The Writerlad Journal

Just for anyone wondering, this site isn’t dead. Things have just been in transition lately, with computer upgrades (Woo hoo! Windows 7!), changes in work schedules, and some project juggling between my other duties at New Creation Now and the Christian Comic Arts Society. I’ve got a backlog of material to post; I just need things to quiet down long enough for me to get online for some site management. Lord willing, that’ll be soon.

I spent July 22-26 at the San Diego “Comic-Con International 2009″, helping run the table for the Christian Comic Arts Society. I’m still trying to get my strength back and catch up on the lost sleep from that week!

I’ve got a blog post up about it at the CCAS social network site, but for those readers who aren’t signed up there, I’m reprinting my report here and at the New Creation Now blog as well…

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Hi all. Sorry for the late report on Comic-Con, but after a very long sleepless week at the convention I dove right back in to my regular work schedule, so it’s taken me a little longer than I hoped to “bounce back” from the show.

For those who don’t know: myself and Ralph Miley are the current leaders of the CCAS local group in Southern California that is in charge of organizing the CCAS ministry at the San Diego Comic-Con. Our group has had a presence at the show for over 13 years now — organizing panel discussions, arranging after-hours meetings for Christian attendees, and running a table in the small press area where we sell Christian comics and give away Christian comic tracts. Here’s a quick rundown of my experience at this year’s show…

Wednesday: Woke up around 3:30 am to pack up and meet Ralph to carpool down for morning setup at the convention. We left for San Diego around 5, arrived a little after 7. Was one of the first to arrive, and got to watch a large parade of forklifts as we waited in line to get into the loading zone parking lot. Unloaded the inventory at the loading docks behind the convention center, had the union guys shrinkwrap our stuff onto the forklift pallets, then we left to park the car, picked up our exhibitor badges (and a temporary setup crew sticker for my wife Heather, who also came down to help) and started the hike over to the small press area.

The carpets were still being rolled down, all the big exhibitor booths were still being set up, and those of us in the small press area just sat around waiting for the forklifts to finally arrive and deliver our pallets of material. Once it finally arrived, it was setup time: assemble the banner, spread the tablecloths, fill the display racks with our Christian comics for sale, and spread out the tracts/flyers for the “freebie” half of our table. As we set up, we discovered that our neighbors at the table next to us were fellow Christians Ralph had met during his trip up to Wondercon earlier this year. God always finds a way of bringing his children together!

The rest of the day was spent with the boring details of conventioneering: finding lunch, checking into our hotel, picking up guest badges, meeting up with the rest of our team of volunteers, and (briefly) walking around the show on “Preview Night” to see how the rest of the convention hall was set up.

I can honestly say that this was the most crowded convention I ever remember. Regardless of the actual numbers, the crowd control (and lack thereof) on the exhibit hall floor gave the show a very claustrophobic feel. The big media booths (Warner, Sony, Fox, EA, etc.) were always staging different contests, handouts, and other stunts which drew such large crowds that they would completely block the aisles in all directions, leading to gridlock on the convention floor as pedestrians overflowed into neighboring aisles. That part wasn’t fun at all, and made me glad I spent most of the show safely seated behind our table in the small press area.

Thursday through Sunday at the Table: I spent most of the convention at the table with Ralph. Talked with people who were curious about CCAS, handed out lots of flyers and tracts. We had guest signings at our table with fellow CCAS members Buzz Dixon (whose credits range from writer on the classic GI Joe and Transformer cartoons up to the trailblazing Serenity Christian manga series) and Eric Jansen (whose work at the Foursquare Missions Press is responsible for the majority of comic tracts at our table. He is also a self-publisher of various comics through his “God & Country” imprint, and is the artist on my Tales of Hemlock comic series).

This year, I didn’t run into anyone who came to our table just to give us a hard time or to argue theology. I did have an interesting conversation with a Mormon cartoonist who wanted to know if his work could have a place within the Christian Comic Arts Society since Mormons considered themselves Christian. I probably stumbled over my words a bit, as I was trying to be as polite as possible in telling him “no”. CCAS is open to Christians of the three historical traditions within Christianity: Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. For all their differences, at least those three groups do agree on basic fundamentals of the Trinity, the deity of Christ, etc. Groups like the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses — full of wonderfully nice people — don’t share that common ground. They may use similar terminology, but their definitions are completely different. If we’re going to call ourselves a “Christian” group, we need to draw the line somewhere as to what that word means; we’ve opted to draw it based on traditional orthodoxy and the historical creeds. But I digress…

Weekend panels: Other CCAS events at Comic-con included a Saturday morning panel discussion on “Spiritual Themes in Comics”, with panelists ranging from Chrsitian writer Doug TenNapel to self-described witch Holly Golightly. Another panel was a Sunday morning panel/chapel service, in which Buzz Dixon gave a mini-sermon tailored to creative artists and then introduced a panel discussion between himself, Eric Jansen, and Leo Partible.

Our other CCAS event this year was a “secret” after-hours fellowship meeting at the convention center, after the hall closed on Saturday night. It was “secret” in the sense that we had asked the convention for permission to hold a meeting there, they said “sure”, but then they did not actually mention our meeting in any of their on-site event programming guides. So, the only ones who knew to attend were those who heard about it from word-of-mouth at our table in the small press area. Still, we somehow got around twenty people who showed up for a fun night of Christian fellowship between a wide mix of comic fans, amateurs, and professionals, all of us coming together for laughter, fellowship and prayer. It was a great night.

Final thoughts: each year at the comic-con, a pattern seems to emerge. Last year, the focus was readers of Christian comics. We had tremendous sales at the table, and people came by to snap up whole sets of graphic novels at a time. In previous years, the focus was evangelism/apologetics, as we had a large number of people who came by the table just to try arguing with us about the Bible, the existence of God, or some issue relating to the Gospel. This year? This year’s pattern seemed to be fellowship. We received a surprising number of people who had been coming to the convention for years, yet this was their first time finding us. There were many sudden shouts of “I thought I was the only one!” or “I’m so glad to see there’s a group doing this!”. This year, we made a lot of new contacts of people indicating that they want to sign up for the social network site online to meet other Christian fans, writers and artists and — even more surprisingly — there were a large number of people from the local Southern California area who expressed interest in getting involved with the local CCAS group and convention ministry. If everyone who expressed interest actually follows up on it, we may end up doubling the number of volunteers working the CCAS convention ministry by the time the San Diego Comic-Con rolls around next year. As always, the path ahead is in God’s hands.

I’d like to give a hearty “Thank you” to everyone who prayed for us during last week’s ministry, and to those who supported us through time and resources. Most of all, I’d like to give praise and thanks to God for his ongoing blessing of this ministry. Unless the Lord builds the house, the laborers labor in vain. God is good.

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The following links are for a series of comic book writing checklists I had put together for brainstorming new characters. I had originally published this checklist a few years ago in issue #100 of the Alpha-Omega fanzine. I had meant to reprint it here, but I ended up having it reprinted over at the blog of New Creation Now instead. Rather than create duplicate content, here’s the links to my articles at the New Creation site.

• Part One: Character Appearance, History, and Superhero Stuff
• Part Two: Character Psychology
• Part Three: Character Spirituality and Ethics
• Part Four: Character Politics, Personal Life, and Romance
• Part Five: An author’s thoughts on the character
  

I’m a big proponent of digital lettering for comics. Partly it’s because I do digital prepress for a living, so I’m already sold on the idea of streamlining as much of the production process into a digital format as possible. And partly, it’s because my fingers and wrists cramp up if I hold a pen for any length of time, leaving digital typesetting my only alternative when working on my own books. (Those who have the skill and dexterity to letter by pen have my admiration.)

In a future blog post, I’ll share my notes from a digital lettering workshop that I put together for the local So.Cal. meeting of the Christian Comic Arts Society. Until then, here’s a few links to my favorite lettering resources on the web:

Balloon Tales: a website of comic lettering tips & tricks, essays, articles, and interviews, put together by Comicraft, the award-winning lettering studio that sells some of the best comic lettering fonts anywhere. I found that their glossary of lettering terms is exceptionally helpful.

Blambot: the website of comic letterer Nate Peikos, offering helpful tutorials and dozens of free lettering fonts for download. His article on comics lettering grammar & tradition is a perfect supplement to the one listed above.

MyFonts.com: an online store where you can buy fonts from various vendors (and download some for free too). It has two very useful tools in addition to just being an online store. It lets you “preview” almost any font in its catalog (including those from Comicraft and Blambot), letting you see what you dialog, title, or sound effect would actually look like using a particular typeface. It also has a tool called “What the font?“, which allows you to upload a snapshot of a sign or logo or other typeface you’re trying to identify, and it will cross-reference it against all the font designs in its catalog to show you the closest matches.

And finally, here’s a link to a still slightly useful blast from the past. Dating back to my first self-published comic from 2000, this article of mine explains how I lettered the pages of New Crew #1 on my old Windows 98 home computer using nothing but QuarkXpress 4.1 layout software. Nowadays, I have the entire Adobe Creative Suite of tools running on the latest hardware, but the basic principles of lettering and layout still applies to what I do today. (To see samples of my newer lettering work, check out the Ragged Capes webcomic from New Creation Now.)

After far too long tweaking the layouts and procrastinating with various computer projects, I’ve decided to finally start posting some gosh darn content here! But what content shall I start with?

My other work can be seen elsewhere online as one of the creators at New Creation Now, and in my occasional participation in the Christian Comic Arts Society’s social network site. The purpose of my site here is to act as an archive for some of the various writing projects I’ve done in smaller, offline venues. Primarily, at least at the start, it will feature reprints of material I’ve written for the long-running Alpha-Omega APAzine.

“What is this Alpha-Omega of which you speak?”, you may ask. Alpha-Omega is an “Amateur Press Association” run by the Christian Comic Arts Society. An APA is a kind of limited print run, members-only, collaborative fanzine that predates the internet era. Every two months, the members of our APA create pages featuring our art, writing, and comments to other members. We then send this contribution (a.k.a. ‘trib) to a central member who collates all the pages together into a stapled publication that is then sent back out to every participating member. The chance to share artwork and writing, as well as engage in a back-and-forth dialog via mailing comments, makes this a paper precursor to internet blogs and message forums. The 2-month time delay between submissions and feedback may seem archaic in an age of instant digital communication, but it has its benefits — which for me, include the time to chose words more carefully, and explore issues in greater detail and depth than the temptation of instant messaging allows.

The ‘trib title for my section of Alpha-Omega is “Adventuring Where Marvels Chance”. The title is taken from a medieval poem, The Pearl. The public domain version of the poem can be found here, although the particular turn of phrase I use for my title was taken from J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation. The relevant lines:

6. From that spot my spirit sprang apace,
On the turf, my body abode in trance;
My soul was gone by God’s own grace
Adventuring where marvels chance.

But, enough with the background info for now. The next posts will have actual content. (Lord willing.)

Still experimenting with the layout for this site. Changed the theme, tweaking the settings, and will be working behind the scenes to create a new hierarchy of categories and tags (for the long delayed posting of actual content.)

Well, it’s been awhile since I last updated. Besides being busy with work (and sick of sitting back down in front of a computer at the end of my day), most of my time has been spent on creative projects and/or configuring new computer hardware at home. But now that the hardware and other computer basics are working, I guess it’s time to hunker down and get this blog (and my related websites) up to speed.

I’m trying out the new Windows Live Writer application from Microsoft’s new Live Essentials suite. It looks like a nice tool so far, and hopefully it will save me the hassle of navigating the back-end admin panels of the site every time I want to post something.

My work is keeping me extra busy as of late, so I haven’t had time to create or post any new writing (of which this “blog” was set up to be an archive). Darn.

Until such a time as I can get back on a writing schedule, I’ll try to put this blog to use and do a little “hands on” training of the Wordpress site design tools. Expect the layouts to change back and forth for awhile until I return to a status quo and get back to the writing again.

It’s been a couple days since I got back home from the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con, and I’m still scrambling to get caught up. Suitcases to unpack, bags of freebies to look through, stacks of comics to review, and pages of brainstormed story notes that need scripting.

Note to self — when you take vacation time off from work to go to the comic-con next year, remember to schedule a few days recovery time for after you get back. Spending a weekend at the hectic chaos of comic-con and then driving home to immediately return to 9 hour shifts of digital prepress troubleshooting and print production at your day job is Not A Good Idea!

Lord willing, I’ll have more to write soon.

Greetings and salutations to one and all.

This is the first posting of my non-blog blog. By that, I mean that I plan to use this site as an archive of my various writing projects from my previous websites, newsletters, and APA-zine ‘tribs, rather than for typical “blog” daily journal postings and interactive conversations.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a typical blog. But since I spend all day in front of a computer at my job as a digital prepress troubleshooter, then come home to sit in front of a computer to work on various comic book writing projects, I just don’t have the time or temperament to commit to further time in front of a computer for daily blog updates. I’ll be posting here as I have things available, but I want to make it known from the start — don’t expect regular updates here!

Aslo, due to the fact that I won’t be updating or checking in on the blog on a daily basis, I’ve disabled the “comment” feature from wordpress for now. Perhaps if I get into a more consistent update habit and start building a steady readership I can change this in the future. But starting off, I’m keeping it “read only”. Questions or comments? Drop me an email, I’d love to hear from you.