Zub Tales

Apparently the alarm clock here in Toronto has been going off at 5:30am all week while I was away in San Diego. I found that out first thing this morning when it woke me up and I groggily turned it off.

Ouch. My body aches and my head feels distant. It must be post-San Diego.

Details and more photos behind the cut…

We leave for San Diego tomorrow morning. I can’t believe this is my fourth Comic-Con coming up, let alone my third with Udon. Each one has been a surreal and wonderful experience. Each one is a whirlwind of things happening all around me.

Last minute packing.
Butterflies in my stomach.
My brain going a mile a minute.

It’s times like this that I feel like my life is a journey. It’s not a 9 to 5 job and it’s probably never going to be. It’s an undulating and shifting mass of challenges and pitfalls. It’s the fear and joy that comes with being catapulted into new creative experiences.

If you’ll be attending the show, I look forward to seeing you again or meeting you for the first time.

Udon will be at Booth #5556. Most of the Udon crew will be there signing the Udon 2005 Sketchbook, Exalted #0, Street Fighter and Darkstalkers comics and doing sketches. In addition, we have two Japanese Street Fighter artists attending as our guests signing a limited edition version of the Capcom Eternal Challenge artbook. There will also be a Street Fighter arcade machine on free play all weekend by our booth.

Pure chaos.

90,000+ attendees and a convention center 6 blocks long. Here we go again.

Maybe someday it’ll be “business as usual”.

Back from Origins. We debated staying until Monday morning to get some extra rest, but decided to make the trek on Sunday evening instead and get back home for sleep.

The show went pretty well overall. The comic sold more than White Wolf had anticipated we would, which was really nice. Quite a few people hadn’t heard there was an Exalted comic coming out which means we’re informing more people about it – obviously quite a good thing.

I wasn’t sure what to expect sales wise. Origins is a gaming-heavy show and all indications looked like attendance was up. The crowd there is definitely board game/minis skewed and involves a lot more playing than buying. Even still, we moved a bunch of the books and sold quite a few to some retailers who will be carrying it back at their home stores. I have no idea what that will mean for sales when compared to Gen Con or Dragon Con later on this summer.

Other highlights:
– Drunken karaoke on Wednesday night to celebrate Brian’s birthday.
– Learning to play Gloom with Ray and Gal. Ray later taught us some kick ass Black Jack strategies to boot.
– Seeing many friends including dextra, ssines, d20hound and crothian.
– Dancing like crazy on Friday night even though my legs felt like jelly.
– Playing Capture the Flag on the show floor with the FanPro gang on Saturday afternoon. Those guys kick ass and made the day entertaining.
– Chatting about the elements that make up the new World of Darkness with Gal and Ray on the drive home.

That’s the quickie version. We’re leaving for Comic-Con in a week and then things will go totally berserk. I’ll post some Origins photos up by tomorrow. Today I rest and tomorrow I dive into the dozens of things that need to get done before we leave.

5 reasons why I am a geek. Given to me as a challenge by the_caveat.

1) Marvel Comics Trivia – especially 80’s continuity crap. My mother used to get irritated that I wasn’t reading anything but comics. To combat her irritation I started lugging around the Handbook of the Marvel Universe and reading obsessively from it (Look Mom, it’s almost all text! Not a comic at all). How obsessive? My brother Joe and I used to test each other with ridiculous trivia like “What was the first appearance of the Killer Shrike?” and stuff like that. Most of it is still stuck in my brain.

2) I have half a shelf of anime soundtracks I can’t understand and 3 shelves of tankobon I can’t read. In a related anime vein – my first webpage was a Geocities site dedicated to Masakazu Katsura. It still exists and gets traffic even though I don’t update it.

3) My multitudes of comics, DVDs and books are all organized alphabetically or by subject and then alphabetically. The moving company that took my stuff from Calgary to Halifax was disturbed that half of the weight of the load hauled was in books and movies.

4) I have binders full of production model sheets from animated movies… hundreds of them all organized by year of release or alphabetical order. They started off at Sheridan as a reference resource and are now just a collection of their own. At Sheridan some of the animation instructors used to ask me for reference material instead of the other way around.

5) I make my living in comics, card games, RPGs and other illustration. Geeks pay my bills and I love it!

This journal entry is my 5 minute break. Heh.

On the run today indeed… up until 4am at a meeting discussing everything that needs to happen before San Diego Comic-Con, then up at 8am, get ready and off to the print house to make sure the Exalted prints are spot on. Color corrections right before our eyes and the prints went to press as we walked away. I grabbed a couple uncut sheets as a souvenier:

On the left is a Street Fighter print we had done at the same time… good ol’ Dark Ryu. Obviously the prints will be trimmed and sorted before we pick them up on Monday.

Now a flurry of e-mails and phone calls through the afternoon mobilizing the stuff we talked about last night and keeping track of a couple new projects and then it’s off to dinner with Erik and a gent from Diamond Distribution to talk comics and books. By tonight, I’ll be in need of some serious sleepy sleep. My throat’s been acting up. I think my body is fighting a cold, so I need to beat this before we drive out to Ohio Tuesday night for Origins.

Exalted #0 is available now from Hero Fix. They send out deliveries within 48 hours, which means you could end up getting the book before people at Origins do.

The zero issue and the Jasara art print are also available as a pre-order from White Wolf’s Online Catalogue:

Exalted #0
Exalted Art Print: Jasara

Both those items will start shipping from White Wolf’s warehouse right after Origins next weekend.

Other questions are answered in the Exalted Comic FAQ.