Ten Years – part three

“Ten years come and gone so fast

I may as well be dreaming”

-Paul Simon

And now, finally, the last installment of ol’ Bob’s rambling trip down memory lane.

This weekend was SpringCon, Minnesota’s largest comic book convention.  I’ve been going to conventions as long as I’ve been doing comics.  I really like going to conventions, although they used to be very stressful.  In the early days, I tried hard to attract customers.  I wanted people to buy and read my comic.  I think most cartoonists at conventions want the same thing.  I’d stand at my table and make eye contact with everyone and chat everyone up who walked by.  I was not unlike a carnival barker.  Well, I don’t think I was THAT bad….maybe I was more like those employees who stand in front of the mobile phone store at Maplewood Mall and get you to buy new cell phones.  Making a sale was very important in the early days.  In some ways, it meant validation.  Yes, people liked what you were doing.  A bad day at a convention would KILL your self esteem.

Over the years, readership of Uptown Girl grew to the point where things are now.  Most people who buy Uptown Girl’s books have been reading her adventures for years.  Unlike the early convention days, I seem to sell books to very few new readers.  But that’s okay.  Half the reason I go to conventions is to see old friends.  Conventions became a lot more fun when I took the pressure of selling books off myself.

One memorable moment was FallCon of…oh, I think 2004 when the first, and probably the only Uptown Girl cosplayer came to the convention.  Since then, Annie has become a good friend.

I did a lot of conventions around the country.  Although lately I stick to the local conventions, I’ve had a lot of fun traveling.  Here’s a picture of me setting up in Iowa, I think.  Note: I am not fat in this picture, my shirt is draped in a funny way.

These days though, it’s all about catching up with friends.  Fellow cartoonists, fans of Uptown Girl and many others.  I am stunned at how many people are in my life because of comics.  Ten years is a blink of an eye sometimes.  But when I look at how much has changed in the last decade, it takes on a different perspective.  Here’s a picture from this weekend, with the two biggest changes in my life the past ten years: my kids, Ryan and Sophie.

So.  Yeah.  Life has been good.  Thank you for putting up with an old man’s memories these past three weeks.  Next week we’ll get back to regularly scheduled babbling.

Ten Years – part two

Sometime in 2005, the local independent film adaptation of ‘Uptown Girl’ came out.  Directed by Ben Mudek, this remains one of the high points of my life.  Ben, along with many of the actors have become good friends of mine over the years.  In fact, Ben has colored the covers to many issues and collections of Uptown Girl.  Ben makes me look good.  Like many things in life, this movie came together because of the hard work of many talented people.  Editors, musicians and many other people put a lot of work into the movie.   The movie had some animation mixed into the live action to emphasis a comic book world.  The animation was done by a local company called ‘Monkey with a Mustache’.  It’s a small company and I worked closely with Jerry and Brian to make the cartoons come alive.  They did great work.  I was excited about the animation because I love cartoons, but seeing Uptown Girl come to life through animation was a dream of mine.

The Uptown Girl movie made it’s debut at a comic convention in 2005.  As I said, it remains a high point in my life, but in some ways, was also a pretty low point as well.  By the time the movie came out, I had produced over 25 issues of Uptown Girl over the course of 25 months.  In the world of Twin Cities minicomics, this was something that hadn’t been before.  Uptown Girl also had a pretty loyal following and had been recognized by The Star Tribune as one of the best local comics.  Needless to say, I was feeling pretty good about what I was doing.  Unfortunately I also let these things get to my head and to be honest, I became pretty arrogant.  I thought Uptown Girl was on it’s way to Hollywood and would be on Saturday morning television any moment.  I thought I was better than I was.  I was giving interviews, signing autographs, doing photo shoots…I thought I was a superstar.  I let this attitude destroy and damage a few friendships and partnerships.  I was a jerk, to be honest.  I started to think the comic was more important than it really was.  I like the comic, but it’s not going to change the world.  I worked very hard on the comic and threw myself into drawing.  I shunned friends and didn’t socialize.  Friends who would call I would almost treat them as an annoyance.  I am not proud of what I did, but I did it.
The hard work paid off, my enthusiasm and energy kept me going for a while, and still continues to this day.  Too bad I became a jerk in the process.

After the movie made it’s premier and Ben and I started to promote it, I was also working on translating Uptown Girl into a full blown animation series with Jerry and Brian.  We all worked well with each other and had fun doing so, and we all thought Uptown Girl would be a great cartoon.  So we got to work.

As talented as we all were, we had no idea what we were doing.  They could animate, I could draw, and Brian Bastian (Bastian for the purpose of this writing) was brought in to write the episodes.  We let our enthusiasm for the project get to us and we got to work.  What we should have done is write a contract first.

We couldn’t quite figure out what we were creating.  Were we creating short, five minute mini-cartoons for the internet with the hope if attracting the eye of Cartoon Network?  Were we putting together a pitch package to send to animation companies?  We didn’t know what were doing.  Combining not knowing what we were doing with my horrible ego just created more problems.

Like I said, our enthusiasm was really driving the project.  Which was  good, considering how stressful the whole thing really was.  We all wanted to make a cartoon.  So, we started work on a pilot.  A short, 15 minute cartoon that was capture the spirit of the comic/cartoon.  We auditioned some actors, Bastian wrote a great script and we were on our way.  After a few months, we decided to hash out a contract so we could figure out who was doing what and what we were all entitled to if the series was sold.  We wrote a contract, revised it, rewrote it again and again and again.  Lawyers were brought in, and after many arguments (remember, I was a JERK) and many months later, we all had a contract we didn’t hate.  We finished the pitch bible (basically a booklet outlining the cartoon, characters and future episode ideas) and we focused on the pilot.

We had committed to a public showing of the pilot in November of 2006, and if it hadn’t been for that commitment, I think I would’ve walked away from the whole thing.  But nevertheless, a contract was signed, the pilot was finished at the 11th hour and we were all very relieved.

Without getting too much into the contract, Jerry and Brian were allowed to pitch the cartoon to producers and attempt to find an agent for a set period of time.  After that period of time was up, the contract would be nullified and we could either renew or go our separate ways.

Long story short, the time was up and we had to discuss renewing the contract.  Since I was still a jerk, it was easy to point fingers as to why the partnership wasn’t successful.  There was some bad blood between the group and I decided that except for Bastian, I didn’t to partner with anyone every again.  In the end, we only submitted the pilot to Cartoon Network, who passed on it.

I think I stopped being a jerk around the time the contract was up.  Amy was pregnant with Sophie and I was starting to relax a bit.
Years later, I looked back on the project and realized I should have done many things differently.  I let my ego get in the way of what could have been a great partnership.

In terms of Uptown Girl, the years spent on the movie and the cartoon were the height of Uptown Girl popularity and potential.  I doubt anything I do will capture that energy again.  I think I am doing better work, but I am a lot more humble these days.

Jerry, Brian and I are friends.  Thankfully.  We are friendly to each other and catch up when we can.  These guys are talented, and I wish I had been a better person.  We could’ve done something great.

Ten years – part one

So, yesterday was Free Comic Book Day.

I like the idea of the day, though after experiencing it as an employee of a comic book store, as well as a guest artist, I am not sure if it’s always executed well.  There are some amazing stores that pull off incredible events…retailers who love and believe in comics.  But those retailers who love comics, and actually know how to market and promote and execute an event like Free Comic Book Day are truly few and far between.

I have a huge soft spot for the day, though.  The first FCBD was a very fun day for me.  It was the first time I did a guest signing at a comic book store and it happened about a year after Uptown Girl started.  So, this was about nine years ago.

I was invited to Jimmy Jams Comics and Games by the manager Mark, who, along with his wife Susan have become good friends of mine over the past decade.  At the time, there were two locations, one in Winona and one in Rochester which has since closed.

Here’s me and my friend David Tea in front of the store.  I cannot tell you how much David helped in getting Uptown Girl from a small idea in my brain to the printed page.  Simply put, if it were not for David, Uptown Girl wouldn’t exist.  Peeking off to the side is Mark.

Thankfully, I wasn’t the only guest.  I had met Albert Nguyen a few months prior who was doing a comic called ‘The Painted War’.  At the time, I thought he was the best cartoonist int he Twin Cities.  I have lost contact with him over the years, but the last I heard he was in art school.  I’m sure he’s graduated by now.

I was so thin and young then.  What happened?

It was a fun day.  I drew a lot of Spider-Man, since the first movie had just opened.  Mark really knew how to make the event fun.  His enthusiasm for comics is very contagious.
Also along for the day was Tom Nguyen, a super nice and talented guy who worked on everything from Batman to Final Crisis.  He also has written many books about art and comics.

I did FCBD signings at Jimmy Jams for about three years.  Soon Brian Bastian started to come along, as well as Danno one time.  Zach Miller was there once, too.  I have a soft spot for FCBD because it was a day I looked forward to for months.  I learned a lot about talking to people about Uptown Girl, being nice, meeting colleagues and flexing my creative muscles.

I am not much for looking back, but once I start to reminisce, it’s kind of hard to stop.  Since the official release of “All This Time”, a book celebrating ten years of Uptown Girl is only a few weeks away, I imagine these strolls down memory lane will be coming a little more frequently.  Sorry.

Twelve Pieces

I’ve just scanned page 164 of “A Long Forgotten Fairytale” into Photoshop and cleaned it up, as I usually do with artwork.  The entire book is scanned into my computer, I just had to add in the lettering.  I am averaging about 5 pages a week these days.  If I stick to this schedule, I think I’ll be done by the end of the year.  So, I’m cutting it close if I want this book to come out in May 2014.

I’ve complained enough at how slowly this book is going.  And it’s hard to really in depth with some of the challenges I’ve faced while working on the book without spoiling too much.  But it all comes down to the story being much more complicated than I expected it to be.  At first I thought the book was pretty straightforward, but that I am in the trenches of it, I wish I had written a very full, detailed script before jumping into drawing it.  I am noticing plot holes that I am going back to fix which is making the book longer than I had expected.  And since many pages needed to be redrawn, I am worried that adding the extra pages are throwing me off schedule.  This book should be out on time, but I won’t have much of a lead time on the follow up to it.  Yeah, I am already worried about a book that will come out in 2015.

Anyway, ever since I started to do comics, I identified with a lot of musicians in terms of listening to them explain their creative process.  A few bands I like have release 10 second snippets of songs for their upcoming albums.  It was fun to listen to these short snippets and wonder how these sounds made up a larger creative work.  I thought it’d be fun to do something similar and post 12 panels from various points of the book.  I don’t think these panels give too much away, if anything, I hope you look at these panels and wonder what in the world is going on.

Can’t Make Up My Mind

A couple weeks ago, I posted a couple pages from what I think will be an upcoming Uptown Girl graphic novel.  I did a couple more recently.

I am not sure if these pages will be the actual book or not.  I like the energy of the pages, but this would mean a shift in many ways.  The style, the materials…I don’t know.

What do you think?  And yeah, I’ll be redoing the final panel in this first page here…

 

It’s a Trap!

Nothing too exciting today, just a cat comic written in my head while at the Science Museum with my daughter.

On the Fly

It’s no secret that work on ‘A Long Forgotten Fairytale’ has been slow and frustrating.  I am working on page 153 and now that I am near the end of the second act, I think the book might be longer than I had anticipated.  I think I could do another 153 pages easily.  Well, not easily.  Nothing on this book has been done easily.

I compare this book to the first Uptown Girl graphic novel a lot in terms of productivity.  I did a page a day then.  I’d push myself to finish the page if it was a late day or evening before calling it a night.  I’d resist doing more pages if it was a productive day.  When I was doing this as a monthly comic, I’d do 8 pages a day, easily.  But then I was single and childless.  ‘Big City Secrets’, the first graphic novel, was done when my daughter took naps,  freeing up a lot of time.  Now Sophie is 5 and I only have time to draw when she is asleep at night.  I work for maybe an hour and I am far behind on the old ‘page-a-day’ schedule.  I need to be more productive.  But when I sit down to draw, Sophie runs into my cave to draw with me, play with me, or a zillion other things.  And that’s fine.  It reminds me that I should be playing with her instead of hiding and drawing, anyway.

But I started to notice a lot of time during the weekends when I would take Sophie to the library or an indoor playland and I would sit and watch her play.  I am too tall for much of the playground stuff.  At the library I’d pick out books for her but she would want to stay and play for a while longer.  I started to realize that these were perfect times to draw.  But I can’t haul my drafting table around.  So I needed to think more portable.

This idea collided with me putting together ‘All This Time’, the next book collecting some of the old monthly comic series.  A lot of the old stories had a lot of the energy and spontaneity that I don’t have with the longer stories.  I miss that.  But a lot of those stories were done places other than my drawing table.  At work, coffee shops, wherever.  I thought if I could draw almost anywhere maybe I could capture the energy the stories had then.

I bought a small clipboard that could open up to store stuff.  It’s plastic, pretty durable and light.  I filled it with paper, pens and a few templates.  Everything I needed to draw a comic on the fly.  In order to fit the insides of the clipboard, I needed to cut the paper down to the size that ‘A Long Forgotten Fairytale’ used to be.

This weekend I had a chance to draw a couple pages and to see if this experiment would work.  I think it did.  I’m always thinking a few books ahead of the one I am working on right now, and a few years down the line I’ll be doing a book called ‘The Lazarus Heart’.  I knew it would open with a bang and the opening has been on my mind lately since lately all I’ve been drawing is people talking, countrysides, trees and birds.  A fun action-y scene in a city sounded like a lot more fun that what I’ve been drawing the last few weeks.

So here’s what I did.

Of course, I still plan on finishing ‘…Fairytale’, but I plan on working on this off and on for a while.  It’s actually been kinda fun.