Archive for ‘comics’
How to set up a convention and how to not set up a convention (and also Feef #087)
by Geoff on November 4, 2013 at 0905I’ve been to enough conventions that I’m starting to get some opinions about what and does not work. Maybe you’re planning a convention or an art show, let me summarize my findings for you:
1. Don’t. Don’t!!! If you are not absolutely committed to spending months of your life planning and promoting this show, don’t bother. Believe me, the road will not rise to meet you on this one. Every hour of toil and sweat and money you put into this translates into one or two more people that will come to your show, and that is all. So if you’re going to have a show that’s big enough to not be embarrassing, then you’re looking at many, many 40-hour weeks. This is not an exaggeration, I’ve seen up-close what it takes. Your volunteers will not “be there for you” because you need hundreds of hours of their time and they can only give you tens and twenties. If you can’t devote your life to the show, pay for everything that needs paying, and then put in a month of sixty-hour-weeks in the month before the show, this is not for you.
2. Go back and read that again. There is nothing easy about putting on a good show. If you don’t put in the time and effort, you will have a tiny and weird show that nobody really cares about. There’s no second place prize here — either your show is big enough to attract at least a couple hundred people, or you will not sell enough to make it worth your artists’ time.
3. I’m back and forth on table fees. You need the money to get the show off the ground, so you sort of have to charge them. But the table fees are the easy part. Getting the artists, that’s the easy part. Your effort needs to be spent making sure the artists don’t feel ripped off, and that’s the hard part, and that’s the part that you have to get right if you don’t want a lot of resentful artists. So charge table, and charge enough to make it worth your while to do the show. But don’t get greedy, especially if it’s your first year and you’re not sure you can deliver.
4. Don’t charge door. Make your money on tables, merch, and concession. Don’t charge door because you want people in there, and you want their last $5 going to the artists, not to you. You want walk-by traffic, and you don’t get that with a high door charge.
5. Alcohol. I’ve been at shows with alcohol and without alcohol. The ones without the alcohol might as well not have bothered. I know the TABC is an enormous hassle. They want a lot of money too. You have to do it. The only way to get people to spend substantial money in a gallery or convention setting is to beer and wine them up. If you’re putting on the show, you have to do this.
6. Go back and read #5 again. It’s so important I’m almost temped to make it bright red and 10,000 pixels high. Serve alcohol or don’t bother.
7. Put the show someplace that people can walk to it. Preferably where they can walk by it. Some people will travel to a strip mall on the dark edge of town for your show, sure. They are your old reliables, and they will follow you anywhere. You already have them. You need more than them. You need to be where somebody can accidentally discover your show and realize it’s the best thing in the world.
8. You need name guests. Fortunately there are many names these days, and somebody’s stock is always up and somebody’s stock is always down. Look for the ones who used to be up and are now down. Names bring people to your show, so get them. What you’re trying to get the public at large to say is, “Hey, let’s go to this show, they have ______ there!” And, let’s face it, if ______ = “comics” you can do better, you want _______ to equal the guy who voiced Donatello in the TMNT cartoon or the guy who drew Booster Gold or something more specific than “comics.” Even “zombies” is better than “comics.”
9. Speaking of zombies, a gimmick is not a bad idea at all.
10. Give your artists room to move. Instead of trying to make all the money you can from squeezing people onto a table, give a fewer artists more space to wow the audience. It is sheer insanity to pack three artists into a six-foot space, especially when they don’t know each other. For the love of god, do not put three artists on a six-foot-table.
In case you can’t tell, I just left a show where they tried to do that, and that is why I am writing this article right now instead of sitting at that show. It makes a miserable experience for all the artists, it makes them hate and resent each other, and the customers get nothing out of it.
You, the organizer, will be much, much more excited about this if you are selling merchandise, concessions, and alcohol, by the way, so motivate yourself that way. Don’t chase pennies squeezing artists in like they’re airline passengers. Pick the best artists that offer themselves, keep the number down a bit so they can actually put up a show that the customer will want to see, and let them drive traffic for your merchandise and concessions.
11. Don’t think of yourself as someone who vends tables to artists. Think about yourself as another vendor, just like the artists, who happens to have a lot more responsibilities. If that takes some of the fun out of it for you, good. I think I mentioned that planning a convention is not actually fun.
Make your money from your table, not everybody else’s table. It’s your show, you have the most prep time and you set it up how you want to — give yourself table, and give yourself a good spot. Put it near the alcohol, for the love of god — the closer you are to the beer, the more you sell. Find somebody smart to run your table, and watch everybody earn. MCBA has this trick down. Litsa’s BYOBeard show did an excellent job with this, because she just sold everybody’s prints for them and took a reasonable commission. That’s also the way European conventions do it.
12. You will absolutely need to have large amounts of ready cash to instantly solve problems that you never thought would ever happen but will still derail the show entirely. I saw one show go to the dogs because somebody stole the lightswitch. It was a fancy light switch and could not be replaced or worked around without throwing thousands at the problem, so the show went on in the dark, and that meant the show was very bad that year. If the organizer had had thousands of dollars to order a new fancy lightswitch from Dallas and been able to pay somebody to drive out there and drive it back like a bat out of hell, then the show would have been saved. But they did didn’t, so it wasn’t. You will need loads of money when you least expect it. If you don’t have it, it will capsize your show. It won’t be your fault, but nobody remembers what a great time they had at the excuse last year.
13. Don’t do it. Organizing a good show is not for everybody. I was frankly astonished by how much work it is. And I’m not saying it’s distributed among the team, because it never is. It’s amazing when there’s even two people to share the workload — usually all responsibility seems to devolve to one person. You will resent your friends for not helping as much as you hoped they would when it became apparent to everyone that it was going to be a lot more work than you thought it would be. You will run out of money. You will be tired, you will get hurt. At the end of it, sure, you’ll have an awesome show that you built, and a city full of people with great memories of working with you and coming to your show, and maybe you’ll even make some money if you were smart and got the TABC license and sold beer or at least gave away some wine. It will actually be totally worth it. But that’s only if you did it right, and you did it all, and you spent the hundreds of hours, and you lost the friends, and you went thousands of dollars into the hole. If you half-assed any part of that, you won’t even have a good show to look back on.
Anybody can get 50 people to come to a show. Make some posters, tell your friends, put it on Facebook, give away some food and wine. I can get 50 people to a show. 300 people to a show, that’s when it starts to be worth the trouble. And that’s also where it starts to be trouble. A thousand people to your show? Better go back and read this article again. Are you sure this is how you want to spend your year?
So, in answer to the question, “Does anything in Dijon figure into the story of Joan of Arc,” the answer is yes, emphatically yes. This latest book I’m reading (The Maid and the Queen, by Nancy Goldstone) is providing last pieces to put it together.
John II, King of France, had four sons. One grew up to be King Charles V, and the other grew up to be Philip the Bold of Burgundy. Charles V was a military campaigner and did a lot to push the English out of France; his life spanned about the middle of the Hundred Years War, and if he had lived a bit longer it might have been called the Eighty Years War. But he died before the task was quite complete.
Philip the Bold was a bit of a schemer. He immediately started machinating to take over all of France. He allied himself with the King of Bavaria and insinuated himself into the graces of the new king of France, Charles VI, who was too young to reign so they made Philip one of the regents.
This is the first time where Dijon comes in. In order to bind young Charles to him more tightly, Philip took him on a series of three punitive expeditions to kill some revolting peasants in Rouen, in Paris, and in Flanders — this is the year when the battle of Roosebeeke happened, where they stole the town clock from Courtrai, and took it back to Dijon, where it is still on top of the cathedral today.
Ten years later Charles VI has gone mad, because his family is all crazy schemers and killing all these peasants gets to him after a while basically, and he begins to run France into the ground. Philip uses this as an excuse to hold on to the regency, but so do his three brothers, and Charles VI goes in and out of sanity this whole time. Meanwhile the English are just running all over killing everything.
Philip was doing pretty well trying to run the place and get rid of the English, but then he died, and his son John the Fearless took over. John the Fearless was so called because he was a tremendous jerk. He played hard for the French throne against his cousin Louis of Orleans, crazy Charles VI’s youngest brother, but he wasn’t a subtle fighter and he didn’t mind killing Louis to get the job done. The duchy of Orleans fell to Louis’s son, Charles the poet, who managed to stay out of the mess for pretty much his whole life.
John didn’t let a little thing like assassinating Charles VI’s brother come between him and Charles VI, and he won a pardon for killing Louis. But still, nobody liked him. So he sided with the English. Secretly of course.
The situation turned to civil war, and the English took advantage. John the Fearless offered Henry of England huge concessions to make him King of France. Things looked bad for France. Then the disaster of the battle at Agincourt happened, and things looked worse for France. The battle ended with the decapitation of nearly all the French nobility, except for the Burgundians. They kept out of it, because they were dealing with the British on the side, and John sealed the deal by invading Paris and taking it over, driving Charles’s son out.
Charles’s son, Charles VII, was a lot saner than his father, and still wanted to be king someday. He was only fifteen years old, but he continued to press his claim (even though his father was still alive). The only thing he really had going for him was his mother-in-law, Yolande, the Queen of Anjou and the leader of the remaining French. She had carefully groomed Charles for years, keeping him alive and away from John.
John had won Paris, he had what he wanted. But, with the stunning victory of the English and the collapse of the French Henry looked like he might take over more than John wanted him to. John wanted to be king of France, not Henry. So he decided to meet with Charles VII and try to end the whole thing.
In 1419 They met on a wooden bridge on the outskirts of Paris under the flag of truce, but for somet reason tempers flare and Charles’s friends murdered John. Nobody is exactly sure why, but there are plenty reasons. John had murdered Charles’s uncle Louis and never been punished for it. Two of Charles’s other brothers had mysteriously died while in the care of John. John had sold out Charles’s father to the King of England, and harried them for his entire life, and now he had driven him out of his home. Also, Charles VII was just sixteen years old at the time, so impulsiveness probably had a lot to do with it. John (who was 48) was probably the personification of wickedness, sin, and rudeness to Charles.
After the assassination of his father John’s son, Philip the Good, the guy who built the priory, openly joined the English. Charles VI remained as a pawn for a couple more years before dying, and then the Kingship, what there was of it, devolved to Charles VII, who was exiled from Paris, uncoronated, and entirely controversial. The English controlled Paris openly. And that’s where the situation stayed for the next ten years, steadily getting worse, until Joan of Arc appeared.
Have I ever told you my theory about chemtrails? They’re stupid.
Here’s the thing. If they’re seeding the sky with barium, it’s not because they want people to breathe barium. There are a lot easier ways to get people to eat stuff. No, they’re seeding the whole planet. All the plants and the animals and the entire biosphere. The only reason I can see for that is to make us taste better to aliens.
If that is the case, then you should just enjoy the life you have, because if they have secretly come over here from other stars to make you taste good they are totally going to eat you, and daring to expose them is about as useful as tilapia plotting a coup of Finland. Either fade into the woods like Jaguar Paw at the end of Apocalypto or stay out here with the rest of us, take your chances, and quit whining. YOU ARE AFRAID OF THE SKY. It is intensely boring to the rest of us.
DC didn’t invent continuity. DC’s readers invented continuity and inflicted it upon the editors, who loathed it and resisted it and ridiculed it every step of the way. DC has always preferred to tell the same story every month and they’d love it if we let them…but we didn’t, and in the 1960s and 70s capitalism actually worked for once and the authors who could create continuity sold so well that they couldn’t ignore it.
Now it has trapped them. They thought that, with reboots, they could essentially repackage and resell the same general package of stories over and over again, like the record companies sold us all the LPs, the tapes, and then the CDs. But it’s not working because the past won’t stay dead — continuity doesn’t work that way. The old stories still exist in the mythic space of our memories, and by introducing the in-universe mechanism of energy-based reboots they’ve ensured that the old methods of dealing with continuity problems (quietly and politely ignoring them, “surprising revelations,” “it was all a dream,” etc.) don’t work any more. All DC history exists at the same time — everything happened, nothing happened. In the DC multiverse there is a world where it’s still the Golden Age Superman, and no crisis however hysterical can dislodge it.
I have a terrible confession to make. Leda, the main character, is supposed to be Indian. As in, from the subcontinent of India. Her mother as well.
The fact that you have gotten this far in the story and have not been able to tell that yet is a sad indictment of my skills as an artist and also a limitation of my format. I drew this thing deliberately small, and sometimes that has been a real limitation. I haven’t been able to do the close-ups and the giant distance shots that I usually do.
Most importantly, I’m embarking on an emergency drawing tour of India. I have to answer the question, what makes Indian people look Indian? Because if I can’t answer that question, my main character can’t be Indian.
Finally got a working computer again! Oh sweet heavens thank you so much universe for this fine and functioning computer that I can use to draw funny pictures to put on the internet. I sincerely like this thing a lot.
Thank you to my sweet wife Gewel Kafka for helping me to get this moderately priced modern marvel. The deal was that I would get us through the summer and she would help me get a computer when school rolled around. I have to say that she kept her side of the bargain in much better style than I kept mine. I love her.
From the internet:
“Pat, your use of derogatory term of tea bagger is racist toward white people.”
Since this is my blog, let’s take a second to unpack the stark and staring lunacy of this statement. Most of it comes from the troubling assumptions that the dominant culture gets to decide what’s racist, and then gets to change its mind. Nobody minded being called a Tea Bagger when they were, ya know, calling themselves Tea Baggers. It’s been about five years. You can’t just decide, overnight, that the name and term that YOU CAME UP WITH is suddenly racist.
As a matter of fact, white people, you don’t really get to decide what’s racist at all. Shut up and listen for once. If somebody whose had a hard time because of their skin tells you something’s racist, you should strongly incline in the direction of believing them.
If you doubted that Stop and Frisk was real, now is the time to consider that maybe you have been Wrong About Everything.
Now that I have one (succesful!) Kickstarter under my belt, I want to do a crazier one. It’s all well and good to fund Rocksalt, and Rocksalt needs funding (please send us all your moneys k thx bye) but I want to do weirder things with it. I want to make a card game, and I want to print namecoins and distribute them. Both of those would use Rocksalt as an ideal distribution channel.
I also want to fund much stranger things, like the Austin Municipal Danceatorium, a Googlecar-based taxi service, and giant billboards that have all the English pronouns and difficult grammatical constructions (so truckers and other people driving through Austin can learn basic English). It’s all dependent upon my ability to communicate to Kickstarter what I need. I don’t know if it’s a business or a living but it’s amusing as all heck.