David the World-Builder

My son David is working on finding his voice - and his medium - but he's a storyteller. As are most kids, I think, but he's always coming up with ideas that he wants to get out into the world. He makes his own comics to sell at our local convention and he's also interested in filmmaking and creating worlds for games.

He and his friends create their own, elaborate Pokémon cities for no other reason than to share them with each other and have another way to talk about the game. But David is also super into tabletop RPGs and is working on developing one himself. That's the map to his world, above, and it's so full of awesome places that I wanted to share it. Can't wait to see where he ends up taking his talent, because I want to play in the worlds he's building.

FallCon report

FallCon was a huge success on Saturday. It was an especially cold day (the weather folk were evening threatening snow), but that didn't keep people away. Crowds were great all day and especially huge around lunch time. And they were spending money, too. Every creator I talked to had great sales days.

Kill All Monsters did really well and my son David sold out of a couple of issues of his Hulkasaurus mini-comic. He also made huge dents in his stock of the other two. I'm really proud of that boy. He set his own prices and hawked his own stuff all day. His work is great, too. I know I'm totally biased, but his drawings are super imaginative and often laugh out loud funny. He's becoming a real pro at this.

My wife Diane had kids lined up all day long for face-painting and for the second year in a row FallCon was her most successful show of the year. After doing FallCon solo for so many years, it's been great sharing a table with David for the last two or three and with Diane a little more recently than that. As she says, "The family that cons together, bonds together." Gonna need that on a T-shirt.

We were worn out after the show, so I didn't get a post ready for yesterday, but I'll make that up tomorrow with two horror movies. And I'll have one up tonight, too. It is Mummy Monday after all.

[Thanks to Grant Gould for taking the photo above.]

Hulkasaurus: One more thing for SpringCon

My son David will be at SpringCon with me tomorrow with a very limited number of copies of his own comic, Hulkasaurus. It's a 12-page booklet containing a giant-monster story and a back-up feature introducing a creature he plans to use in future issues. Only a buck. Get 'em while they last.

Something That Made Me Smile Today

From Calvin's list.

Speaking of Kids Reading Comics...

From today's Minneapolis Meet-Up for Read Comics in Public Day. I took a couple of other photos too that you can see here.

The Nerdification of David: Dungeons & Dragons

Yesterday David noticed the back cover of a comic I'm reviewing (Jane Yolen and Mike Cavallaro's Foiled) and had some questions. There was a picture of a couple of people sitting at a table with some paper, dice, and small figurines. David wanted to know what they were doing, so I told him. "It looks like they're playing Dungeons & Dragons."

"Dragons?" He was already hooked. He's a sucker for giant reptiles of any persuasion.

I explained the concept of the game and that interested him more. He likes board games and let's-pretend games ("What kind of dinosaur are you right now?" is a frequently recurring question in our house), so my description of D&D as a combination of the two was a selling point. I told him that when I picked him up from school on Wednesday we'd go to the Source and spend some time in their role-playing section to see what he thought.

He naturally wondered if there were any RPGs about dinosaurs.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I'm not looking forward to spending the amount of cash it takes to invest in a decent role-playing game these days (my own D&D manuals are way out-dated). On the other hand, I can't think of much that would be more fun than shepherding him through his first dungeon. I'm not emotionally invested in his choice either way, but I'm very curious to see what happens when we're at the store tomorrow.

And if any of you know a good RPG about dinosaurs, I'd love to hear about it.

Happy Birthday, David!

Today's my son's eighth birthday, so in honor of him I'm going to kick off this week's art show with two items that he'll especially enjoy.

David's Favorite Superhero Comics Character



By Craig Rousseau.

Tarzan fighting a triceratops ... under water!



By George Wilson. [Gold Key Comics!]

Happy Birthday, Buddy!

For the rest of you guys, I'll get the rest of the art show up in a bit.

David Draws: Pete's Dragon

A friend of ours was talking about Pete's Dragon a while back and David wanted to check it out. He liked it enough that he decided to draw this homage.

I'm not sure where the zebra and the bee came from.

Killer Croc by Christopher Jones

This is the other commission I had done at MicroCon for David. His other favorite comic book character as drawn by The Batman Strikes artist Christopher Jones.

Vacation photos: Friday

P6130032, originally uploaded by MichaelMay.

On Friday, David and I visited a jungle-themed water park and went to see The Incredible Hulk. Awesome day.

The Lizard by Grant Gould

I commissioned this from Grant Gould at MicroCon. The Lizard is one of David's favorites.

Vacation photos: Thursday

P6120025, originally uploaded by MichaelMay.

On Thursday, David and I ate breakfast with Paul Bunyan, rode ducks, and checked out the damage from the emptying of Lake Delton. Click the duck above for the pictures. The ones of the empty lake are pretty wild.

David Draws: The Hulk

I got this on Father's Day. The text says, "Me and Dad went to The Incredible Hulk."

Man, I love that kid.

Vacation photos: Wednesday

P6110045, originally uploaded by MichaelMay.

Diane had the day off on Wednesday and wanted to spend it hanging out in Baraboo. We found a park with a small zoo attached and had a good time wandering around the town square where we ate lunch, bought some candy, and I found an old copy of Porto Bello Gold at a cool, little bookstore.

We also tried visiting the Circus World Museum that's located on the grounds where the Ringling Bros. used to winter their show. Why anyone would want to winter in Wisconsin when they've already got a headquarters in Sarasota, Florida is something I hoped to learn, but unfortunately the museum was closed. Remember Lake Delton's emptying out on Monday? The waters had reached Baraboo and were threatening the outdoor parts of the circus museum. You can click on Hugo Zacchini above to see what it looked like.

(Incidentally, some Googling tells me that Baraboo was the home of the Ringlings and starting in 1884 was the first winter headquarters for the show. John Ringling moved the HQ to Sarasota in 1927 with at least one other HQ location - Bridgeport, Connecticut - in between.)

Vacation photos: Tuesday

P6100001, originally uploaded by MichaelMay.

We kind of laid low on Tuesday. David and I watched a lot of TV and went to see Kung Fu Panda. I'm not going to do a full review of it, but it was a fun movie and we liked it. Didn't take any pictures of that though.

My mom and nephew stopped by for about an hour on their way to Michigan to visit my aunt and uncle. Got some pictures of them and David feeding the ducks in the pond behind our condo.

Vacation photos: Monday

P6090129, originally uploaded by MichaelMay.

Okay, truly, I'll have some honest-to-goodness content later today. Just want to make sure I stay on top of posting these.

On Monday, Diane had the morning off so we went to the International Crane Foundation near Baraboo. We actually did most of our sight-seeing in Baraboo this trip. I sort of hate the Dells themselves (except for a couple of attractions I'll talk about later in the week) and small town Baraboo is a wonderful get-away from the kitschy, tourist-trap madness of the Dells.

So anyway, click on David and the crane for more pics from the Crane Foundation.

I should also mention - as long as I'm talking about last Monday - that the weather adventures started on Saturday as we drove to the area. We got caught in a thunderstorm, but I've driven through those before and it didn't worry me. When we stopped at a truckstop for a bathroom break though, we were told that there was a tornado warning in the area, so we hung out for a while drinking coffee and eating pie.

Eventually the weather cleared enough that we got back on the road even though the warning was still in effect. We raced the weather to the Dells and got caught in the thunderstorm again. No twisters though.

I tell you all that to say that on Monday the Dells' big, man-made, recreational Lake Delton overflowed its banks, washed away a small dam and a nearby road, and cut a new channel to the Wisconsin River, completely emptying out the former lake. I'll show you pictures from that and tell you how it affected our trip later in the week.

Vacation photos: Sunday

P6080081, originally uploaded by MichaelMay.

Hard to believe that a week ago we were in the Wisconsin Dells. My wife works as a nanny and every year they let David and I tag along when they all go on vacation. This was our second year in the Dells and it ended up being an eventful trip. Lots of flooding in the area kept things exciting and challenging.

I think to keep this manageable, I'll just post the pictures a day at a time as the vacation occurred. So here's Sunday. Diane was working, so David and I went back to a cool, but kind of creepy pizzeria/brewing company we visited last year. We followed that up with a trip to a local candy company in the small town of Baraboo just south of the Dells.

Click on the picture above to see the rest of the Sunday photos.

David Draws: Two-Face

I've got lots of David's drawings I've been meaning to scan and share. This was at the top of the pile.



My six-year-old son and I have been watching Batman: The Animated Series on DVD lately. Kinda makes the week-long wait between episodes of The Spectacular Spider-Man more bearable.

He likes to do a couple of things with the shows he loves. One: he likes to "play" them. He picks his favorite character to be, then he asks me who I want to be, then we figure out who my wife is going to be (or ask her, if she's around). After watching Batman, David's usually Man-Bat, I'm Killer Croc, and Diane is Poison Ivy. We're a merry little band of thieves and murderers around our house.

The other thing David likes to do is draw. He's never wanted to "be" Two-Face, but he was pretty fascinated with the character after we watched the two-part Two-Face episode. Hence this drawing. He says he's not really happy with it, but I'm pretty pleased. Definitely not his best work, but it's his most recent so I figured I'd start with it.

Just for kicks, here's Bruce Timm's Animated Series version:

Do you have time for a cute kid story?

What if it's dinosaur-related?

My son's Kindergarten teacher has obviously been teaching the class about Martin Luther King, Jr. He came home yesterday with a poster he'd made with a silhouette of himself and his own "I Have a Dream" statement printed at the bottom. My first thought was that it was pretty bold of the teacher to compare Kindergarten kids to MLK. But my second -- and lasting -- thought is that it's very cool that she's not only exposing them to King's dream, but also encourging them to form and communicate dreams of their own.

David may have gotten the point better than the kid who said, "I have a dream of a new video game," but not as well as his immigrant classmate who dreams of a world without hunger.

David's response is completely David though: "I have a dream that birds and lizards stay dinosaurs forever and carnivores didn't eat herbivores."

Preach it, Son.

If you don't mind a Tarzan-related Cute Kid Story...

One of the best pieces of parenting advice I ever got was to let David be whatever he wanted to be and to love him regardless. As a non-conformist, that touched me. Especially since the advice came from another young non-conformist who was speaking to me from the child's perspective rather than a parent's.

So, as much as I love comics and Star Wars and all this other geeky stuff, I've made an effort not to push any of it on David. He's an animal geek by preference, so at age five now, he likes Tauntauns, but that's as far as his Star Wars (or Star Whores, as he pronounces it) fandom goes. He recognizes Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, and the Hulk, but he's far more excited by Devil Dinosaur than any of those guys. This is one of his favorite comics of all time. He has good taste.

But lately, he's been getting into Tarzan. He discovered the back-issues of Marvel's Tarzan on a recent trip to the comic store and now he wants a new one every time we go. (They're cheap, so I indulge him.) And he's been watching occasional episodes of The New Adventures of Tarzan with me.

I took him to the comic store last night and he picked out this issue for me to buy him. Then, when we got home, we watched an episode of New Adventures that I'd been telling him about where Tarzan wrestles a lion. It's one of the better Tarzan-wrestles-a-jungle-cat scenes. No stuffed animal for Herman Brix to roll around with. It actually looks pretty dangerous.

Anyway, David -- as he's wont to do -- immediately identified with the lion and started "attacking" me. We wrestled for a bit until David, sweet kid that he is, decided it would be better if we were friends. If only the lion in the movie had been so smart, he might have saved himself a knife to the neck.

For bedtime, David wanted me to read him his new comic which, as fate would have it, featured Jad-bal-ja, Tarzan's faithful Golden Lion. David was in heaven. Suddenly, his room was a treehouse, I was Tarzan, and he was my pet lion. It was decided that Diane -- who was working at the time -- would be Jane.

It wouldn't be half as much fun if I'd pushed it on him, but all on his own he's discovered a love for both Tarzan and role-playing games. He's such a geek and I couldn't be more proud.