated, bound, put in an envelope, and mailed using US postage and valuable USPS employees. A massive waste of everybody's time and money, especially considering that it was the 1980s and the pages you're wasting complaining that the fan club vote was rigged or that that other fan club over there isn't responsive to their memberships's emotional needs could have been spent giving us translations or synopses or episode guides or character guides or fan art.

So anyway I have to write that article (which is almost writing itself here!!) and I want to get another Let's Anime updated before the guy at Black Sun posts something about every 60s anime thing in the world, and I have crazy stuff I want to scan in and post here, and of course there's the beast of Mister Kitty to update every week. Found Sound isn't too hard, though ten minutes surfing through music blogs reveals vastly weirder music than anything I own. I'm going to be blunt about Stupid Comics though - we are running out of Stupid Comics. It's getting tougher and tougher to wring comedy out of our comic book collection; finding ten or twelve images that we can hang gags on, comics that aren't merely inane or tedious but actually the kinds of comics you would show to your friends and ask them what the hell is going on - there are only so many comics like that in the world, and a smaller percentage of those are in our posession. We're going to have to range a little further afield to find the dumb comics, and in the meantime I'm giving myself permission to take a week off now and then to let the creative batteries recharge, to parcel out the stupid at a more economical rate. It's a present I give myself, and those are the best kinds of presents!!

In the meantime, of course, I invite you to enjoy Mister Kitty updates of Zero Fighter and Shain's strip Element Of Surprise, and this week's Found Sound is all romantic and stuff!

Excitement and adventure confronted us at every turn yesterday! Well, if you count "rain" as exciting adventure, then sure! Because it rained, which was good as my car really needed a car wash and I had actually seriously been thinking about getting a car wash, but then it rained. We did some toolin' around the sticks looking at junk that WE COULD NOT BUY BECAUSE DUDE DIDN'T PUT A PRICE TAG ON IT AND THEN LEFT TOWN FOR A MONTH. If we can't give you money for your junk THEN IT ISN'T FOR SALE, IS IT. Nossir. We did buy some cheap comics and one guy just gave us an LP -just said "take it" - so that's pretty cool.

I finished the latest ZERO FIGHTER and that's up, and we watched a bunch of old commercials and had pizza and wings. And got most everything squared away and out of sight, almost. Today I put up a new LET'S ANIME column all about fans! Because people love reading about fans.

I acquired a set of big metal flat files over the weekend and spent Saturday night and a good part of Sunday rearranging everything in the studio area. Sunday night the Morgan Spurlock Simpsons anniversary thing was on and they interviewed a guy in England whose house is filled with Simpsons memorabilia and that's how I felt, I felt overwhelmed with junk. The plan was that the flat files could store my old artwork, the years of comics and work from college, and also posters and prints. This would free up the space taken by the work table, under which all the boxes of artwork were kept. The way this has worked out is, there's more artwork than the flat files can hold, I've lost wall space for two shelves worth of videotapes, I don't think we'll be able to get rid of the work table as originally planned, and I still have boxes of stuff - publications, zines, assorted toys and junk - that has to go SOMEWHERE. It's Tetris in real life! And while I do enjoy making order out of chaos, somewhere around 10pm, when you've been doing this all day, the sheer magnitude of junk starts to become overwhelming and you just want to set fire to it all and start over.

Obviously the plan is to put most of the VHS tape onto DVD, and I have been doing a bit of that. I filled a suitcase with converted, replaced, or otherwise totally useless VHS tape and took it to the Anime North staff meeting for free distribution yesterday. But that's a long process. Still, the journey of getting rid of a thousand boxes of junk starts with one trip to the thrift store.

I actually don't mind having a lot of stuff. What I mind is not having anywhere to put it and not knowing where everything is when it's put away, and not having space to work on things like artwork when I need the space.

Heck, we still have random boxes of stuff squeezed out of their hiding places from the living room reorganization last fall. Shain's dead old computer is just taking up space sitting on the floor. I have a box of Xmas lights and power cables that should probably be dealt with. I have two perfectly good speakers that should go somewhere. Of course we all know the solution to these spatial crises is held by the Great God Ikea, but that's not happening for a few months. I guess we will have to suck it up and live a cluttered uncouth lifestyle for a little while longer.

In other news, I did get the first Zero Fighter strip of 2010 up for you! (actually Shain put it up). If I had had the time and the space and not been surrounded by boxes and little jars of screws and stacks of VHS tape I probably would have redrawn this page in a few places, but dammit, deadlines are deadlines. NOT THAT ANYBODY'S READING THIS STRIP ANYWAY, sob sob.

I will say that it's nice to finally have something big enough to handle that enormous Grandizer poster and the Unico poster and the rest of the posters I've accumulated over the years. Of course now I feel like a goof for hanging on to posters that I don't have the wall space to use. I guess that's why I quit buying posters. Someday we'll have an enormous luxury house, and the walls will be lined with posters of stupid Japanese childrens robot cartoons. LIVIN' THE DREAM!!