37 wedding

Me

This last weekend I flew out to California for my friend Brian's wedding. It was a mix of Jewish and Indian Christain wedding traditions that amazingly mixed quite well. It was one of the better weddings I've been to, and I've been to hundreds of weddings (my quartet used to play wedding gigs all the time). Still it was sort of sad in a way, not because of the day, but because it made me feel old, like the closing of another chapter. But never mind that, here's to the next!

Brian waits


Karen arrives


Jess Speaks


They listen


Brian ties the Thali


Karen and the Sari


And as always, it ends with cake


JQ on the left


Jess on the right

Pickled Garlic

Whoa! Crazy Page 96 storyboard preview! (zoomed in)

Chris just finished the storyboard for page 96, so the race is on to see if I can finish it before I go to California for my friends Wedding this Friday. It sure would be nice because we are heading over to Dallas for A-Kon on the 3rd of June. It will be interesting to see how that goes in comparison to Anime Central. We only have an Artist table this time, and since they are setting it up in a giant square, I'm going to be hard pressed to figure out a way to set up our booth properly, especially since we have to take everything on the plane with us.. O_o I have a half formed idea in my head about how to get the back drop up.. But we'll see.

Anime Central a Success

Despite some early programming issues, Anime Central went off pretty well for us. Parking was not so great and we didn't know about the loading dock area, so we ended up having to park in a parking garage and transport all of our merchandise and display elements about half a mile to our booth. Luckily I had just bought a little suitcase with wheels that would just hold one 50lb box of our books or we would have been hurting!

The Convention Center from our room.

When we got there someone had swiped our table, but that was quickly sorted out and we got set up with time to spare. We didn't have any power, so I didn't get to work on the page at all, but to tell the truth, it would have been hard anyway, we were pretty busy with sales and answering questions.

Our Booth! ( it was more impressive in real life )

On Friday night Chris and I gave our "Creating Webcomics" Panel. It was a pretty full room and we got applause at the end. Some of the audience came by our booth later and told us it was the best panel they had ever been to, That's always nice to hear!

The next night we got together with Carrie from 9th Elsewhere, Jerry from Secret of Mana Theater and Brion from Flipside and recorded a three hour three hour Alpha Rant Webcomic interview special. I will be posting that as a podcast after I get done editing it. We also talked to some other people about doing some remote interviews, so hopefully those will happen in the coming months as well.

Anyway, sales of Chapter one went really well, and I'm feeling inspired to work harder on Chapter 2. The cool thing is that most of the people who bought the book have never heard of us before, so we reached a whole new audience. It was nice to finally get to meet a lot of our favorite webcomic creators like Michael Poe from Errant Story, FAUB's John Fortman, Christopher Snowdon from Steampowered, Dirk Tiede from Paradigm Shift, the guys from Studio Antithesis and many more. We also made some great contacts. We'll defenatly be back next year!

Pic of JQ, Me and Chris, thanks to Stacie from Studio Anti Thesis

Me and an Actual Fan! Her Favorite page was 74.

Fred and Sarah from Megatokyo stopped by to say hello.

No Con is complete without a cute girl in a Pikachu outfit

Back to the Grind

Now that the books have all been sent out it's time to get back to the grindstone and crank out some pages. It really is time to update the website as well though. It's starting to feel kind of pieced together, which isn't my intention. What I'd like to do it get it more unified, change the navigation etc. I finally got around to buying the new Version of Macromedia Studio 2004, so I have a lot more freedom to design the site..

Speaking of Macromedia I was shocked to hear that Adobe is trying to acquire Macromedia! I have no idea what that means for my favorite program - Flash. I'm slightly concerned because I really hate the Illustrator version of vector illustration, Flash kicks it's ass. I know there are a lot of designers out there who don't use Flash like I do however and they have been clamoring for Macromedia to change it's drawing tools to be more like Illustrators for years. Very Scrary! On the other hand, I am NOT impressed with the changes Macromedia made to the drawing tools in the latest version of Flash. It also seems to be a huge memory hog, I have 2 gigs of Memory in my computer and Flash 2004 still runs slow when the illustrations start to get complicated. So we'll see. It could either be a really good thing or a really bad thing. I guess the only way to know is to wait and see.

Everything's Shipped

All of the preorders are now out the door and on their way. What a relief!

I can't wait for people to satrt getting them!

International Packages Packed

I just finished packing up the international orders this morning. Filling out the custom forms and matching all the little pieces together, labels, customs forms, packing slips etc. was a huge pain in the butt. I'm not sure how this is going to work at the post office. I'd like to use the self serve kiosk again, but I may have to use a teller, I shudder at how long THAT will take :P I'll let you know how it goes. Hopefully it will be easy?

But probably not.

Domestic Orders Shipped

Well I just finished shipping off all of the US orders this morning. I started to do them yesterday afternoon using the self serve kiosk but it broke. So I took the remainder of the box I was doing ( about 15 packages, stood in line and had the postal guy do them for me, after 20 minutes and feeling like the rest of the customers were going to kill me for taking so long I decided to come back this morning when no one would be there and the self serve kiosk would be fixed.

I have to say, The self serve mailing system is awesome! (when it works) you can do a package in about 20 seconds from start to finish, which kicks the pants off the systems the post office employees have to use, they take about a minute and a half per package. AND it's open 24 hours, so I went at 4am this morning, no one but me and 4 boxes of packages ;)

I did learn some interesting things:
You can't use self serve to ship to military bases
It takes 35 days to send a package to Hawaii by parcel post
It takes 35 days to send a package to Alaska by parcel post

So next time I'll have to use the Priority mail envelopes to send stuff to Hawaii or Alaska.

US orders packed

Well it was a choice between getting the page out on Wednesday or packing up the book orders. I went for the orders.

Half of the preorders are packed!

I packed up the domestic orders tonight, I'll be doing international tomorrow. I think I have to include customs forms with them :P luckily I can download those from the web so I can cut and paste in the addresses. I'm wondering how awful this is going to be when I get them to the post office. I should probably go when no one else will be around!

We have the books

Well My friend Aaron and I picked up the books from the printers and took them to my brothers house yesterday. There are 113 boxes that each weigh about 50 lbs. It took three trips even with the gigantic truck his girlfriend let us borrow!

108 boxes of comics (I took 5 to my house so I can send them out)

I also made a promotional video of the book so people can get an idea of what it looks like.
Of course nothing can really give you the idea of how nice it is until you see it in person and hold the thing in your hand. It's really a heavy book, (because we used 100lb glossy paper) and the print quality is supurb!

I will start sending these out probably tomorrow, I want to finish the current page first. It's going to be a big project, we've had about 150 peorders so far, that's alot of envelope stuffing!

Snow?

Should it be snowing in May?

It looks like rain here, but it's actually fluries