SALT LAKE COMIC CON: FAN X - POSTGAME

A few weeks late, but I've heard a bunch of people say things like "better late than never" over the years, so here we are. That's not always true, by the way, because sometimes it just gets way more awkward if you try to pick up a thread after it's been on the ground for too long. Believe me, I know.

But whatever. This is my blog and I'll pick up threads for things that happened weeks ago without even skipping a beat. That's how we roll here.

And since that's the case, I'm going to give you the rundown of Salt Lake Comic Con: Fan Experience from a few weeks ago.

Last September, Salt Lake held its first Comic Con and it was a huge success. So much so, that they decided to do it twice this year. They called the first event something different, of course, but it was basically the same thing. Things got a little bit crowded at the Salt Palace Convention Center last time around, but that's mostly because no one knew what to expect so they only used half the available space. This time, they opened the entire thing and it was enormous.

The final numbers haven't been announced yet, but the rumor is that Fan X (what they're calling the April event) was the third largest comic convention in the country—right behind New York Comic Con and San Diego Comic Con. That's pretty damn impressive.

Like last fall, Casey, Spidey and I took a gamble on a booth to sell some of our unwanted comics and it worked out really well. We sold a whole bunch of stuff and immediately started making plans for the next event. This time around, we had things pretty well organized (well, Spidey and I did, anyway. Casey waited until the Saturday before the convention to even start, which meant we were helping him bag, board and sort his comics the whole weekend.) and ready to go. We rented a truck Wednesday afternoon and got everything loaded into the convention center that evening. It was a full three days this time (instead of two and a half), so we had to be there pretty early the next day to get everything set up and ready to go.

From the minute the doors opened we were busy. There were a bunch of people that had bought stuff from us last year that came back for more and were really excited to see us. That made us feel pretty good and the whole weekend went really well from start to finish.

It was really exhausting, but a lot of fun and I'm excited to get back to it this fall. I solidified our spot for Salt Lake Comic Con proper a couple of days ago, and now we just need to get an earlier start on getting things together. Luckily, Spidey let us store everything at his house so it's all in one spot and we can organize things a little easier.

We're also splitting a bigger space with Casey's toy store, The Tutoring Toy, so that we'll actually have enough room for all of our books. Now we've just got to start planning out how to make the most of the space we're getting.

If you're planning on attending Salt Lake Comic Con in September, buy your passes ASAP and come visit Grudge City Comics/Old News Records/The Tutoring Toy in booth 1701.

I promise to give better updates as we get closer to it. Probably. Well, maybe.

Oh, and that tank top in the photo below? Yeah, that's available if you want to buy it. Just head over to my store and grab it.

INTERVIEW OUTTAKES: RYAN OTTLEY

There's a lot of stuff that gets left on the cutting room floor when you do an interview. A lot of it is for good reason, though. Most of the time it's because it just doesn't fit with the narrative.

Ryan Ottley, Utah native and artist of the comic book Invincible, and I sat outside Nobrow Coffee one evening this past summer and talked about a lot of things. The crux of the article was Salt Lake Comic Con, but we barely got into that. I was more interested in everything else he was up to - mainly since he was only going to be at SLCC for the first day.

We talked about how he got into the business, why he doesn't jump ship for Marvel or DC and about that art burning party that he had with Derek Hunter that set comic book message boards on fire.

Very little of that made it in to the actual article, but he still gave some great quotes. Figured it was high time you got to see them.

You can check out the original article that I wrote for SLUG's August issue first, then come back here for the stuff that didn't make the cut.

You can keep up with him at his own site, the art blog he does with his friend James Harren called The Bog, and of course you should be reading the fantastic Invincible published by Image Comics.

Enjoy the stuff that didn't make it!

On Becoming a Full-Time Comic Artist:

I didn’t do any school or anything. I used to work at a warehouse and I’d always had that dream of being a comic book artist since I was 14. I was working at the warehouse and I got fired from that, and I thought ‘sweet, I’ll just live off these unemployment checks and try to get in to my dream job.’

That’s what I did and it worked, I think. It took about a year and a half of just doing short stories for DigitalWebbing.com - they had an anthology back then. I was doing it for free. I would just find a writer that I liked and I would say ‘send me this and if I like it, I’ll draw it and if I don’t... sorry.’ I’m not going to draw something for free that I don’t like.

On Working for The Big Two:

Mostly at conventions people will come up and give me cards. I’ve had offers to do stories at Marvel and I’ve turned them down. Marvel was the most recent thing and I said, 'I’ll do this as long as I get to do my own covers. And they said no to that.’

I think that’s really weird. They’re really picky about that. I think if I’m going to draw the interior, I’m going to draw the cover, too. That’s just the way I roll. I don’t mind some covers here and there by other artists. Every once in a while Invincible will have guest artists, but most of the time it’s me doing the covers.

When I go into a comic shop, sure I see these beautiful Marvel covers everywhere, then you open up to the inside, and I’m not saying the inside is terrible, but it’s different. It’s like different actors and I hate that.

Sometimes it feels like the interiors are more for the story and the cover is more for the art and I don’t like that. All of it needs to be about the art and the story.

My favorite artist isn’t just the kind of artist that’s a great storyteller. It’s gotta be a good story, but it’s also got to have that really good artistic thing that's good enough to be a cover. You can do interesting things all over the place instead of just telling stories.

There’s a bunch of artists that are mainly just there to tell the story. They’re not flashy, they’re not over the top.

On Burning Old Art:

I don’t do that anymore. That was really Derek and I having a burn party. I burned 10 pages. 10 terrible pages that I just wanted to get off the planet. It’s funny, I guess I shouldn’t have shared it. It’s fine to do it, just don’t share it. I got called the worst names and people told me I should have given it to charity. Why would I give shitty art to charity? That’s kind of a dick move right there. ‘You won’t make any money off this, but here you go.’

If I wanted charity to make money, I’d send them the good things I’ve done. Which I have! Do I need to go out and shout 'here are the good things I’ve done and here are the burned things I’ve done?'

SALT LAKE COMIC CON - POSTGAME

Well that escalated quickly.

Let me give you a rundown of the past couple of weeks, real quick.

I work every day except Saturday and do a double on Wednesday. I’m not complaining about it, because those two extra shifts each week are my choice and I could pretty easily make a few cuts in my budget and do without them, but I just don’t want to. All the extra money I make goes into a savings account in case I someday decide that I hate my job and want to quit, leave the country for a while and go on an awesome adventure to Norway, visiting Viking museums and then venturing down through Europe. Sounds like something I’ve been thinking about, doesn’t it? It also gives me a little capital to make stuff and things for events like Craft Lake City and Salt Lake Comic Con.

Anyway, the month of August was pretty hectic as it was trying to get ready for Craft Lake City and as soon as that was over I had a couple of breathing weeks to do things like clean my apartment, wash my car and catch up on sleep. But it wasn’t too much of a vacation, because I worked pretty much every day.

The last week of August, I worked Wednesday day and night, worked Thursday, went to a wedding Thursday night, worked Friday, went straight to Tamerlane practice, then went directly to my brother and his wife’s “Announce the Sex” party for their new baby (it’s a boy). The next day, I woke up, had a tattoo appointment, a baby shower/diaper party for a different baby, then the Tamerlane/Mick Morris benefit show. I waited tables all day Sunday and all day Monday (Labor Day), worked Tuesday then went home to get all my Old News Records stuff organized. Wednesday morning I went to work until 5, drove immediately from work to the Salt Palace to meet Casey and unload all the tables and racks for Salt Lake Comic Con. We left, I drove to my parent’s house and spent the whole night pulling out and organizing the comics I was going to sell that weekend. I left my parent’s a little after midnight and headed home.

The next morning, I picked up Casey from his house at 6:45 AM. We drove to The Park Café, had breakfast and then picked up a U-Haul at 8. We made our way out to Spidey’s house in Draper, stopping at Office Max along the way. We loaded Spidey’s comics, drove back to U-Haul to exchange the truck because the “check engine” light came on, and moved everything from one truck to the other. Casey and Spidey headed to Casey’s house and the toy store to grab all his stuff and I went to my parent’s house and started bringing everything outside. About 11:30, Casey and Spidey showed up at my parent’s house and we loaded all my stuff into the truck. The two of them headed down to the Salt Palace and I headed out to Midvale to pick up my more “Long Live Sloan” shirts and the new tank tops I designed for the show. We got everything set up and the doors opened at 3 PM for people holding VIP passes.

From there it was pure chaos. Well, controlled chaos was more like it. No one really knew what to expect from a first year event like Salt Lake Comic Con, but the bar was set pretty high with all the tickets they’d sold already. Casey, Spidey and I were ready and excited. We’d had plans of vending at San Diego Comic Con and Emerald City in Seattle, but never actually made it so we wanted to bring our best effort to this – whatever it was going to end up being.

People started swarming our booth, checking things out and looking through all of the stuff we decided to sell because we felt bad storing it at our parent’s houses. We had a pretty great system going and we were all ready for the night. Casey thought he was going to leave in the middle of things to go to the gym, but once he saw how busy and crazy things were getting in the hall, he changed his mind.

The rest of Thursday was packed, and Friday and Saturday were both the same, too. It was an awesome weekend and our Old News Records/Grudge City Comics (yeah, that’s what we’re calling it from here on out) shop did really well. We were pretty tightly confined to a 10x10 space and every once in a while things got pretty cozy in there, but it was all worth it.

We sold a lot of comics last weekend and I mean A LOT. Casey and Spidey brought more books Friday and Saturday and I had to bring a second round on Saturday. There were surprisingly few booths actually selling comics at the show, which I thought was kind of weird, but I guess it makes sense.

The other, actual brick and mortar shops in Salt Lake all had a presence, but Dr. Volt’s mostly focused on gaming stuff, Black Cat brought mostly quarter and dollar books and I have no idea what Night Flight had. Blast from the Past Comics, which was next to us, brought a lot of older comics that were worth some serious money. There was another shop from California that came by our booth every morning to pillage through our stuff and, I’m sure, turn around, mark it up and sell it at their booth. After I figured out what they were doing the first day, I stopped letting them go through the new stuff I brought. I hid it under the table while they looked through the boxes and told them that I hadn’t brought anything else. It was for no real reason other than spite. They just hovered around like vultures waiting to look through things while we were trying to get our booth set up and organized. I just started ignoring them instead of telling them to get lost like I really wanted.

But since we were selling most everything for about a dollar a book, people kept coming back over and over again. I even heard one guy say, “Oh this is the booth they were talking about.” I had no idea who was talking about us or what they were saying, but I was thrilled that people were talking and that word was getting out.

Between doing Craft Lake City two days and vending at Salt Lake Comic Con for three, it’s made sitting behind a computer writing IVR (Interactive Voice Response) copy and wireless Internet tips really, really hard.

All in all, it was a lot of fun and I’m very much looking forward to next year. There are already some wheels in motion for how we can do things better and how we can expand our little operation. Thanks to everyone that stopped by to say hi, actually bought some stuff or just wanted to look through our comics. You guys made it all worth it.

Now that it’s all over and I don’t have any other vending shows coming up, I’ll be updating the ONR store and probably doing a little spotlight on some of the stuff I had this summer – most notably Mike Farfel’s novel Tulip. I’ll have a little write-up on Filler Issue 2, the HP tank top and the new mini-comic that Candace and I finally got printed on Friday night of the convention.

If you missed out, you really missed out. It was an awesome time from start to finish and I can’t wait until next year. You should probably start planning your cosplay costumes now. And if you can top the Princess Leia, I'll be impressed.

Also, if you actually know the Princess Leia, send her my way. I'll be her stuck-up, half-wittet, scruffy-looking nerf herder any day.

SALT LAKE COMIC CON

There will be a better, more informative post up soon, but just to give you a heads up, I'll have an Old News Records booth at Salt Lake Comic Con on September 5, 6 and 7.

I'll have more copies of Tulip, Filler (1 and 2), hopefully some more Long Live Sloan shirts and maybe a new design special for the con, too.

If things fall into place, maybe a mini-comic or two as well. Fingers crossed.

More info soon, but right now I'm busy formulating a game plan to get Tia Carrere to fall in love with me. It's taking up the majority of my time.