Con Report: TCAF 2017 (Patreon)

Last weekend I was in Toronto for TCAF. Canada is a lovely country and I always have a wonderful time when I'm visiting. It's the second year I've done the show, and it was the first time I've exhibited primarily for my game work, rather than for the comic the game was based on.  I learned a lot of things, so for this week's Patreon I thought I'd share my thoughts as a convention exhibitor. 

I've been a cartoonist for about ten years. I started out making comics on the clock at a previous job, and when the demands of being an artist became too much and it began to affect my health I made the hard decision to leave the previous job and pursue art full-time.  It felt like a hermit crab leaving the known security of a too-small shell for the uncertain hope of a larger one, where navigating the space between previous and next leaves you exposed and vulnerable.  It's something we all have to embark upon to grow in our lives.

When I'm at a comic convention I meet a lot of people who have never heard of my work before. It's always heartwarming when someone approaches the table and I don't have to explain what the comic is, and that slowly happens more and more often, but the vast majority of encounters I sell people on the things I make.  My elevator pitch is "Dead Winter is an action-adventure comic set in a nameless city with a -little bit- of a zombie problem"- I honed this pitch over the years, and I make a lot of deliberate choices in putting it together.  Firstly, it doesn't name other similar works to compare to my own.  I don't pitch it as "like X" or "like Y but less Z" because I'm not pitching X or Y, I'm pitching my work, so I want to focus on presenting it on its own merits. I used to say "post-apocalyptic city" but that is too many syllables, "nameless" is much punchier and it lends an interesting point to the comic.  It'd never directly mentioned in the work but the name of the setting is never stated, so I work that into the pitch.  Lastly, I always specifically put the words "zombie problem" at the very end of the pitch. When I hit that point people always smile and laugh, saying things like "just a little, huh?" That sells the idea that it's more lighthearted adventure and less of a horrific gorefest, emphasizing that "little bit", and I think that's the most important part of the pitch, because I've come to believe that zombies are a thematic liability.

Over the years I've taken to calling it "the Z-word".  When I started out in 2007 I had the thought that zombie stories were an unexplored niche in webcomics, so I could make something to fill that niche.  This was right on the cusp of a cultural eruption of zombie work, and if I'm honest a lot of it came off as very off-putting, creating a stigma around anything with zombies in it. Here in the mid to late '10s people are exhausted by the idea of zombies, they've seen the splattering heads and the gung-ho violence and the huddling and crying and fighting and dying so much that when they see the Z-word they tune it out, and its in this context that I travel to shows to sell my comics. I try to minimize the Z-word; my con banner features the characters' faces, the book covers focus on the characters, my prints and artwork is human-centric because the story I write is human-centric and the Z-words are a supplemental catalyst for a narrative around finding one's self and preserving one's identity amidst the collapse and reconstruction of our most fundamental concept of civilization. I try to create work that isn't about splattering zombies, but about who we are as humans, how much we depend on each other for support and what happens when that support structure disappears and knocks us off the top of the food chain. People often say "I don't like zombie stuff, but I like your story", I've heard that a lot at conventions, and I try to sell the points that make my story mine over and around the Z-word. I think I do a pretty alright job of it. I don't sell a whole lot but I can usually at least break a little more than even, enough to cover the expenses of getting to a show, meeting old fans and introducing the work to new people. I don't have any illusions about being a popular artist, but I try to do shows so I can connect with people and I think there's tremendous value in that.

At this year's TCAF I was invited to show off our game. I had my table set up with a TV I hooked a laptop up to to demo the game nice and big, and I supplemented that with my comic books on the side.  The show has a strong emphasis on comics and arts, but I was showing in a section primarily about games, which is something I've never done before.  Normally in a comic context people want something nice and tangible to bring home, and big-ticket items like books draw peoples' attention. Changing the contextual focus to games created a new dynamic- people didn't show up to look for comics or look for stories or even look for books at all, they came to try out games.  Here I didn't really need to use my elevator pitch, people could see from the game screen the tone and the themes of the media. Nothing was hidden behind the book cover, people didn't need to take that first brave step and actually pick up a book and see what it's about, what it's about was happening right in front of them and it drew them in.  I actually didn't update this Patreon as early as I wanted to because my body was so sore from sitting on the plastic bench at my table all weekend, as I had no time to get up and go look around the show floor myself. It was a lot of traffic and a lot of interested people, and that was very encouraging!  I didn't have to try hard to sell people on giving the work a chance, it spoke for itself and people enjoyed it.  I was happy to be there.

At the beginning of the show I got to talk with a gentleman who liked my work, he was a cool guy and he was very insightful. I mentioned how I was splitting my time between comics and games and he sounded almost disappointed to hear that, talking about how much he liked the writing and the dialogue in my comics.  For a moment my heart sank, I felt doubt in my pursuit of making a game, an uncertainty in if what I was doing was the right choice.  Am I sabotaging myself? If I push a little bit harder into comics will more people see my work and embrace it?  I intend to see the comic through to the end of the story, I have no intentions of abandoning it unfinished, but I felt like maybe I was making a decision in error to pursue the scary new world of game development.

Over the course of the weekend, amidst everyone coming through to play the game, all the smiles and laughs and energy and the teamwork and strangers playing together, I only sold -two- books, and one was to someone who already had a book.  Any uncertainty I had coming into the show had been immediately dispelled.  I am the hermit crab again, and my shell is too small. I need to grow as an artist and as a creator, and recontextualizing my work in a new medium allows people to see the good in it and give it a try. The comic supplements the game and the game supplements the comic, a big and ambitious work has become bigger and more ambitious, but it absolutely cannot exist solely as a work of sequential art.  I've never been more certain that I'm making the right gamble.

I'm going to keep working on the comic page above and try to have it finished for next week.  Tuesday the 23rd is my birthday and I'd like to have the comic done before then so I'm going to power through it this weekend- the last two panels are shots backdropped by simpler walls so once I get through the middle two panels it should be smooth sailing from there.

Thanks for sticking with me and my work!