Once again it was the journey to there and back again. Not to Mordor but to rainy rainy Supanova Sydney to setup and man a table for the ACT Comic Meet collective. My partners in crime included and the ever delightful Emmajeans, the Steampunk pirate Katie, the snazzy salesman Sam Cavanagh, the Magic card addict Rob, and the cosplay counting Ben.
Friday Bump in This year we wisely avoided having to deal with the loading deck and instead had a system of snazzy boxes- SO much easier! Upon arrival our table was covered with pillows decorated with MLP characters’ faces spilling over from the stall next to ours – it’s amazing how ordinary young people are able to get the licence to sell copyrighted characters! After bump in I got to attend the George Perez Masterclass which was fun. George drew his examples of comic book storytelling which was projected onto a big screen behind him. Always love to see people drawing. I especially loved the moment where he explained how he approaches drawing unique faces. He demonstrated drawing the ears of Captain America and Hawkeye as examples. I am now super-sensitive and conscious of drawing ears!
Saturday: On sale amongst the collection was our new Anthology comic ‘The day I destroyed the world’ which is an awesome fun comic of two page stories which turned out to be the favorite comic of the weekend along with ‘Liedekjin’, the sequential exhibition art book . We also sold ‘showbags’ that people could get prints and badges with a collection of books. (It’s amazing how well value-adding works!) Emmajeans also got a bunch of cosplay portrait orders. Saturday night we got to hang out with random comic peeps and then crash into a sleepy sleepy coma.
Sunday: A quick photo of myself in front of a TARDIS then more selling! More craziness!! We sold out of the stock we had brought for ‘Bob’, ‘Cafe’ and ‘The Lesser Evil V1’. In the afternoon I got to go to the panel draw-off of David Yardin, Mark Brooks, and Jon Sommaria which was fun. Three versons of a steampunk Gandalf was created and then 3 lucky people got the original art. Sadly I was not one of those lucky people. The day ended with a the quickest pack-up time we have ever had (yay again for new boxes!) and a quick pic of myself with Gollum.
We wisely decided to extend our stay overnight and then got to have Tea and Toast with Tim McEwen and Bruce Mutard where we had much discussions of conventions, comics and how one makes a tumblr blog.
And back again: After escaping the oncoming Sydney storm we arrived home for some exhausted laziness.
On reflection I am still of the position that being placed beside people selling what appears to knockoffs of license characters printed onto anything is a losing battle. The pull to a known brand that the customer has already spent time investing in is far too great. The amount of times someone would literally interrupt their friends and pull them away from a comic they were holding was painful. I hear that some conventions actually have a review where you have to show examples of artwork to get into ‘Artists Alley’ but then I guess that would suck up a lot of man hours sorting that out when ‘Artists Alley’ is far from being the big drawcard of the event.
I’m not sure what the solution is – maybe separate artists from licensed character ripoffs, maybe ban ripoffs altogether, maybe artists should just have to deal with that kind of competition as that’s how life is? It just still seems all wrong to me.
Apart from that – Supanova Sydney was exhausting frantic fun. I think we sold more things then we had at any other con and was fun seeing other crazy creative people.
I am eager to get back into a new project and how to wrestle time from the rest of the day for it.
Enjoy some con pictures!
-Gavin THE all-tuckered-out Thomson
