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For those of you who don’t recognize the character speaking to me, that’s Mich. She’s never had a formal introduction in the cartoon, but she has shown up here a number of times, starting with last year’s cookie season. Mich is a life-long Girl Scout, an engineer, an avid and fantastic knitter, and the official keeper of my brain at conventions. She’s also become my manager this year as we attempt to move career more and more into cartooning and art.
Mich and I went to Marscon this past weekend and we had a fun time. In addition to the usual adults-only panels I worked on (speculative fiction erotica, repopulating the world after the apocalypse, zombies in love), I also got to be a panelist on a couple of podcasting, digital art and webcomic panels. Many thanks to Barb Fischer for inviting me to participate in the latter. Yes, I am a webcomic artist, but it’s only been recently that I’ve been more known for the webcomics than for the erotica writing and podcasting. I expect I’ll be doing more webcomic panels at more cons in the future.
I also had a table in the artist/author alley at Marscon, where I sold several copies of Mustachequerade and the new Zombie Valentine (the Zombie Valentine is available on Zazzle if you want to get one!). I sold NO books, which doesn’t surprise me. It’s not that my books aren’t good. They are good, but they are for a niche audience (adults interested in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror erotica), and the print versions certainly cost more than the ‘zine ($1) or greeting cards ($3) that I brought. It was just far easier for people to buy those things, and I ended up making more money selling those two items than I have ever made selling books at a convention. This is one of the reasons why I’m moving more into the cartooning and art and spending less time on the writing. I will continue to write, but it’s far easier for me to sell the art, and frankly, it’s easier for me to produce the art as well. And frankly, I just enjoy cartooning more than anything else!
Overall, Marscon went very well. Now Mich and I are looking forward to Farpoint in February. I start working on Mustachequerade 02 this week, as well as a Zombie Easter card, and plan to have both of those in time for Farpoint. I have been assured I will have table space at the con, so if you’re going to be there, stop by and see me!
Oh, and I should point out, today’s cartoon was drawn on my iPad, using an app called Adobe Ideas. It’s as close to pen and ink drawing as I can get on the iPad. It’s not the perfect solution for drawing the cartoon on the go, but it’s the closest I’ve come so far! Adobe Ideas draws in vector format, but acts like a pen and ink program. So I can cartoon the way I’m used to, but scale the drawing up or down to any size with no loss of quality!
