Supanova 5: In the Ass of Madness

Need a lift, buddy?

Well, the Melbourne stretch of the Supanova convention is over and next up is Brisbane. The two non-convention days in Melbourne since the thing ended on Sunday have been fairly quiet with very few signs of The Hatch to disturb our sleep. Someone claims to have found some Hatch droppings on the roof of a church, but without proper laboratory facilities they could be anything droppings, and, in fact, look suspiciously like regular old human droppings (Australians, for whatever reason, seem to love shitting on churches).
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Supanova 4: Ambiguously Hairy Genitals

Don't hate me because I am beautiful.

After the sometimes traumatizing ordeals of the previous days, Sunday was a walk in the fly-infested park, to be sure.  I’m not even sure the day warrants a report, but I’ll see what I can dredge up from memory.
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Supanova 3: The Signening

Try my delicious spicy chicken. You know you want to.

Waking in a puddle of my own sick, having sleep-expunged at least my stomach’s memories of the night before, I thought about the day ahead. It was Saturday, the first day of the actual signing portion of the Supanova convention.
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Supanova 2: Roo’d

Some years back, when I was working on Intruder JIM, I took a trip to Korea to visit the overseas animation studio where the show was being animated and was treated to a rather unexpected little bit of local business custom.  I was taken, by the suit and tie wearing executives from the studio to a ‘gentleman’s club’.

The extent of it, for me, was that the studio people, all your very average, distinguished Korean types in suits and ties, glasses and smart, short haircuts, brought the few of us that were visiting into this dark place where women came out and walked around on a stage, each of them wearing a number.  The numbers were for picking which women you wanted to come down and be your server and company for the time you spend there, serving drinks, chatting about whatever it is there was to chat about, and looking generally thankful for not being their feet anymore.
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Supanova: The Rackening

Take THAT, you tacky heathens! Unf!

I’ll write something more detailed about Friday’s events later.  Today, Saturday, will be the first day of actual signing and cavorting with the native fans, and I’m sure I’ll get into that as well, but I wanted to get out a few things about yesterday.

I wandered around the showroom floor a little bit and checked out the area they were setting up for me to sign at.  It was your standard signing getup, complete with  flaming torches and trapdoors leading to acid vats and such.  Nothing to get too excited about.

Someone pointed out a rack of comics that would be part of the setup, half full of some but not all of my books.  Really, it was just the old school stuff : JTHM, SQUEE!, and I Feel Sick.  Dunno if they had any Jellyfists on site, but I don’t recall them being on the rack.  The rest of the books were issues of Lenore, and I pointed this out, mentioning that those were not done by me but were part of an experiment in teaching violent gorillas to channel their anger into more creative outlets.

The person I pointed this out to responded, saying they were aware of the fact that the books were not works of mine, but that the “people who buy your stuff will buy that stuff, too.”

Like Jesus and the moneylenders, I swiped the issues of Angry Gorilla Comics (Lenore) off the rack, making a huge mess of things.  I proclaimed that readers should maybe pick something new up now and then.  The last thing I want to do is to perpetuate the stereotype that my fans are just tasteless zombies without the desire to pick up more than what’s being marketed directly into their asses.  I’d rather have people genuinely like or despise what I do rather than pick it up blindly as a requirement of their “scene”.

I suggested maybe replacing them with issues of The Walking Dead, something I wish I could talk about to more people, dig?  Something I could geek out to to the people that stand in line to get my child-like scrawl on their copies of JTHM.

Just a note, though:  Pretending to be Jesus and knocking shit all over the place really doesn’t make you look that cool.  I thought it would get me chicks and respect, but mostly it got me dirty looks from the guys that had to pick everything up.  I even joined in, picking up books and saying terrible things about myself, but the damage was done.