July 2008 Archives

Too bad that can't be treated with bloodletting.

Slowly getting back on track here, after the San Diego Comic Con. (I had a booth this year, E10, between the 700 and 800 aisles.) You may know it as "Nerd Prom"... although I hear Paris Hilton was actually a guest this year, so that alias doesn't really fit as well as it should anymore, does it?

Anyway, the con still hit all the rest of the SDCC bingo squares, this year.

Condescending local news report? Check. ("Biff! Bam! Pow!" tagline strictly optional, tight shot of an overweight fan in an ill-fitting costume mandatory.)

Schwag crawl? Check, albeit an disappointing one. (Scored a free novel and some magazines, but an acutely felt dearth of closed beta keys or trial accounts for MMOs in development, this year. Too bad.)

Bewildered local? Double-check. ("So uh... what exactly do y'all DO in there?")

Serious WHEN MARKETING ATTACKS moment? Oh, yeah. Super-check. (Still haven't bothered with deciphering that SEEK THE SIX thing skywritten over the hall on Saturday. And I'm not gonna even TOUCH the "Humans only!" signs outside all the restrooms.)

Ever-increasing mass-media interest in comics? Oh my, yes. Checkity check-check. "Do you have representation?" from suits is up there with "D'you do trades?" from other cartoonists now, when it comes to ambient con chatter.

I'm not bitchin', mind you. It was a great con, the best ever. 125,000 attendees strong, I entirely sold out my 140 book stock, and met/caught up with a lot of other cartoonists. And I got to play Spore.

Not the Creature Creator. The finished game.

I am such a big dork that this was the highlight of my entire weekend.

EA/Maxis had a modestly-sized wall booth in the con's video game ghetto, which was always packed. I abused my exhibitor pass on Sunday to get in the hall early, and be first in line. I spent about twenty minutes quickly designing a clownfish-froggish-looking thing with eyes on stalks, building up their little village in Tribal stage, dressing them in leaves and skulls, and then sending the entire tribe on a doomed, kamikaze-style mission to wipe out all their neighbors.

I am gonna lose WEEKS of productivity when this game finally gets released. I now know this for a fact.

All in all? Fucking awesome.

If you stopped by and said hi, thanks for dropping me a line! And if you couldn't find me, I'm sorry. Let's hope my plans for next year work out, and I'll be a lot more obvious, eh?

New comic, and a little information.

Hey, guys. Back from San Diego. Had a great con, but I came home to an inbox chock-full of questions and warnings about the state of my site, and the state of my host. I've had the problem explained to me, and I'm gonna go ahead and explain it to you, too.

Templar is hosted by Webcomics Nation, and my domain is a redirect; I don't actually have my own site and webspace for the comic. Over the weekend, WCN got hacked, and someone slipped some malware onto every page of the site in a secret iframe. Google caught on early, and began blocking WCN and sending out warnings to browsers.

(If you accessed the site anyway last weekend by turning off or toning down your browser's security settings, please, run a virus check on your computer as soon as possible. The malware was a Trojan. I have no idea what it was meant to do, but probably nothing good.)

Then, in a feat of timing I'd snort contemptuously at if I read it in a work of fiction, the second the programmers got the server scrubbed clean, WCN's domain registration expired. It was set to auto-renew on a card that had since been canceled, and was never switched over to a new account.

Everything should be fixed now, though. If it's not fixed for you, wait a bit for the DNS to propagate.

Sorry about that. Everything is better now, though.

Later: Super-informal con report. but for now, just the important part, via camera phone.

I will be in San Diego this year, but my plane doesn't actually take off for a few hours yet. I'll be there for the afternoon on Thursday, all of Friday and Saturday, and a good chunk of the morning on Sunday. Wonky availability, but I'll probably be behind the table most of the time, so look for a great, big Templar banner and you'll probably find me!

When I get back, three things will happen.

All of the pre-order drive comics will begin to go out. The printer will ship the books while I'm at the con, and With those in hand, I'll go through all of the pre-orders and get them out of the house.

Also, no more back-dating new comic pages. It's fucking crazy. From now on, when the comic updates, it updates, so everyone will get to see how crap I am at this. :(

And finally, the Templar Guidebook will go live. It'll kinda be an on-site wiki. You may have noticed a slight re-design on Templar's homepage; the guidebooks's part of that. It'll be about the town, the people in it, the factions and the general state of things. I think it'll help the comic's newbies get into things a little easier, and help keep things straight.

Time to pack. Gotta go!

I'm not even sure it happened myself.

Off to crank out more comics.

PS: I stole this from Scott Kurtz's Twitter. Cuz I watched it ten times.

Although, really, if there was a guy like Pierce in the world, word about him would probably get around.

If you notice it, you may groan audibly. And that is your right. but in my defense, I simply could not resist. If you don't notice it? Why, there was nothing to notice to begin with.

Nothing at all.

Uncle what now?

Never heard of him, I must say. But that's cool. You cool? I'm cool.

A small change of routine: When I post blog updates, by request, from now on I'm gonna be linking the direct, actual pages of the comic instead of the domain homepage from now on. This should make the blog posts easier to associate with the pages they're talking about.

That's pretty much it. More comics soon!

Well, that's not too sinister-sounding. Not very sensible, but nobody'll hafta call the cops.

Yet.

Madam, you are awfully familiar. Have we met?

No?

Are you positive?

Ah, well. My mistake.

As you were.

Tuesday. Fun to write. Not fun to know.

I spent this last weekend at Wizard World Chicago, where I finally got to meet John Campbell and catch up with Miss Monster after entirely too long. Sales were middling, but I still managed to enjoy myself and unload some misprints to make way for the boxes of book two I've got coming any day now.

I did some sketches, too. Clack far biggar.

I was also introduced to a dude named Nathan, who is responsible for this: A very strange, very interesting fantasy comic I previously had no idea existed, called Shade. I've only read about half of it, but WOW. Totally into this! Check it out, it's completely beautiful and completely unknown and that is just not right.

There are so many cool fuckin' people in this town. I oughta leave the house more.