The site has been dark for quite some time now and after spending the weekend in New York attending NYCC, I thought everyone was due for an update.
First, the comic update… I’ve been toiling away on the script for issue two of Declension and despite my best efforts, the issue continues to balloon in size. There is simply too much story to tell in a mere 20-24 pages and the issue has already jumped to 28 pages and it’s looking more and more as if I’ll be forced to settle at 32 pages by the time everything is wrapped up enough for me to begin thumbnailing pages. The upside is that it’s definitely the best writing I’ve ever done and I’m hoping that some time with an editor will push it over the top and make it far and away the best Variables work I’ve done thus far. The site has been idle for too long and I’m going to continue posting updates as they happen… Expect to see some page roughs in the coming month.
This weekend, I had the chance to visit New York Comic Con for the first time and… wow. It’s basically San Diego Lite, only with the added benefit of being in what has to be the worst convention center design I’ve ever seen. Javits Center feels like an MC Escher drawing. There are escalators, stairs, and choke points everywhere you turn. Once you get to the show floor, it’s (mostly) like any other heavily-trafficked convention, with the (unfortunate) addition of being split into several different rooms that make the convention difficult to navigate. As a side note, whoever decided to create a mobile app for a convention center that doesn’t host things like maps locally needs to be punched in the face. Anyone who has attended a large convention knows that the first thing to go is cellular data service and if your phone needs to pull down a map just to see the layout of the show floor, you’re going to have a pretty miserable time finding anything at the convention. Bonus points for creating a show floor map that is at such a low resolution that you can’t zoom in and clearly see the booth numbers. Sigh.
Basically, the show feels like San Diego without the years of polish that surround that convention. Everything was just a little too difficult to figure out, right down to the organizers shutting the freakin’ doors on Saturday because the convention was too busy to let anyone else onto the show floor. Here’s hoping that in the coming years, ReedPop (the organizers of the convention) will be able to figure out some of the difficulties that surround just a large convention. It’s still a relatively new con (and has grown at an astronomical rate) so there are plenty of reasons to believe these issues will be sorted in time.
I was able to catch a few panels and while none of them were as brilliant as the Mark Waid & Scott Kurtz panel I saw at SDCC in 2011, I still learned some great information about the comic creation process. I checked out a panel run by some successful Kickstarter project creators, a panel on writing comics that played out more like an infomercial trying to shill someone’s book (along with a great statement about how torrents are killing the industry… sigh), and a third panel about the creation process on Wonder Woman (not terribly informative about the creation process in general but interesting in its own right).
All in all, a decent convention that made me wish I could have attended on Thursday so I could meet and talk to more creators without the bustle of 100,000 people beating down the doors to get into the show. It was enough to convince me that the con might be a viable place to market Variables and I’m definitely going to look into getting a booth next year if the price is anything close to reasonable.
That’s all I gots for today. I’ll be back in the next week or two with more information on the book, along with a sketch or two of upcoming Variables work (I hope).
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