I’m back from Wellington. There will be several posts discussing my exploits, for I had several of them.
Firstly, a couple of things I wrote at the Downtown Backpacker’s. I’m sticking these in the extended body of this message, and for those of my beloved readers on LiveJournal, well… we’ll just have to see how this works.
Saturday Night - 11.30pm
I’m sitting in a cafetaria in a backpacker’s in Wellington. From where I’m sitting I can see an empty room full of tables and sofas. Behind me a few people are staring at internet terminals, and there’s a fair bit of noise coming from the bar, where most of the actual backpackers are entertaining themsevles. Apparently some rugby thing is happening. Every now and then a group wanders down the hall talking loudly about people who are somewhere else.
Today I have been sitting behind a desk with comics in front of me, beside a bunch of other people I don’t know too well. I know their comics, but because I’ve never done anything that wasn’t in a compilation with other people, or a collaboration without particularly clear indication of who was involved, not too many of them know who I am. A few of them remember me a little from last year, but North Island comics people are strangely cliquey in a way I’m not used to. I have concluded that I really ought to do a comic of my own, and I have a couple of half-started things that would be suitable. “Because I’d like to be better known as an artist” is not my usual motivation for drawing stuff, but I would. And it’d be good to set out with the aim of doing something with the highest possible production values, that I’d be happy to sink a bit of money into. This may, of course, be one of those plans I make when I’m on holiday that take considerably more sustained effort than I’m able to maintain in everyday life, but we’ll see.
In fact, now that I think about it I do have a comic with my name on it. A fair chunk of the current issue of Funtime Comics Presents is taken up with something I did called “Remains”, and it’s long enough to merit being printed upside down at the back and having its own cover on the back page. So if I turn the issue over, it looks like the comic is all mine.
The trouble is, I did Remains about ten years ago and now I think it’s crap. It’s got no plot to speak of and it’s packed with sophomoric attempts to be deep and significant. I really don’t like it at all now, and it’s a bit embarassing to find that Darren the editor has got around to publishing it - I’d forgotten it existed.
Strangely enough, I have achieved one of the trappings of fame today: small children have been asking for my autograph. This is a very strange experience, because none of them know who I am, and none of them show any interest in reading the comics on the desk in front of me. But they have these pads for collecting autographs and I guess they’re aware that they don’t really know who’s famous and who isn’t so they ask for autographs from everbody.
I bought a framed hand-painted picture from Ant Sang, currently the best-selling New Zealand comics artist. Best-selling in New Zealand anyway. Given that his Dharma Punks comics are about a group of goths who get involved in a plot to blow up a fast food restaurant in a misguided crusade against capitalism, it seems a little strange to be doing business with him. But I’m a rich guy with a day job and a house with many empty walls, and he’s a nice guy who does excellent comics and could probably use the money. I haven’t actually taken the picture away yet. It makes a good centrepiece to his display, and it seems a shame to take it away when I’m going to be sitting next to him again tomorrow anyway.
This evening we made a comics geek outing to see “American Splendor”, a film about Harvey Pekar, the grumpy blue-collar filing clerk who lives in Cleveland and writes autobiographical comics. Which is probably what inspired me to sit here in an empty cafetaria writing about myself on my laptop.
Now, Harvey Pekar has a thing about phoniness, and he has always aimed to make his comics as honest as possible, whhich is to say that he focuses on the most miserable aspects of his life. But even his readers know his work is strictly autobiographical, we don’t actually know him personally, so to us he’s effectively just another character. And there was a play about his life, and now there’s a movie, and he does ask the question at one point whether if his cancer killed him, this character would go on living without him.
On the strength of that, I thought it would be cool to write Harvey Pekar fan fiction, where you try to make up stories about Harvey Pekar and the real people in his life that he writes about. Only I don’t actually know him personally, so I’d have to make up Harvey Pekar stories. I’m not sure whether this is a very good idea or a very bad one, but it’s something I’m thinking about.
Sunday Night - 10pm
There has been a marked decline today in the number of small children seeking my autograph. Perhaps they have gotten wise. While this is in one sense disappointing, it is heartening to learn that small children cannot be fooled indefinitely. It may have something to do with Tim Bollinger reputedly signing his autograph with “Please go away”, a sentiment that says a great deal about small press comics people.
The day did begin with all of us a bit tired and scratchy. I picked a fight with Dylan Horrocks when we disagreed over which of us, if it had to be only one, would get to have free will in a deterministic universe. Possibly you had to be there. Fortunately we were separated by immovable desks and neither of us were conversant with the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules under which I haphazardly challenged him to fisticuffs. Later we sorted things out, and he encouraged me to develop my plans for Harvey Pekar fan fiction which he found most amusing.
Of the many small sections of conversation I overheard at the convention, my favourite was from a member of a group of enthusiastic furry fans (if you don’t know, trust me when I tell you that no good will come of your asking): “I liked the first one hundred and fifty one Pokemon, but I don’t like the new ones so much”. This is how it is at comics conventions.
I have been quite productive today - I completed a page of Glop, and several panels of a jam comic I passed around which will likely end up as part of Darren’s show report on the international Silver Bullet Comics website. It was heartening to have several people tell me how much they like Glop, and even more heartening that they turned out to like it quite a bit instead of not very much. I have resolved to draw it to an epic conclusion in the next few episodes, and then put together a collected volume. And my collected volume will contain a writer’s commentary explaining which episodes I drew in a maneaba in Kiribati, and why I stopped using teeny tiny writing at one point. I’m also planning to write something for Dylan’s Atlas series, and develop an idea about a group of people walking along a very long pier into something big and audacious modelled on the Canterbury Tales. These are all very good ideas to have, and I hope that writing them down now will contribute in some small way to their actually occurring in a world where I am not always attending a comics convention.
Tomorrow I go to visit CWA New Media, at either 10am or 11am. Because there were two e-mails in which times were discussed, and I saved a copy of the one with the incorrect date on my iBook because it had the address. There was a later one in which I’d corrected the date, but I have a vague feeling that the time also changed to 10am. I figure that being an hour too early is better than being an hour too late because it can be corrected with only minor inconvenience and no messing around with rotating black holes. So I shall aim to be on Courtenay Place by 10am, and to that end I shall get a decent night’s sleep.