Project Waldo

Less than a week to Emerald City Comicon . My first convention with a badge that says "Image" on it. Since Nonplayer won't be out for another month (it's debuting at WonderCon on April 1), I'm not completely sure how I'll be spending my time at ECCC. Image has said I'll be able to hang out at their booth, but there are many more creators than seats, so that'll be touch-and-go. Right now, it looks like I'll be signing there from 11am to 12pm on Friday and Saturday. I'll be at the convention for all three days, though, so if you don't see me at Image and you want something signed (or just want to say "hi"), just ask someone at Image where they last saw me. There will be Nonplayer posters for sale -- they're 11" x 17" on silk cardstock paper. Both the second and third pages of the first issue have now become posters:   There are a hundred copies of the one on the left and two hundred copies of the one on the right...

This is going to be a brief post -- I'm trying to contact comic shop owners to make sure they know about Nonplayer, and I could use some suggestions for shops you like. If you want Nonplayer available at your local shop, make sure to add them to the comments! To sweeten the deal, I'm offering a free signed poster to any shop owner who gets back to me. Please don't ask me for a free poster if you don't run a comic shop -- I'm printing these with my own money, and I'm poor.  The poster may be difficult to send to non-North American comic shops, but I'd still like some overseas suggestions, too. I'll see what I can do on a case-by-case basis. Thanks guys! As a reminder, this is what the poster looks like:

I must not fear.  Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.                                                  - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear Last week, I did a phone interview for the Comic Book Page podcast . I've done plenty of interviews by email, but this was my first real-time interview. Things went... well, I should have known something was amiss when I woke up on the morning of the interview in a state of panic. For the entire day leading up to the 5 p.m. interview, the anxiety got progressively worse. This was my first and only chance to make a good impression on the ears of the interne...

Some of you may have seen this over at the Nonplayer website , but I felt I should post it here for posterity's sake: The guy on the right is my friend Joe Keatinge, and the guy on the left is Moebius , my all-time comics hero. Joe and my studio-mate Justin "Moritat" Norman went to the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée Angoulême last week to scope out the French comics scene (and to see the by-all-accounts-stupendous Moebius show in Paris), and before they left, Justin made me print out a copy of Nonplayer #1 to take along with him. I need to make a quick digression. Despite being universally overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated, comic creators are the most generous, selfless, and encouraging people on planet Earth. Justin and Joe are great examples. These are busy guys with books of their own to think about, yet they went out of their way to take a sample of my work to the other side of the planet. In my experience, this is unusually nice. Also...

Nonplayer, brought to you by Image Comics ! Coming to a comic shop near you on April 6. More details at the official Nonplayer website . Sorry, it's hard to reach the keyboard from the ceiling. I'll post more when I deflate a bit. Very happy.

This posting hiatus started pretty innocently. Having mentioned in several previous posts that I had a major publishing announcement to make, and certain as I was of that announcement's imminence, I decided to refrain from posting until I could drop the Big One. After all, it was getting kind of embarrassing, saying over and over again that there would be big news and then coming up empty every time. Maybe the internet didn't really care one way or the other whether I'd landed a publishing deal, but in the echo chamber of my head it felt like a big deal. So, is this the post ? Nope! But since there isn't anything more for me to do, and since I feel an overriding need to do something , I'll write about it. I got into comics for the autonomy. A comic is just about the most elaborate thing a person can create without assistance, which sounds like heaven to somebody who's spent fourteen years in video game development. But what I hadn't taken into account wa...

As I work on the story for Nonplayer, I'm frequently reminded that I'm not a very good writer. Which isn't to say I can  never  be a good writer -- after all, I'm just barely making a dent in my ten thousand hours . Clearly, I'm thinking about story much more than I used to -- there's a new dread that seeps into the back of my head whenever I watch a movie or read a comic that has the same shortcomings I'm encountering in my own work. How is it that I walk away from those experiences with the feeling that I've failed somehow? I didn't even  write  that movie! It's a strange thing. Here's a tentative first pass at a definition for "story": a story is sometimes more than, but never less than, a sequence of significant events. I might even venture that those events need to have some narrative connection to one another, but maybe a thematic relationship is all that's really needed. Jackass 3D worked fine, right? Well, okay, maybe...