NYCC 2009- Day Zero

So tired, so very tired.

After a semi-successful Pub Quiz last night (we came in second… horrors) I got home a little before midnight and did some clienty stuff, so that I'd be clear. Then I woke up at six, did some surprise clienty stuff, left a half hour late and picked up Bob Ingersoll to drive to New York.

Then I drove. And drove. And drove. And drove.

It's far. Really far. Pennsylvania, you are one long frakkin' state.

Bob and I got in to NYC, dropped by booth stuff off at the convention center and headed back to our hotel to freshen up before seeing the new production of Guys and Dolls.

I am tired, so I may gloss over things and come back to them later, but here are my initial thoughts on it:

It was in "previews", which I knew. That's how I saw Dance of the Vampires (and why I'm one of the few who did). No biggie there. What I hadn't realized that this was, essentially, opening night. It was their very first performance.

Guys and Dolls is one of my favorite musicals. There are a lot I like, but out of all the Broadway I know, Guys and Dolls may be the Broadwayist. It's a pretty traditional musical, with characters who talk and then will break into song rather than sing the whole thing. There are huge dance numbers and set pieces and so on. And I just dig it.

I saw the 90's revival, with Nathan Lane and Faith Prince, which was excellent. In fact, it was so good that I originally considered not seeing this one. When you've seen that performance, you know everything else is going to have a hard time competing.

But the cast included Oliver Platt, Lauren Graham, and Craig Bierko. Oliver Platt alone was enough to get me in the door. And the performance, in a much smaller and more intimate theatre than the one I saw the 90s version in, was just great. There was much more immediacy to the production.

Craig Bierko is great as Sky Masterson. He's got the charm and the confidence. He doesn't have quite the powerful voice as Peter Gallagher (who was the original revival lead) or even Tim Wopat (whom I saw in the role). But he more than makes up for it by being Sky Masterson. Boston Legal, you really wasted this guy.

And Lauren Graham is great as Adelie. Faith Prince had the voice and the charisma, to be sure. Graham brings just as much funny, but in a different way. I was impressed with how good a singer she was, too. Plus, she's the best-looking Adelie I've seen.

I don't really know Kate Jennings Brant, who played Sarah, but she did a great job. She played her strict character with a lot more warmth than I would have expected, and when she lets her guard down, it seems like it's the personality she's been hiding, not one grafted on.

Oliver Platt, though... Man, I love Oliver Platt. He was great in West Wing and Diggstown and so many other things that I feel weird saying "eh" about him. He plays a very affected version of Nathan Detroit, kind of a cross between Fat Tony and Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons. It just didn't sparkle the way everyone else did. Now, he certainly could be looking at Nathan Lane's performance which was so memorable and saying to himself "Whatever I do, I can't do that." Maybe people who didn't see the 90s version will like it better. It's not bad, it's just I was expecting him to blow me away and I wasn't.

Also, Tituss Burgess as Nicely-Nicely Johnson and Mary Testa as General Cartwright almost steal the show. Testa is funny all the time. And together, they vrought the house down with Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat.

Okay, that's enough for now. More later.

I Like to Think of Myself as the Antithesis of Decompressed Storytelling

More good words about Love and Capes from Blake Petit:

With so much fear about the price hikes (argh!) I have to single out Thom Zahler’s Love and Capes from Maerkle Press. The book is $3.95 an issue, but it’s worth it, not just for the story, the characters, or the artwork – as splendid as those things all are. No, it’s worth it because of how deep the book is. This is a comic with actual words, and lots of ‘em, and the rare silent or sparsely-dialogued panel is always worth it. This ain’t no comic you can read in five minutes, that’s for sure.

You know, Blake brings up the reason I can't watch people read LNC. It takes 2-3 months to make an issue, and watching someone fire through that work at a minute a page… well, it's just too much.

Read more stuff from Blake here.

New York Comic-Con Bound!

I'm heading up to New York for the fourth annual New York Comic-Con tomorrow. I'll be there all three days, set up at booth #2446, in Small Press. So you can plan your shopping accordingly, I'll be doing/bringing:

• All nine issues of Love and Capes, as well as the trade paperback collection, Love and Capes: Do You Want to Know a Secret?There will be deals a'plenty on multiple issue purchases, too.
• Both the "Mark and Abby" Love and Capes t-shirt, as well as the new "Amazonia" shirt. I've got sizes small to extra large, and even some double and triple XL sizes. Quantities are limited, though, so stop by early.
• The set of Love and Capes trading pins, with Mark and Abby, Darkblade and Amazonia designs.
• I'll have the Love and Capes Valentine Cards that I had printed for this show. And there may even be an exciting announcement at the table.
• Freshly printed copies of both Powerful Women sketchbooks. How fresh? I'm picking them up today, in fact.
• I'll be doing commissions left and right, of course. As a baseline, all commissions are finished inked drawings. $20 per character, and we can do color if you send me a scan of the image or if I take it back home and scan it myself.

Not going to be there? You can order everything at the Love and Capes store, and order commissions here.

Wordpress app test

I'm just retesting the wordpress app for my iPhone so I can blog from NYCC.

We Have a Winner!

We have a winner! The first annual Love and Capes Valentine's Day contest is over, and David and Carla Rose have won! Yay! Clapping sounds! Woo-hoo. Tell them what they've won, Johnny…

Well, Thom, David and Carla will enjoy all nine issues of Love and Capes, signed by the creator, two matching Love and Capes t-shirts, a set of Love and Capes pins, a heart-shaped box of Ghirardelli chocolates and they'll get a shout-out in the forthcoming Free Comic Book Day issue of Love and Capes #10. Hey, a FCBD issue of LNC? Someone should have mentioned that somewhere.

This contest was a resounding success. I may have to do another one sometime.

Browsing the Shelves

Since it started, I've had half-page previews of Love and Capes up on the Love and Capes site. A strip, from the already-published run, appears on the site every Monday and Friday. I think that free sample has been part of the reason of the success of the strip.

The thing I didn't have was any sort of way to view previous strips. There are lots of reasons why, mostly how I wasn't able to properly write the HTML code. No more, though. Thanks to the Comicpress plugin for WordPress, I've been able to create the Love and Capes Archive site. It's accessible off the main site, but you can check it out directly here.

The online strips cover the book from issue #1 to (currently) the beginning of issue #4. And, thanks to that same Comicpress plugin, I've got the next three months live and ready to go. You can even subscribe to it with your RSS reader.

And, of course, if you don't want to read online, there are a plethora of ways to order the book as well.

Reviews News

Blake Petit at Comixtreme put up a nice review of Love and Capes #9. Here's just a part of it:

This issue was just a bit of a departure -- Zahler usually leaves the actual action part of superheroing off-camera, showing us a more ground-level view of the superhero life. We actually see most of the fight between Mark and Psi-Clone this issue, though. It works -- I don't think the story would have been as satisfying if we didn't get to see it

Go read it and his other reviews of comics this week.

Cover Round-Up

Now it can be told, the cover I did was for the Ft. Worth Weekly. It's one of those indy alt-papers that I've done so much work for over the years. Here's the cover, complete with text and headlines and masthead and all of that stuff.

For those of you techies in the audience, drawn by hand, inked by hand, colored and composited in Photoshop. I handled most of the illustration elements separately, which allowed me to get in some nice detail in the Cowboy. The story is about how the big Stock Show (which is a Rodeo, for those of us in the North) that brings in tons of revenue to the city, but the city only gets a tiny fraction. So they wanted a cowboy roping a pile of money.

I changed it a little bit, making the money more of a sandworm (Dune, anyone?) so that there was a little more motion and resistance to the money. I think it worked pretty well.

All Access

The fine people over at the Comics Podcast Network have put up their Weekly Comics Spotlight #75. In it, they cover Love and Capes #9, and have some far-too-kind things to say about it. They particularly call out how accessible the book is to new readers. That's something I work very hard at and it's nice to see it appreciated.

Check out the podcast here.

Weekend Warrior

A few years back, shortly after going full freelance, I decided I shouldn't have to work weekends anymore. It was one thing when I was working for The Man, and nights and weekends were the only time I had to myself. I don't mind doing my own stuff on my own time, like Love and Capes, but I didn't want to have to work on weekends anymore.

It's a great theory, and it works more than it doesn't. This weekend was one of those "doesn't" times. That's okay, since both projects were for people I like who don't ask for too much. I'm willing to make a diving catch in the end zone a couple of times, but if it happens every time, then that's just poor planning.

So, I finished up that coloring project and moved over to this cover illustration. I still can't show the whole thing, but will be able to soon since it runs this week.

I had a really good Sunday. I went over to my Grandma's for "dinner" (well, it's lunch, but it looks like dinner) and hung out with the family, and visited with a couple of friends later in the afternoon, and even watched The Simpsons with my parents and brother. All great things. But, for some reason, I was beat when I finally got to the drawing board to ink and color this cover.

There have been plenty of times that I've been up until 1:30 in the morning working on Love and Capes and it's an effort to make myself go to bed. Maybe it's the last two months of that and LNC taking its toll, but I just had no power. I could hear my couch calling to me: "Look, Bourne Identity is on. And you've got lots of Supernatural on DVD yet." I'm not really a lay-on-the-couch guy, more of a do-something-while-the-TV's-on guy, but man, yesterday I really wanted to just veg out.

I managed to ink the drawing and lay it out in Photoshop so that I could wake up (shudder) early to finish it this morning. I did manage to get up a quarter after six to start coloring.

Have I mentioned the glories of coffee, by the way?

I got it done, and I think it looks really good. It's one of the rare jobs that actually turned out a little better than I envisioned in my head. So I guess it was worth it.