Matt Shepherd’s Man-Man: The Blog

WARNING: contains some strong language.

Beginning at the beginning:

I took the overnight train from Montreal to Toronto at 11:30 Thursday night. The idea was to get to Toronto, have breakfast with my friend Ed and figure out lodging arrangements (I was staying at Ed’s place), walk around a bit, have lunch with my friend Doug and get to the convention to sign it at around 3 p.m., as the con opened at around 4. It worked out well: I read and slept on the train in about equal amounts, rolling into Union Station on time with about four hours sleep. Not ideal, but about what I expected. Breakfast and catching up with Ed was excellent, as was my walk through my old haunts, as was my lunch with Doug.

Then I got to the convention.

It was pretty surreal to begin with: several hundred people milling around the convention centre, and I had a real hard time finding the room where “guests” were supposed to sign in. Eventually, I did: an empty conference room with a black curtain stretching across the back third of it on metal frames. I got in line to pick up my pass, and as I waited, James Marsters (“Spike” on a TV show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a special guest at the convention) walked past me and behind the black curtain. Then a tall guy with a guitar followed him. Then, a few seconds later, somebody back there started playing the guitar and singing; I assume Marsters (or maybe Marsters was just singing, or maybe Marsters was just playing the guitar, but THAT doesn’t make much sense). So I’m waiting to pick up my guest pass, and Spike is singing soft rock from behind a curtain ten feet away from me. A good surreal start to a really surreal weekend.

Make my way upstairs to the main con floor, and find the Slave Labour booth, and meet Dan Vado and Joe Nakamura. Dan’s in his late thirties/early forties, full beard, full head of hair, about my height and seems kind of angry. Joe exudes this twenty-foot ring of friendliness that takes a bit of the edge off me being nervous. So I say hi, and they say, hi, and then Dan says “I have some bad news for you,” and I think “oh God.”

Dan tells me that there has been a series of unfavourable events leading up to the con. The technical term, used quite often in the comic industry, that Dan employs is a “clusterfuck.” There has been a clusterfuck, which has resulted in Dan and Joe’s flight being re-routed and delayed and, to make things worse, a concurrent screw-up by Federal Express that has caused half of Slave Labor’s merchandise to head to Syracuse instead of Toronto, with no way for it to clear customs and get to us for the convention.

The half of the Slave Labor shipment that is in Syracuse includes my book.

All copies of it.

So I’m at the convention, and there are no Dead Eyes Open comics there. I’ve brought a handful, five or six, and we hit the other stores at the con to see if they have any copies, but everyone in town is sold out except for one store, but the owner gets in kind of a weird confrontation thing with Dan (hard to explain) so that kind of bottoms out. No comics for me, is the upshot. Thankfully, DEO has a four-page excerpt in the big Slave Labor Sampler book they’re giving away, so I have SOMETHING to stack in front of me and sign.

The convention itself is kind of weird.

See, I thought I was going to a comic book convention, which was concurrent with a sci-fi convention, an anime convention, and a horror convention. All in different rooms, or areas, because you can buy distinct passes for each. But really, the passes just regulate which panels and movie screenings you can get into, and the entire convention is crammed onto one huge floor.

My intention in going was (a) to meet the Slave Labor crew, (b) to meet, hopefully, some editorial staff from other comic companies and give them a copy of DEO and maybe lay the groundwork for future work, and (c) to meet what few people had read DEO and were at the con.

But Slave Labor is the only major publisher there. Actually, there’s Speakeasy, which puts out some awesome books, but they have a distribution model that I’m not entirely comfortable about getting myself involved with. But the big guns: Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image – and the equal guns: IDW, Top Shelf, NBM, Alias… not there. There are individual creators who do WORK for all these companies, but nobody from the companies proper.

A minute on Slave Labor’s position in the comics industry: imagine the music industry instead. If you’re under 35, this will probably make sense: Slave Labor is the Sub Pop of the comics world. Which means they’re not the biggest company by a long shot, but they put out a lot of great material and have some incredibly groundbreaking, influential, and popular artists on the roster.

So I’m there with no comics, which is freaking me out a little, but the con is freaking me out more. There is so… much… fricking… STUFF. I walk around for about an hour, just looking at all the exhibitors’ booths. Mostly stores who have set up shop for the weekend. And the stuff. I can’t begin to describe. Millions of comics, first of all, but also toys and masks and shirts and videos and board games and collectibles and video games and puppets and accessories and it goes on and on forever. If you’ve ever wanted an action figure of Christian Bale in American Psycho, this is the place to get it. If you want episodes of The Hilarious House of Frightenstein on DVD, you’re in the right place. It’s kind of overwhelming, and then there are the people in costumes. Yeeeee.

Back at the Slave Labor booth, a few more guys show up: Chris Reilly and Steve Ahlquist, two of the three editors of the Strange Eggs anthology (Ahlquist was also the writer of Oz Squad, which I loved back in the day), Dave Ray, an artist who did one of the Strange Eggs segments. Really, really nice guys. We chat for a bit, then James Turner, who does Rex Libris and the graphic novel Nil, shows up, and we all talk for a while. Turns out this is also James’ first con experience, and he’s about as dazed and bemused by the whole thing as I am. But he has books, goddammit … and also the coolest buttons I’ve ever seen in my life, which he’s selling for 25 cents and which are an immediate smash.

Thirty seconds after we sit down, people start asking us if Jhonen will be doing a signing and if Jhonen will be there and where Jhonen is and if Jhonen is going to make it. And a while later, Jhonen Vasquez shows up. Now, belabouring the music industry metaphor: if Slave Labor is Sub Pop, Jhonen is Nirvana. Seriously. No, SUPER seriously. He’s one of the Big Draws at the whole convention. And whenever he walks in the room, it’s like … imagine a magnet being dragged down a room full of sand, but mixed among the sand are hundreds of iron filings. Now, imagine that these iron filings are goths, and Jhonen is the magnet. So from out of the crowds, hundreds of people dressed in black sort of file out and follow him like the tail on a comet. It’s really … something. And the constant status of everyone else at the booth as not-Jhonen in the eyes of the world WOULD be frustrating, were it not for the fact that Jhonen turns out to be a super nice guy. He’s there with his friend Zoe, and the minute James and I introduce ourselves – Chris and Phil have already met him – he’s full of compliments about our books, which he’s read and absorbed and really likes. Which is scarily cool. I’ve loved Jhonen’s stuff since I was in university, so – music metaphor again – imagine opening for a Nirvana show back when they were huge and having the band tell you very specifically what they really, really like about your album before you even have a chance to speak. It’s neat, and really impressive, and really genuine. So you can’t really begrudge Jhonen for being popular when he’s just a nice guy that seems happy to be there. Don’t get me wrong, he’s not huggable or anything, but he’s a very nice guy.

So Friday continues, and Jhonen hangs around for a couple hours and signs things. There’s a real horrorshow incident while Jhonen’s doing signings – nothing that results in injury, but a couple of guys just get offensive and quasi-assault him, Dan pulls them away, they take off, and everything goes back to normal. Jhonen then heads back to the hotel; the rest of us just hang around and talk about comics and life and other things. It’s great – these are all fantastic guys, and loads of fun just to hang out with. We all get asked Jhonen questions about eight zillion times. Eventually, the con wraps up, and James leads us on a merry expedition (with Jhonen and Zoe) to a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, which I guess is sort of intuitive, and nine of us cram around a table for six and are served by a server who combines both the servile aspects of an attentive waiter and the regimented control structure of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi. To the point of batting Jhonen’s hand away when he tries to serve the huge bowl of soup on the table, adopting a Soup Stance with one hand behind his back and the other hand tossing soup into bowls with what I can only describe as zest. Dinner’s great; we all head home. I stay up and talk to Ed and Rebecca (Ed’s wife) for about three hours after that, getting to bed around four a.m.

Six o’clock, I’m awake. It’s like a medical condition. So I wake up and read stuff for about three hours, then go grab coffee and a cookie and walk around on Dupont Street for a bit, then head down to the convention centre for about nine. Help Dan and Joe set up the booth, and the day begins. Today, I’ve wised up: still no comics, but I make a big sign that says my comic has SOLD OUT, but people are welcome to grab a sticker (Roy and I made a bunch of DEO stickers, and Roy signed about two hundred of them and sent them back) and a sampler comic. So I sign a ton of sampler comics, usually handing them out to people in line to get stuff signed while Jhonen’s doing a signing. Four or five people come up to me specifically to tell me how much they liked Dead Eyes Open. Astoundingly, one of them is down from Thunder Bay (I was born in Wawa, so we’re practically sort of neighbours in an extended way), and I get interviewed for a podcast by a couple of neat guys who actually know where the comic’s title comes from – a Severed Heads single from the album Come Visit The Big Bigot.

Saturday’s cool. But by the end of the day, I look like I’m going through heroin withdrawal. Everyone else is bushed, too, so we all go our seperate ways – the Rhode Island contingent has a hotel out in Brampton (! “Canadians don’t have clear highway signs,” they say), Dan and Joe and Jhonen and Zoe are just going to chill at the hotel, so James and I have dinner at a Tex-Mex place on Queen street, a great conversation about comics and day jobs and how the two intertwine (dude lives next door to one of my Canadian comic-book heroes, which almost gives me a heart attack), and then I head back to Ed’s for about 10 p.m. and we have this great four-hour talk about life and religion and politics and writing and the creative process. So at two a.m. I’m pretty wiped; off to bed and, of course, up at 6 a.m. Sunday.

Sunday was awesome, because I was (slightly) better rested and felt like I finally had a handle on the whole “convention” thing. So I really checked out Artist’s Alley, meeting a dozen or so great indie artists and pros, and was pleasantly surprised to run into Salgood Sam from Montreal. An outside shot that some Purolatored DEOs might arrive from California turned out to be a bust, so it was a last day without books. Whatever – I’m having a great time meeting people, talking to the SLG guys, and just getting to know some really awesome people from all over.

Con wraps up, some of us go out for dinner and a beer or two, and then I head uptown to meet up with a group of old high-school and university friends to catch up. What a great night that was – a lot of people I haven’t seen for years, in some cases ten years. Of the eight people there, everyone knows each other in clusters of twos or threes, so we all sort of do the get-to-know you round the table, and drink and talk and generally make merry for a couple hours. Unfortunately, by this time I’m wired from convention adrenaline, buzzed from the dinner beers, exhausted from lack of sleep, and a little delerious from running from the wrong subway stop to meet everyone. So I sort of jabbered insanely and waved my hands a lot, and everyone humoured me. It was very nice of them.

Monday morning, I had breakfast with my sister and caught up with her, and then it was back to the train, back to Montreal, bus back to Sherbrooke, and home at about 10 p.m. And today, back at work.

It was a good weekend.

And that’s it at great length. Over 2,000 words, actually. Sorry about the length, but you can understand why I don’t want to TELL everybody all this individually, over and over again.