It’s July. Comic Con International is in three weeks. If you’re going, it’s time to triple check your prep, start getting ready to travel and brace yourself for the upcoming Nerd Prom.
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Sharing a booth at a convention is an excellent way to secure a larger presence at a convention than your could afford on your own. And if your comic and the comics of your fellow exhibitors share a common theme or approach, the synergy could help you to cross promote at the table and boost the sales of each other’s merchandise. But like all experiences that involve a group of people, things can get nasty fast if you don’t spend a little time discussing expectations, ground rules and contingencies before the show starts. Here are a few topics to discuss.
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With about three weeks (gasp!) to go before Comic Con International, it’s time to get into gear. Here’s a quick checklist. Feel free to add to it.
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I took a question on Twitter recently:
Would it be wrong to draw my comics on A4 paper? I find it hard to fill big spaces.
My answer was, of course. that he should do what he felt comfortable doing. 140 characters doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for art advice. But it made me think that perhaps some artists don’t understand the benefit of drawing larger than the final size of the strip.
The primary benefit is that reducing the art tends to make the line work look cleaner and smoother. All of the little shakes and quakes of your hand are minimized, leaving your lines looking much more confident.
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Q: Continuing the copyright debate, the Walt Disney Company, which is notorious for defending its IP, acquired Marvel about a year ago. What does this mean for events like comic book conventions, where the sale of unofficial Marvel fan art is common-place?
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Comic scraper sites (and apps) pop up at the rate of every other month or so. Typically, they use a webcomic’s RSS feed to “scrape” the comic and use it for their own purposes — whether it’s a collection of their favorite comics in one site or an app that allows a reader to easily surf all of their favorite comics in one, easy place. In general, comic scrapers take only the comic, leaving behind the other elements of the webcomic site — like the blog …and the site’s advertising.
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In the process of compiling the sixth Evil Inc book, I ran across the solution to a problem that’s been plaguing me ever since I started printing in color.
I lay out my books using Adobe InDesign and export a PDF to send to the printer. In this case, the printer, Transcontinental, gives me a “PDF preset” to use so the PDF is created to their standards.
Once I uploaded the PDF, I was alerted that some of the images were presenting at a low resolution.
I know this isn’t the case because… well, heck, because I’ve been doing this kind of work for twenty years now. 🙂
So I started hunting around, and I finally found the culprit. Part of Transcon’s PDF preset — in fact, part of practically every PDF preset — has image compression built in. After all, that’s what a PDF file does… it compresses the document for easy use.
But I’m not looking for easy. I’m looking for quality.
So I modified the PDF preset and — viola — my resolution problems disappeared.
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While I was exhibiting at Wizard World Philadelphia over the weekend, I was invited to join a panel discussion about digital comics. During the conversation, a successfull creator said a phrase that makes me cringe every time:
“This is bad advice but… I don’t want to be involved in the business side, I just want to make comics.”
Now this person and I am on very friendly terms, so I took him to task quite openly. But I think it’s time to codify our stance towards this attitude.
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We’ve discussed the con toolkit before. It’s a tacklebox that you keep everything you’re likely to need during a convention appearance. Having exhibited over the weekend, I have one more thing I’d like to suggest you include in yours — especially if you’re in Artists’s Alley.
A bike chain.
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Keeping track of your sales during a convention appearance is important for several reasons. First, you need to track sales in order to accurately account for sales taxes and income taxes. Secondly, it’s important to track which items are selling better than others as you decide on what types of items to offer in the future. Third, it’s always helpful when planning how much of each item to ship to a convention. And finally, if you buy books in bulk and claim them as inventory in your income taxes, you’ll need these numbers when you get home to adjust your count.
With all of these reasons, you’d think there would be a better way to track sales, but as you go from booth to booth, you see two derivations of the same system. The first is a chart the artist keeps behind the table and marks on to record each sale. If they remember to.
The second, less visible, method is to simply count the items before the show and count them after the show, subtracting to find the difference.
Pretty unassuming, isn’t it?
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