Hear me now and believe me later

At MicroCon I had the pleasure of being briefly interviewed by Taylor Kent of Snark Infested Waters. You can hear Taylor's entire podcast of the convention here. I'm around the 2:40 mark talking mostly about the Cownt and Tales from the Inner Sanctum, though I do manage to collect my wits enough to mention Kill All Monsters as well.

I don't think I'm quite ready for Matt Lauer just yet.

Awesome List Catch-Up: Part Four

Who is The Nobody?



Jeff Lemire is making a graphic novel based on H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man.

Black Panther cartoon sounds good

Yesterday I said, "If the cartoon is anything like the early issues, I'll be all over it." Looks like I will.

Wonder Woman movies update

Doesn't look like we'll be seeing Wonder Woman on the big screen any time soon. The Justice League movie has been tabled.

And while producer Joel Silver still wants to do a Wonder Woman solo film, he's still trying to figure out the best direction to approach it from. Take your time, Joel. I'd rather see it done right than done soon.

Femme Noir



I reviewed the first couple of issues of Christopher Mills and Joe Staton's Femme Noir.

Sarah Conner Chronicles Season Two

There'll be one. I'm just now getting around to watching Season One on TiVo, so I don't know how to feel about this yet. I have reservations about the pilot (the only episode I've seen so far), but I hear from pretty much everyone that it gets better.

Josh Medors Benefit Auction

It's not awesome that Josh Medors -- who illustrated the short prose story I wrote in Tales from the Inner Sanctum #1 (in addition to many other, more high profile things like G.I. Joe and Fused!) -- has cancer. It is awesome that there will be an auction at Emerald City Comic Con to help pay for Josh's medical expenses.

Get well, buddy.

Why Gail Simone's Wonder Woman will just keep getting better and better until the world cannot contain its Awesomeness and explodes

We're all doomed, but at least we'll go out with great Wonder Woman stories.

Del Toro does The Hobbit

The man likes his fantasy. I think this is good news, but I feel like I know exactly what to expect. Hopefully he'll do some surprising things with it.

New Dark Knight poster



I don't know why I'm not more excited about this one. I want to see it, naturally, but I'm not anxious about it. I probably will be once we get past Iron Man.

Still. Very cool poster.

Awesome anthology

I reviewed Indie Spinner Rack's Awesome anthology. Among other things it includes: a robot with a fishbowl for a head, a Mexican necrophiliac robot, a couple of talking bears, ice-cream eating aliens (one of whom has a pet flying ball named Greg; the other of whom has a gun that shoot dragons out of it), some enchanted deer, Scuba Archeologist, Frankenstein vs. Popeye, an alien visitation, and one of the scariest comics I've ever read (the scariest I've ever read involving talking geese).

Still more Crystal Skull pictures

This crop is more exciting than the last batch. Even more at the link.

Possible SPOILERS BELOW in some of them, I guess. This is the last item in this post, so you can stop reading now if you don't want to see.

MicroCon report

Well, MicroCon was a blast as always. I got to catch up with a bunch of other local comics creators whom I only see a couple of times a year, and that's a huge benefit of the show. Got to talk to Tyler Page for a bit about his recent Xeric award and what that means for his upcoming print edition of Nothing Better. Sam Hiti and I chatted about his Fist-a-Cuffs blog and how cool it is that everyone's suddenly paying attention to it. Bought a copy of the new Spider Chronicles anthology off contributor Martin Powell. I know I'm forgetting people, so I apologize for that.

I also met some cool new folks. Joel Vollmer, artist on Dust to Dust, for one. Joel showed me his portfolio and I couldn't be more excited that he's the one illustrating our Jesse James/Machine Gun Kelly gunfight. I also got to re-meet Sarah Morean whom I'd briefly met at FallCon last year, but didn't realize that she was a creator, much less someone whose work I needed to check out. (It's not surprising, but Shawn Hoke knew that already.)

The most fun about the local conventions though is hanging out with my usual convention pals: Grant, Jess, Darla, and Alex. Paul Taylor and his wife and baby also hung out with us for a while, and new this year to our neck of the convention was Charles Raymond and his wife Jennifer. I bought some great, oversized Hulk comics from Charles, sketchbooks from Jess and Grant (I already had one of Darla's), and a copy of Josh Howard Presents: Sasquatch, which Alex and Grant had both contributed to.

As for my own self: I wasn't really there to sell this year. Tales from the Inner Sanctum has pretty much found its audience in the Twin Cities, but I did okay with Cownt prints. My real goal for the show though was to get folks interested in and excited about Kill All Monsters! Mission accomplished. Everyone who stopped by the table checked out the unlettered pages I had on display and when I'd explain the pitch there was a lot of enthusiasm for the book.

I also had a couple of folks ask me for advice about finding artists or otherwise breaking into the biz, which is happening more and more at shows, but is still flattering and humbling.

Meet Michael May!: MicroCon 2007

Just because I'm not on the website, doesn't mean I won't be at MicroCon on April 29th. They take it for granted that I'll be there. And of course they should. You should too.

I'm an institution I tells ya!

So anyway... yeah, I'll be there hanging out with Alex Ness and Joel Vollmer, aka the rest of the Dust to Dust team. Also, my perennial convention pals Grant Gould, Jessica Hickman, Darla Ecklund, and Paul Taylor.

I've been too busy working on new projects to put together the Art of the Cownt book that I've been meaning to do, but I'll try to have some other Cownt merchandise to sell. Definitely some prints; maybe a mousepad or two. And of course, Tales from the Inner Sanctum. Oh, and I'll be carrying around the inked pages from Kill All Monsters! #1, so ask to see those. They're beeyooteefull!

Tales from the Inner Sanctum at the Source

Yesterday I dropped off several copies of Tales from the Inner Sanctum #2 at The Source Comics and Games in Saint Paul. Probably everyone who reads this and lives in the area already has a copy, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

Writing is Hard: The Clever Trap

The other day I read something that made a lot of sense and I want to capture it here.

It was on a message board commenting on a particular cartoon, but the idea can apply to all writing. A fan of the cartoon defended it by saying that it's "funny because it defies your expectations."

To which someone who didn't like it replied, "to think that anything strange or unexpected makes a good comic is to fall into the trap that makes so much 'clever' art and literature fall flat on it's face. Always, always, always comics should firstly be moving, amusing or entertaining."

The word "comic" could easily be substituted with "story," don't you think?

I realize when I look at some of my short comics stories that I fell into that trap. I went for clever, twist endings instead of moving or amusing stories. Certainly not all of them, but some. Johanna Draper Carlson didn't mention me in particular about this in her review of Tales from the Inner Sanctum #1, but she did notice the phenomenon when she wrote, "many (of the stories) rely on twist endings that become predictable once the reader realizes that most of the contributions are aiming for such."

This is something that I need to remember to think about if I write more short comics stories.

MicroCon 2005

MicroCon was so much fun. I shared a table with Grant Gould and Jessica Hickman again like we did at FallCon last October. I was much better prepared this time though and we had a good looking table, I think. Here's some pictures of it before the con got started. Click on it or any of the other images to see a full-sized picture.

Since FallCon, Grant was selected to be an official sketch artist for the Revenge of the Sith cards. That's a collage of some of his sketch cards behind him. I kept forgetting to ask, but I think Jess is working on a page from Three Days the Devil Danced.

Behind the Grafika and Cownt stuff on the table you can see a cool drawing that Grant was nice enough to contribute to my Black Canary sketchbook. One of these days I'll get the rest of the sketchbook scanned in and posted on my LiveJournal, but for now, here's Grant sketching and a better shot of the final piece.

Grant had a great idea for attracting people to his side of the table. He'd made up trading-sized cards on which to do personal sketchs for people of whatever Star Wars character they wanted. Or any other character some joker like me wanted to see holding a lightsaber. One guy requested a Scrooge McDuck. I wanted the Cownt.

One of the coolest things about the con was all the kids there with their parents. Grant attracted those guys like Pooh bears to honey.

After a while, fellow Grafika member Darla Ecklund showed up to pretty up my side of the table.

Seeing people is the best part of these things. There's some folks I only get to see a couple of times a year like Sam Hiti.

This year there were several people whom I'd talked to online, but never met in person. The scurvy rogue known on Steve Niles's message board as Black Bart stopped by and picked up a copy of Tales from the Inner Sanctum #2. I also finally got to meet inker Barb Schulz after missing her for coffee a week or so ago. There was also indie creator Jennifer Young who's done some very cool mini-comics and a graphic novel called Cold Summer. I love her work and it was great finally getting to meet her. I don't know why I'm so serious in the picture. Blech. The camera caught her in mid-gum-smack, but I think it works for her.

What else? Oh, yeah. I got to meet some cool new people too. There was a father and son there with a table who are starting their own publishing business and are looking for creators. We exchanged information and promised to stay in touch. And I talked to lots of comics fans. One fella bought Tales from the Inner Sanctum #1 thanks to the fact that Jess's original pages were on the table (I bought those from her, which was my coolest purchase of the day). There was also a nice couple named Amanda and Mike with whom I had a very nice, long conversation. And then there was this guy. We never did figure out who he was supposed to be dressed as. That's green construction paper on his head though.

My brother-in-law and co-Cownt-creator Dave showed up for a while. It's weird to me how much he and Cownt artist Gav Spence look alike.

And that's pretty much it. After the show, Grant, Jess, Dave, and I went and got some burgers and called it a day.

The End.

Red Eye

There was a nice, big box full of these when I got home today:



Which means that I am now Officially Ready for MicroCon.