Updates galore

The last half of October has been a heck of a few weeks for me. The biggest highlight was my trip to Winnipeg for Central Canada Comic Con where I was selling Acts of Violence: An Anthology of Crime Comics and the issue of IF-X featuring Dark Art, promoting The Grim Collection, and checking out Artist Alley in the hopes of finding some talented artists who might be interested in working together on comics for The Grim Collection. I will have a full Con report posted on this here blog in the near future.

In other news, Song’s End has been lettered by E.T. Dollman. I will be packaging the files and sending it to the Hamtramck Idea Men over the weekend. You might recall that Song’s End will appear in the December 2011 edition of IF-X. The theme is “West”.

There has been movement on other comics as well. Manoel Magalhaes has turned in more pages for Orphan. Tim Hall has completed character designs for On The Other Side of The Bridge, and just the other day turned in thumbs of the first eight pages. My experience with Tim has been great thus far and I can’t wait to see what the final artwork looks like. The third comic currently in production for The Grim Collection, The Dig, is also moving forward. Adam Sward provided me with character sketches that were quickly approved. This will be the third collaboration between Adam and I.

And, I hate to announce this for fear of jinxing it, but there is a very good possibility that a long gestating comic project is soon to debut.

I will finish with one final word about The Grim Collection. I added new content to it on November 4. The Draw of Memories is a short fiction, the first to appear on The Grim Collection.

Lumsden Workshop

A big thanks to Dalton, Evan, Charlie and Josh for coming out to the Wrters’ Workshop in Lumsden on Saturday, October 22. I supplied an idea for a graphic novel– a ship has run aground on rocks in a stormy sea and is in danger of breaking apart– and then the boys collectively created a setting, characters, background, and plot for the graphic novel. The results can be downloaded here. I think you will agree these are very creative young fellows.

Appearance at Central Canadian Comic-Con

October 28 – 30, 2011
Central Canadian Comic-Con
Winnipeg, MB
I’m booked in for C4 in October. I am selling Acts of Violence, a new issue of IF-X that features a short horror comic of mine, and looking for new readers and artists for The Grim Collection. The floor plan is not yet available but when it is I’ll post my location on this here blog. Hope to see you in Winnipeg!

Calgary Con Report

Thought you might like to hear about my experience at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo. It was June 17 – 19, and is the largest Con in Western Canada. The numbers aren’t in for this year, but there were more than 30,000 attendees in 2010.

I did not know what to expect of the Con because this was my first time as a fan and creator, but I can say with assurance the experience was better than I could have imagined. Sales were great. The atmosphere was amazing. The people were fantastic. I had fun. I learned.  And the whole Con experience revitalized my desire to be an active, contributing member of the comics community. Seeing and experiencing tangible evidence of what being a comic creator is all about was therapeutic.

I went down with four other comic writers (the writers / creators of Acts of Violence). We each brought copies of Acts of Violence and the other guys had other books to sell too. Going in I was going to be happy if we sold 30 Acts of Violence. The other guys at the table who did Cons before thought 50 copies sold would be strong sales. We sold 104 copies of Acts of Violence (the highest selling book at our table) and the other books sold well too, including 50+ copies of Ed Brisson’s Murder Book. We did awesome.

In summary, I loved the Con experience (as a fan and creator). It made me realize how much I want to be a full-time member of that community. It has also gotten me super-excited for the future of Synchronicity—whether it ends up at a publisher or self-published I know it is a great book and would be well received by the community. I look forward to the day when I have the honor of selling it at a Con.

Visit me at Booth 1504

If you are attending the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo this weekend (June 17 – 19, 2011), visit me at Booth 1504. I will be there with fellow Acts of Violence creators Ed Brisson, Todd Ireland, Kevin Leeson and Dino Caruso. Guest artists Simon Roy, Vic Malhotra, and Simon Fernandes are going to drop by and do some sketches. We will have Acts of Violence on sale, but other stuff as well, including the Shuster Award nominated Murder Book (by Ed Brisson), Outnumbered (by Todd Ireland and Kevin Leeson), and Shuster Award nominated Jan’s Atomic Heart (by Simon Roy).