What Happened At and After the Book Signing (Patreon)

I’m laying on my stomach in front of my bookshelves, trying to write about the book signing in San Francisco last weekend for you guys, and I can’t believe this is real. My first draft was kind of a bummerfest. I was bein’ all sad about the people that scare me, the ones who have helped influence my decision to reduce the amount of events I do and to stop taking on speaking gigs. If I were a better writer I would have expressed the pain of what it’s like to be vilified by people who project the worst possible message onto your work and then I would have smoothly segued into how this book signing at Good Vibrations was the exact, shocking opposite of everything I’d been scared I would encounter.

The signing was supposed to be an hour and half in the back of the store in their Historic Vibrator Museum room. The manager expected Matt and me to do a little presentation first, which was not something anyone had mentioned when we were setting all of this up. At first I was inclined to stick to my guns and insist that, no, we had nothing prepared, let’s just go straight to signing books. But then I thought, hey, I can just run through my usual spiel of OJST’s origin story and, if anyone had them, we could answer a few audience questions.

The doors to our room were opened a bit earlier than scheduled, since a healthy-sized crowd had already built up and why not just get things started anyway. It wasn’t a large room, so when I say it was standing room that’s not actually as impressive an accomplishment as it sounds— but y’know what? No. Regardless of the size of the room, that’s still pretty fucking cool that it was maxed out. I’m gunna sit on the part of me that invalidates my successes and say, yeah, it was standing room only and that was delightful as hell. Matt and I bantered a bit, people laughed at the right places, and we could have spent a lot longer taking questions but more and more people kept building up outside the door so we asked everyone to reconfigure into a line and got to work.

Good Vibrations had scheduled an hour and a half for our event but it took four, without any breaks (even to pee), to get through the sea of people who came. The line stretched from our room through the length of the store and out the front door. I felt bad for the one or two folks who had never heard of our book and were just going through the line as a favor for an absent friend and as for the rest of the crowd, jesus, I guess this is how rock stars must feel when they perform on stage. The room was sweltering with body heat, sweat rolled down all of us in there, but the thing that overwhelmed me most was all the appreciation and recognition and love and gratitude emanating from the 100+ people who took the time to chat with us at our little table. It was surreal and beautiful.

It doesn’t feel real.

I make comics as a compulsion, a coping mechanism. They are how I process my thoughts and figure my brain out, they’re how I communicate, both to others and myself. I make them obsessively as a patch for this hole I’ve had in my heart my entire life, the one that makes me feel like I’m not a real person, I don’t matter, I shouldn’t exist. And then, of course, there’s all the people writing comprehensive expositions about how damaging and toxic my work is in regards to queer identity/feminism/social justice/sex positivity/etc-- y'know, everything I value. There’s this part of my brain that fundamentally cannot process that there’s some people out there who found my old dumb diary comics and current sex positive comics helpful, that they can be something meaningful to others. I feel really self-conscious and disbelieving even writing that down.

Don’t worry, I’m not getting a big head from one night of glorification. Once we’d arrived back home my brain immediately plunged itself into 48 hours worth of thinking I’m absolute trash. I think of the weekend’s feelings like a graph: My baseline self-esteem is at 0 and then at the book signing it got bumped up to +50, so to balance out it then had to dive down to -50 for a couple days, and now I’m mostly back to 0 again. It all evens out in the wash!

Ok, wrap this up. The book signing was intense. It was beautiful. Thank you so much if you made it out, I appreciated meeting every single one of you so much. I’m still exhausted. I’m full of thoughts and feelings. I want to do more, I want to do better. Not everyone has to like them, but I want to tell stories that resonate with a room full of people.