04.30.2006 - Isabel Marks:

Hi gang...it's time for another funday Monday news update! With actual important news!

First off... we made the goal for the month of May- which means Namir Deiter will update seven days a week, You Say it First updates six and Spare Parts two. Thanks to everyone who donated (especially to one person in particular... I owe you, my friend... I owe you. If I could bake, I'd send you cookies). Bonus content (such as wallpapers and bonus story info) will be up in the next coming days... sorry, the Buttons the kitten issue (which was paid by your loving support- thank you all!! ;__;) threw me for a loop. As for Buttons... she's still not feeling well from all the hydrogen peroxide they gave her. If she's not better by tomorrow night we get to take her to the vet and pray there is a way out of this that won't cost thousands.

We're having a 24-hour sale on May 1st. Discounts on Spare Parts, The Shokora Diaries, Undoubtedly Kawaii, and the Namir Deiter 2005 Yearbook.

Ok, I JUST found out Free Comic Book Day is May 6th. My ever-loving hubby told me it was around October... yeah, we didn't know. After last year I wanted to do something really special and fun for the 2006 version, but it looks like once again I will have to do something really quick and cheesy! Hooray!

Want to know how to get the free comic book day book sent to your home? Unfortunately I don't have the power of free distribution in comic book shops... so you all will have to pay for shipping (boo me if you like).
There are several ways to get the book...

If you donate at least $1.20 (and live in the US or Canada)- you will get one of these books sent to you plus the wallpaper as usual. No fuss, no muss. E-mail me if you live outside of the US for the price... I don't have them on-hand. This is to offset shipping and just a little bit of the production.

If you donate the $10 to get the bonus book for the month- the Free Comic Book day book will be sent free of charge along with it (plus of course your one month account to NamirDeiter.net, home to daily comic commentary, sketch days five days a week, comics two days a week plus oodles of wallpapers!).

If purchase at least one of the books from the ND Unlimited Story in the month of May you will receive the free comic book day book free of charge.

I hope to have the book ready to be shipped no later than the end of May... no earlier than the 6th (sorry... still got to write, draw and make the things). The book will only be available for the month, but will more than likely become web content in a few months from now (but as a bonus incentive to donate and/or pay for your shipping... it'll be a story from an all new series. Ooooohh!). Of course page count is still undecided.

Also, all of April's donation books have been sent! We will work on buttons for donators soon!

Also... an update on Namir Deiter Book 2!

...ok, we have now heard back from all the books editors (yes, my grammar is so horrid that I need more than one) and Terrence is making the changes as I type this. We are also working on getting our ISBN numbers to work for us (which means we might be able to sell the books through Amazon... if we ever get the chance to look into it). I hope to have the book to the printers by the end of the week... which means we are now one week behind schedule. Nuts.

How will this affect pre-orders? I really hope it doesn't... I'm especially worried now because Terrence and myself will be out of town near the end of the month, which may throw a few more wrenches (or monkeys) into the works. I will try my best to leave things in such a way where my relative monkey minions can gets the books shipped to pre-order people while I am away.

04.17.2006 - Terrence Marks:

Yes, you read it right - we're taking pre-orders for Namir Deiter Year 2 - "Summer's Last Hurrah". We'll be taking them on-line only, until May 8th. We're trying to get a handle on how many books to order, so we strongly encourage you to pre-order a copy. That's why all pre-orders include a bonus sketch (of an ND character on the title page of the book) and a minicomic featuring a full-color version of the book's bonus story.

Status: Commentary done. Comics being proofread. Bonus story being colored. Book expected in early June.

04.17.2006 - Terrence Marks:

Now, I've spoken before on con salesmanship. Two years ago at Comic-Con we aggressively handed out flyers. People would walk past our table double-speed, trying not to make eye contact with any of us because they knew we'd make them take one if they slowed down at all. That was unpleasant after about the fourth day.

We took it easy here. It was a lot more pleasant. Peter brought a bowl with little chocolates. That was our "hard sell". If anyone came by and looked interested, we'd offer them one. It worked fairly well. It broke the ice and gave people a chance to start talking to us about our work if they wanted to.

Peter would ask "Do you like comics?" while gesturing to our books.If they said no, I'd ask "Well, do you like science fiction?" while gesturing to his. Some people said "no" to that also; I wondered what they were doing there.

After a while, word was getting around. Someone came up and asked "Is this the table with the free chocolate?".

A few fans came by (Hi, Geoff). A few more sent their friends to pick them up something (Hi, Brendan). A few random walkups. We signed some of the Kevin & Kell books dedicated to us when Bill sent people our way. It was fun.

David Kyle
Peter introduced us to David Kyle. David Kyle was organizing science fiction cons back when they called it "scientifiction". He published the first hardcover books by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Howard. He wrote three Lensman books. He's easy to spot at a science-fiction convention because he wears a red jacket and is in his late 80s.

He's cool. Not "cool for such an old guy". He's cool. He asked how long we were married. Three years, we said.

"How many months? How many days?"

"Today's the twenty-fifth?"

"Yeah"

"Three years, three months, and three days".

"You're putting me on".

"Nope. Jackpot."

The Dinner
There was an awards banquet Saturday night. We didn't get tickets. We weren't aware of it until Peter asked us how many tickets we had. So us, Bill Holbrook, Dressari, and the Prellwitz family headed off to dinner at a local Chinese buffet. I felt bad about taking them away from the banquet for a while until I realized that Peter's children didn't have tickets either and he couldn't've just left them there.

I learned something important about Kevin & Kell from Bill. Kell Dewclaw? In her last name, the stress is on the second syllable as if it were DuClaw. I had always pronounced it with the stress on the first syllable, like "dewdrop".

Bill asked what Lemon Technology actually does. They resell fragrances, generally for industrial use. I wanted it to be a company that did something that would never affect most people. Something that was unglamorous and had a fairly limited market. A company that didn't sell direct to the public. But when your company orders a gallon of pine-scented disinfectant to mop the floors with, the pine scent has to come from somewhere.

Since this was the largest number of You Say it First readers I had assembled to date, I asked if they thought they could tell when Isabel wrote the comic and when I wrote it. I had always wondered about that, how similar our writing styles really are. I think they're fairly different, but since we edit each others' work it probably gets blurry. They said they never thought about it, which means there probably aren't any great differences. One day I may publish a scorecard. The Lounge Guys give you +5 to "Written by Terrence". Or maybe not. I'm never sure about how much of the process to reveal.

George Takei
I was walking through the hotel lobby. A man was looking for his wife. She came into the room and said, "Georgie! There you are!". As I walked away, there was an Asian man in a Planet Hollywood jacket around the corner. He said "I thought I heard somebody calling me".

I said "No, I think it was a different George".

I realized, then, that he was George Takei. We were heading the same direction - I was staying a few doors down from him, I later found out. That meant that I had a whole minute to try to think of something better to say than "George Takei! You are so cool!". Because, well, he's just come back from several hours of that. I couldn't so we walked quietly back to our rooms.

The End. Hope you had as much fun reading it as I did living it.

04.10.2006 - Terrence Marks:

I-Con Report, part 2
Badges
The names on the con badges were printed very small, in about 8-point font. We hadn't brought the badges Isabel made for previous cons. We should've, just so people could tell who we were. I couldn't read them without my glasses, and even then I'd have to lean in and there's that awkward "Have I heard of this person before?" moment that took a second too long because of the small print on the names.

If you're a cartoonist, it really helps to make yourself a namebadge that's easily identifiable. It should have a recognizeable piece of your art and your name printed large. The first con I went to, I wore an ascot. I don't any more for a number of reasons. Firstly, I know this is a borderline case, but I think dressing as your own character is too gimmicky and comes across as a little desparate. Secondly, Brisbane doesn't wear them consistantly so the relevance is kind of lost. Thirdly, I lost them.

The Panels
We had four panels, all on Sunday. This was our first time doing panels. To prepare, we saw Stan Sakai's "How Usagi Yojimbo Came to Be". I felt mildly intimidated when I realized that he had been doing this since I was nine and Isabel was more likely to eat her crayons than color with them, and I couldn't possibly become as good as that. At least not in one afternoon. It did, however, make me wish we had gone to all of his other panels.

Our first panel was "Getting Started in Online Comics" or something like that. It featured us, Bill Holbrook, and Mookie. It was at 10 AM on Sunday, when the con first opened. It was in a different room than was listed on the schedule. A marathon closed down the road most people used to get to the con. There was only one person in the audience, Dressari, and that was because he came over with us. He'd had dinner with us and Bill the night before and didn't have any questions left over. About 45 minutes in, we went back to the dealers room because nobody else had shown up and they had to relocate the belly dancers' panel to that room because the anime dance had caught fire the night before. I'm not making any of that up, honest. The only thing that would've improved it was more audience, and I'm not even sure that would've helped. They drew Kevin, Tipper, and Dominic on the chalkboard. I considered writing a two-panel exchange between Kimberly and Brisbane up there, but couldn't think of anything that'd stand on it's own especially well.

We headed back to our table for a little while and waited for for our next panels, which were a three-hour block, one right after the other.

What I feared most was that there would be a large audience who were more familiar with our comic than we were, who would ask us detailed questions and embarass us about apparent contradictions in the characters' personalities or the timeline. Ask us things like "Do you really expect us to take the comic seriously with the lounge guys in it?".

I was entirely wrong. What I should have feared most was an audience that we outnumbered, half of whom had heard of our comics once or twice but hadn't read any of it.

The first panel was "Why anthropomorphic characters?". Bill, Isabel, and I each had about five minute answers for that. Mine was the simplest - because there were a lot of other good comics out there that did it and it made the characters seem more iconic. The fact that it was the only way to tell them apart, back when I had a new artist each week, was just a coincidence. There were two people in the audience. They were both very nice and helped us by asking questions to fill the time. Sam "Uncle Kage" Conway was in the next room over. He's famous in the anthropomorphic con scene for his panels. He also had a three hour block that we were scheduled against. It sounded like his reputation was deserved. There were a few times I felt like we should call it off early and head over to see what was going on his side of the wall; it seemed like he was having a better time of it.

Then we had "Three comics at a time" panel, which featured a few aspiring cartoonists who said they'd email me if their comics ever go on-line. We were also scheduled for "The Daily Grind of Updating Webcomics" at the same time. I had hoped they'd combine the panels. They seemed similar enough. There were hints that they might, but it didn't happen. We went with Three Comics; it was in the same room as our panels immediately before and after. During the panel, all I hoped was that somebody told the people at the other panel why we weren't there.

For those of you who missed it, the secrets include: use blue pens or tracing paper so you don't have to erase pencil lines, simplify character designs, use pre-made backgrounds and, the big one - don't do anything else. Three people were in the audience. We seemed to have an upward trend that way.

Our final panel was "Writing with Furry Characters", which featured Isabel, myself, and Amadeus. It seemed like a bit of an awkward fit, especially without Bill there - he had to leave to catch a ride to the airport. He would've been perfect for that panel, as his characters live in a much more anthropomorphic world than ours do.

I'm informed that Amadeus was to do with a film they showed at the con the night before. He would've been perfect for the panel excepting the small fact that he didn't show up. Word on the street was that he was last seen having dinner.

If you were to replace our characters with humans, there would be very few points requiring explanation or changes. You can count the number of species-related character traits on one hand. Species has, purposely, not been mentioned in You Say it First or Unlike Minerva. (That got a bit awkward when people talked about Brent, their pet whose species only remains nameless because we can't think of anything good to call it). There's nothing especially "with furry characters" about our writing. About twenty minutes in, I kind of had to admit it to the crowd - which had swelled to ten people - we must be doing something right! Half of them left a couple minutes after that. I think a few of those people were aspiring novelists. We have no real advice for novelists. Neither of us has written fiction prose in the last six years, and the prose we had written back then isn't a thing we generally choose to show off.

Neither of us, in fact, view "anthropomorphic" as a genre. It isn't. There are a number of specialized anthropomorphic subgenres with their own styles and rules, but it's no more a genre than "movies featuring bald actors" or "songs about weather" is. I haven't read any anthropomorphic fiction - actual prose fiction - since Wind in the Willows. I'd wager money, though that there's less stylization and that readers of said fiction are less "trained" than readers of other conventional fiction. A lot of fiction out there is attenuated to the fact that the average person who buys a romance book, this is the twentieth romance book they bought. If anthropomorphic fiction has that kind of fine-tuning on it, we're unaware. So not only do we not have anything useful to say on the subject. We don't believe that anything really useful can be said.

After I came clean - and I felt much better afterwards - the topic changed as people started asking us again about how to start comics. This was territory we were familiar with. We've started an awful lot of comics.

04.03.2006 - Terrence Marks:

Spare Parts is back! Hope you enjoy it!

So, how was I-Con?

Quite simply, it was the best con we've been to. And here it is, categorized by anecdote, because chronological order is for suckers.

The Table

We shared a table with Peter Prellwitz, who published ND Year One and is an accomplished science fiction author in his own right. He brought along two of his sons to help us man the table, and Dressari, a fan of ours who came all the way from England (and also helped run the table when we weren't there).

We wound up getting Mark Goddard's table (He played Major West in Lost in Space, and cancelled at the last minute). We were next to a company selling what appeared to be independent horror B movies. On our other side was a company called Anime Clash. They had, they told us, just sold entirely out of anime and were selling their other products, also independent horror B movies. Was this a good thing? Well, we stood out from our immediate surroundings, at least.

We were, more importantly, across from Bill Holbrook and Stan Sakai. I often wished we brought a beachball so we could hit it back and forth when things got slow. We dropped by Bill's table a couple times and he came by ours.

The Sketchbook

I've been toting around this sketchbook to conventions since DragonCon 2000. Back when I first got it, I'd get a sketch from anybody who'd give me one, but I've become a lot more selective over the years, in part because it's running out of space. They all mean something to me.

I got three new sketches this con. Mookie, R.K. Milholland, and Stan Sakai. I already had Greg Dean and Bill Holbrook. I went up by the Goats table once, but Jon wasn't there and I decided not to hang around, partly because I was afraid they wouldn't know who I was and partly because I was afraid they would.

I started reading Dominic Deegan because I figured we'd meet at I-Con and it'd be polite. It's an amazing strip. I got a drawing of Dominic; I was thinking of asking for Celesto or Gregory Deegan but didn't. Always better to let the artist decide.

I caught Randy Milholland at his table. There was a sign, "free sketches". An eight-year-old boy was in front of me. Randy asked his mom, "He doesn't read the comic, does he?". "No". "Ok, good. Don't let him". So he drew the kid a ninja. He was selling original art from the strips for about $5 each. I bought one.

We gave Stan Sakai one of our books and he drew an amazing sketch of Tomoe Ame for me. He spent, I believe, a total of ninety minutes at his table over the three days and we managed to catch him. He works with great speed. I'm married to somebody who can sleep in and still draw seven comics a day; his speed still impressed me. He looked through my sketchbook. He's the first artist in a long time to do that. He took the time to look through all the other sketches I had, and he recognized a number of them.

03.20.2006 - Terrence Marks:

Thanks to Isabel, the cast page is finally updated! If you've been wondering who these people are, now's your chance to look them up!

03.06.2006 - Terrence Marks:

Resolution Roundup:

Yes, it's over two months late. But I've got a whole bunch of half-written news updates and I really ought to start posting things.

Looking at my resolutions for last year, how did I do?

I did finish reading everything Mark Twain wrote*. I read three other books (the entire Harry Potter series , the first two Series of Unfortunate Events); I'm sure I went through some non-fiction as well. Kittens for Dummies. That counts. I believe I mentioned "several major programming projects". I think that NamirDeiter.net counts as "several".

I did not send out three pieces of fanmail a week, nor did I add one comic strip to my reading list each week. The fanmail thing lasted a week. The comic thing lasted until I got a job. I should maybe try to add a comic a month. I may try for one comic a month. Or buy book collections. Or find comics that are entirely work-safe and read them during my breaks at work.

I didn't learn to draw, but I did participate in 24-hour comic book day. I was better at it than I thought. Not good at it, but less bad than I suspected.

Anyhow, my resolutions for this year? That's tough. I'm going to get back to writing comics; I've become lazy in that regard. Isabel wrote a supermajority of YSiF and an appreciable fraction of Spare Parts back before it went on hiatus. I still do intend to bring Spare Parts back. I want to write; I just wasn't enjoying it at the time. I also intend to learn to draw and write at least 100 pages of other comics.

*: "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" was published under a (different) pseudonym. Skipped it. Didn't read the complete letters, or collected speeches. Majorly skimmed things like "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us", which is a moderately serious book review for a book that was, I'm sure, quite topical 100 years ago.