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It is always darkest before the Dawn…
But this time… there will be no Dawn!
How dramatic was that? And now my wife & comic partner is going to ruin it all if she happens to make a filler post, but we’ll have to see just how much offishness she’s going to have with her week off. We’re both pretty busy getting back into the day job grind after our family gathering in San Francisco, which was a fun time. I could complain about it being cold and rainy, but the fact is it was plenty cold and rainy down in L.A., at least on the days we left and came back. It looked like the Rose Parade was spared, but we watched that remotely.
I don’t mind watching the Tournament of Roses remotely. I have a great abundance of pollen and flower allergies to contend with, which takes away the upside that we live within a few blocks of the parade route and float viewing area. The complimentary tickets we receive are just things that I pass on to family and friends, and meanwhile we still enjoy the benefits of not being able to park on our own street for a few days a year. Might as well leave the car at the airport, right?
While in San Francisco we checked out the Moscone Convention Center, or at least a small portion of it since it turns out that Moscone represents an entire complex of buildings and outdoor spaces. Now that I’m home and checking maps it doesn’t look like we ever saw the actual building that WonderCon takes place in, much less APE. Matter of fact, it turns out APE is held in an entirely different location several blocks away, so that was even more of a fail on my part.
Let me back up a moment for those unfamiliar with the “convention circuit”. WonderCon and APE (the Alternative Press Expo) are the other two expositions directly run by the same people who are responsible for San Diego Comic-Con. They are smaller scale, but then again compared to SDCC that’s not saying much. WonderCon occurs in April and APE in October, and both are held in San Francisco, so we were interested in scouting out their locations as part of our hoped for expanding of Zombie Ranch operations in 2011. Also influencing our interest was the fact that by getting pro status with San Diego, we also qualified as pros for WonderCon, meaning we can get free passes to see the show. The plan right now is to go to WonderCon as pure attendees, and then hopefully get in on APE as exhibitors… this means APE on one weekend of October, and then Long Beach Comic Con the next, but all the independent publishing folks we’ve talked to really recommend APE as a “gateway convention” to getting approved for the small press section in San Diego. Our 2011 application for SDCC Small Press was again denied, which again both disappoints and elates (elation because it means we get to wander free for at least one more year), but we’re really pulling for 2012 to go through.
By the end of this year we’re hoping not only to have a label company up and running for Zombie Ranch, but also another comic for public consumption. This new comic will still be primarily web-based, but we may be publishing it in “chunks” rather than page-per-week format. It’s going to be a humorous fantasy theme, and before you say that there’s already a gajillion of such offerings online (including my much enjoyed Rusty & Co.), I must say that Dawn has been looking forwards to telling this story for a long time. Whereas Zombie Ranch is a project that I write and she draws, the new comic (for now code-named “Saturnine”) is a project that she will draw and I will write. If that’s confusing to contemplate, let’s just say that she gets to be much more in the driver’s seat this time around, and she’s being rather disturbingly giddy about that.
So that’s what’s currently on the agenda. Meanwhile I caught a showing of the True Grit remake, but decided to combine that with actually reading the book, which I’m not quite done with as of this writing. Dawn also retrieved a tome entitled ‘Zombies vs. Unicorns’ from a bookstore we browsed in the Haight-Ashbury district, but that means she’s got first crack at it and has made noises of reviewing it her own self. I don’t know about you lot, but I’m intrigued.
Next week, the story of Zombie Ranch continues. See you then, and Happy New Year!
