Freedom City

Just got an email last night from the Minnesota Comic Book Association; they run a fun convention called SpringCon (the big one used to be FallCon but they switched) that we enjoy attending. When Spring and Fall Cons switched places, Spring going large and Fall going small (one day), we happily showed our wares at SpringCon. This year, with our own Will Grant moving up to Minneapolis, we thought we’d throw our hat in for the small con.

So I sent off an email expressing our interest to the email on the website (not forgetting to include our credits) and waited. So now the show is less than a month away and it’s time for reservations and plans to be finalized (I’d already put in for a day off at the day job for travel time). Carter and I talk about it and I say I’ll get an answer from them by hook or crook within the week.

Like magic, last night it came. It’s a very nice email, they’re very sorry and all. Hey, it’s another weekend I get to work on the football book.

But here’s the thing. We like to go to a few cons a year, whatever we can afford. We’ve been focussing on comics cons for years now; some are great, some less so. Our NYC pal Todd and I spoke recently about MoCCA Art Fest and how it is such a closed society; with the exception of some Really Big Folks, people are just buying each others’ comics. The value of MoCCA Art Fest for us has been the folks we meet; every year we connect with a few folks who bring larger value to our work. But at $400/table (sure to rise again next year), it’s just not feasible to make the show anything other than a writeoff. Now that almost entirely has to do with travel and all the other expenses inolved. We’re coming in from the Midwest, and that adds some dollars to any con appearance we make. (We are a go for MoCCA 2011, but are looking at KingCon and the like for the road ahead).

Add to this the fact that we’re distributed by Ingram and not Diamond, and you have lots of comics folk who have never heard of us. But we’ve been around a good while, putting out books for the bookstore market since 2003, but making comics much longer. Our fans are dedicated and eclectic; most of our new readers are people who aren’t usually comics readers. If you click through the link above and look at what the critics have said (from Comic Book Bin to the American Library Association), you can see we’re different and engaging.

We like going to cons. We’ll have LOST IN THE WASH completed soon, and we plan to look at horror cons for that. I’m working on a text about early State University of Iowa football history and I dunno I’ll go to a lot of sports bars. We want to go places and show folks what we do. We’ll speak, we’ll do presentations, we’ll do readings (we did a couple great ones at Prairie Lights, and one at the Waterloo Public Library), we’ll add to a con experience.

Size doesn’t matter. Genre doesn’t matter. Where are you, O fun cons? We’re available. Iowa/Illinois/Minnesota/Missouri/Nebraska/Wisconin…sure, why not? But if the timing and cheapness of travel are right, the sky’s the limit. The creators are here. If you’re a con/library/entity interested in having us turn up, contact method is here.

Who’s in?

http://www.sva.edu/sa/index.jsp?sid0=201&page_id=482&event_id=1427

If you’re in NYC Oct 8-Nov 6, drop by

Visual Arts Gallery 601 West 26 Street, 15th floor New York, NY 10001

to see some pages from LOST IN THE WASH on display. It’s a show of SVA grads (of which Will Grant is one). But they tell me the balloons will be on the pages, so I made it in too. Weehaw!

As of this morning, the newsfeed on the front page of candlelightpress.com shows the three newest posts from Carter (carterallen.biz), Jeremy (jeremysmith.biz), Will (willgrant.net), Ian (i-bennett.com), and me (johnirathomas.com).

Over at Comic Book Bin.

Leroy Douresseaux looks at the third installment of LOST IN THE WASH. Go see!

Leroy Douresseaux takes a second look at LOST IN THE WASH: The First Half in preparation for part 3.

was tossed out there as one of the best comic book series of the past decade in this collaborative list from Comics Reporter. I missed this completely the first time around. It’s darn good company, for sure.

Vol 3 will be this decade, for sure.

More to come:

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Here’s more recording and listening from the same session.

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