As you might have noticed, a few weeks ago we reached one of our first big mile­stones: we fin­ished ourt­first story-​arc!

Well, I’m excited to report to you that just today we’ve reached yet another big mile­stone: tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties! (Actu­ally, I’m not so much excited as I am per­turbed and frus­trated. But you get the idea.) Yes, accord­ing to Mr. John Chouinard him­self, his spankin’ new Mac is cur­rently refus­ing to boot up.

I’m a little unclear on the specifics of the sit­u­a­tion, so maybe John will chime in with his own words. At the moment, though, it looks like we’ll have to miss tomorrow’s update. Depend­ing on how quickly this gets resolved, you might also be seeing a filler strip or two coming up. Hope­fully it won’t be too big of a prob­lem! We’ll keep you posted.

John adds: Greg speaks the truth! I don’t think the prob­lem is ultra-​serious, and I still have a few tricks to try before giving up all hope. (Anyone here know Kenobi’s holo-​extension?) What’s cer­tain for now is that Friday’s strip will be unfinished—pencils only, lads! (Chronil­log­i­cal: Unplugged! Except not at all as sat­is­fy­ing.) What I do not know is how far this prob­lem will spill into the week­end slash week slash month slash Slash. So hope­fully this’ll blow over soon, but if not—well, we’ll be sure to say so, at least!

I had read (and very much enjoyed) Kean Soo’s Jellaby in the past, and con­se­quently was pleas­antly sur­prised to run into a col­lab­o­ra­tion of his. Those hoping to inspire neti­quette, or lack thereof, in par­tic­u­larly young young­sters, take note! Looks like we’ve finally seen the day where web­surf­ing pro­fi­ciency rivals that of the terlet.

You know what I need? Here’s what I need.

I need someone—preferably some­one hairy and short, don’t ask me why—to break into my room every morn­ing and bound about, shout­ing “IT’S A BEAU­TI­FUL DAY, YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!” until I run scream­ing into the street. I could use that.

pundit: A master of puns

“Did you hear about the cler­gy­man who was a jerk to every­one he met?”
“No.”
“He was a real big apsehole.”
“Oh John, you’re such a pundit.”

The first install­ment of a ground­break­ing new series!*

Chris Onstad, cre­ator of Achewood
MEETS
Vin­cent Connare, cre­ator of pop­u­lar font Comic Sans

REF­ER­ENCE

I wonder how many times Vince has been shown that comic. My guess: a lot of times.

*State­ment makes no guar­an­tee of future installments.

I am writ­ing this to you all from the glass-​walled busi­ness center of the Embassy Suites in down­town San Diego, a place I emphat­i­cally should not be. This is not to say that I have any­thing against San Diego or the Embassy Suites—I don’t—it’s just that I had orig­i­nally been expect­ing to be some­where over Kansas around now. Appar­ently, Jet­Blue had some prob­lems with this plan; rather than scram­bling to find a con­nect­ing flight, I decided to just cool it and take tomorrow’s flight out. I’m in no rush, the hotel room was booked for the extra night anyway, and hey, San Diego’s a pretty nice place.

Anyway: Comic-​Con. It hap­pened. It was excit­ing! It was so excit­ing, in fact, that I com­pletely forgot to take any pic­tures! To make up for this, John will recre­ate the expe­ri­ence for you in astound­ing, jaw-​dropping, col­or­less and sketchy detail. You already got a taste of this last Thurs­day, and you can look for­ward to a little more of it on Tues­day. But to help sati­ate your surely-​excruciating inter­est, I will attempt to sup­ple­ment his visual extrav­a­ganza with a few humble words of my own.

Pre-​Con
I got my first taste of Comic-​Con this year before even arriv­ing in San Diego, as both R. Stevens and Jeph Jacques were on my flight! For a couple of dudes whose web­comics I don’t read, I sure do manage to run into them an awful lot. (By “awful lot”, I mean “twice”—the first time being ROFLCon—and by “run into” I mean “awkwardly stare at from a healthy distance”.) If I keep this up, one of them might even start rec­og­niz­ing me as That Tall Creepy Guy Who Keeps Look­ing at Us. A man can dream, at any rate.

On Wednes­day, John, John’s mom, and I went to see Hell­boy 2. We agreed that it was a very pretty movie. Then we went to pre­view night.

Pre­view night is the night before the con­ven­tion proper, and they open up the exhi­bi­tion hall to let atten­dees roam wide and free. Those who forage suc­cess­fully are rewarded with exclu­sive goods and excit­ing mer­chan­dise. The rest either go mad or are devoured whole by inscrutable cos­play­ers. Hap­pily, I sur­vived, and was rewarded with a set of Final Fan­tasy plush toys. In fact, I’ve had my eye on those damn plushies for the past two years, so I was down­right ecsta­tic to get my grubby paws on them at long last.

We also went to a Star Trek exhibit at the San Diego Air and Space Museum, where I annoyed John per­sis­tently with innu­mer­able dumb ques­tions, found out and promptly forgot what class ship the Enterpirse-C was, and learned from Worf that per­haps today is a good day to die. Good times all around.

Thurs­day

In the inter­est of time and space, I’m going to describe the rest of the con­ven­tion in list format. Any­thing I fail to men­tion will be excluded for one of three rea­sons: (1) it is not inter­est­ing, (2) it has been or will be cov­ered by one of John’s comics, or (3) I forgot about it. But if you’d like me to elab­o­rate on any­thing, you can always just ask.

• Spore: Will Wright gave an excel­lent and intrigu­ing pre­sen­ta­tion, and the game looks fan­tas­tic. It was a little awk­ward, how­ever, when he started talk­ing about Nazi slave camps and the people in front of us wouldn’t stop laughing.
• How to Tell a Story: Exec­u­tive sum­mary: STO­RIES should have CHAR­AC­TERS that DO THINGS.
• Dum­b­rella: More gawk­ing at R. Stevens, but also a bunch of other web­comic artists (and MC Frontalot, too!) and an offi­cially sanc­tioned pre­text within which to exe­cute my gawking.
• Sci­ence of Sci­ence Fic­tion: John went to some Star Trek thing instead of this. What a nerd!

Friday

• Watch­men: I woke up early and wait­ing in line for 2 hours to get into this panel. The movie looks good, but the panel wasn’t worth the bother.
• Intro­duc­tion to Web­comics: This was very much like a live edi­tion of Web­comics Weekly (plus Phil Foglio). I rec­om­mend the pod­cast if you don’t already listen to it.
• Penny Arcade: Mike and Jerry have a great rap­port; if you ever have the oppor­tu­nity to see them in person, seize it!
• MST3K 20th Anniver­sary Reunion: Gah! We missed this! GAH! Miss­ing this panel was by far the biggest dis­ap­point­ment of the con­ven­tion. Every­one from the show was there. Every­one! Now, if they had hosted this event in a bigger room, maybe we could have gotten in. Instead, the Comic-​Con orga­niz­ers decided to use the largest avail­able space to screen Avatar: The Last Airbender.
• Worst Car­toons Ever: I’ve gone to this show every year for the past three years. I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s some kind of deep-​seated self-​hate com­plex? Actu­ally, it’s prob­a­bly because of Sam Bas­sett: Hound for Hire, who hap­pens to have a machine gun in his hat.
• Spike and Mike: The Gaunt­let: This year’s batch of ani­ma­tion was weaker than in pre­vi­ous years. But it gives me an oppor­tu­nity to rec­om­mend Lone Sausage’s pro­duc­tions, a peren­nial favorite of the show.

Sat­ur­day

• Quick Draw!: Think Whose Line Is It Anyway? meets illus­tra­tion. Although it’s an annual Comic-​Con event, this was the first time John and I went. Fan­tas­tic stuff. If you ever attend Comic-​Con in the future, def­i­nitely go see it. (Sergio Aragonés in par­tic­u­lar deserves spe­cial men­tion for his excep­tional impro­vi­sa­tional talent.)
• Doll­house: John and I some­how man­aged to squeak into this one. Joss Whedon is a funny little man and I envy him enormously.
• Myth­busters: To avoid miss­ing the Myth­busters and reliv­ing yesterday’s MST3K dis­ap­point­ment, we camped out in room 6B start­ing two panels prior. It was nec­es­sary. Adam and Jamie were greeted like rock stars, and the energy in the room was as explo­sive as the show.
• Riff­Trax Live: One of the biggest and best sur­prises of the trip—at the Balboa The­ater, we got to see Mike Nelson, Bill Cor­bett, and Kevin Murphy do a live riff on Plan 9 from Outer Space! It def­i­nitely helped ease our dis­ap­point­ment over miss­ing the MST3K panel the night before.

Sunday

• Woke Up Late: I slept in until I was woke up with a call from my brother telling me my flight was can­celed. Nice!
• Exhi­bi­tion Hall: My first pur­chases since pre­view night: Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes and A Con­tract with God by Will Eisner.
• Frag­gle Rock: I don’t really watch the show, but John does, and I couldn’t turn down the oppor­tu­nity to see Red Frag­gle live, now could I?

And that’s about it. The hos­pi­tal­ity of Embassy Suites has enabled me to spend the rest of my Sunday after­noon as I invari­ably do, wher­ever in the world I so happen to be: lying some­where, stuff­ing my face and watch­ing movies on TV. Beyond grab­bing a grilled chicken sand­wich at the second-​sketchiest Wendy’s in the world and writ­ing this post—this very one that you are read­ing right now—not much else has happened.

So yeah! That was Comic-​Con. Goooooooooooooooooooood times.

Here are a few tid­bits that I’ve been mean­ing to throw up here:

1. Comic-​Con is really soon! Like, next week soon. John and I are both going, which means that we won’t have so much time for comick­ing. We’ll have some­thing for you, but it prob­a­bly won’t be reg­u­lar Chronil­log­i­cal stuff. Never fear—it prob­a­bly won’t be The Mag­i­cal Man, either (unless you people want to see more of him…?)
     
2. We like feed­back! Really, we do! Com­ments are open for a reason, so if you have con­struc­tive crit­i­cism, post away. Plain-vanilla crit­i­cal crit­i­cism would work, too. Heck, I’d even take a vio­lent, raving dia­tribe if some­one cared enough to write one.

   And of course, if you have some­thing pos­i­tive to say, the ol’ self-​esteem bal­loon could always use a little inflat­ing, too.

3. Noth­ing! There is no third thing.

Friday’s comic will be a slight diver­sion from our reg­u­lar comick­ing, as I will be trying my untrained hand at illus­tra­tion. You might call this a “filler strip”; I prefer the phrase “artistic experimentation”.

How­ever you care to refer to it: do not fret. It won’t be a per­ma­nent thing. It won’t even be a fre­quent thing. And rest assured, we will be back to our reg­u­larly sched­uled pro­gram­ming next Tuesday.

I’m glad to announce that we’ve broken the 20 mil­lion thresh­old! These are magic days, people. We’ll remem­ber them for the rest of our lives.

First decree: I should make an effort to try to some­times think of remotely inter­est­ing things to impart once in a while. (I should say things.) In the mean­time, please point your browsers to the Shoe Blog.

Starting tomor­row (which by my cal­cu­la­tions is Tues­day, June 10) we’ll be post­ing offi­cial comic-​type things up here. This mes­sage is to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them from the non-​official pseudo-comic-type things that came before, which I have now deleted from the site and which have returned into the mys­te­ri­ous ether of Inter­net from which they sprang, never to be seen again. A moment of silence is in order. (Not really.)

Anyway, we’re going to aim for a twice-​weekly update sched­ule, hope­fully Tues­days and Fri­days; how­ever, as the saying goes, Comickin’ Ain’t Easy™, espe­cially for those of us who are com­pletely new to this whole busi­ness. What I’m trying to say here is that things might be a bit rocky at the start. But we’ll try! We’ll try real hard! And isn’t that what truly counts?

What’s that? No? Oh. Damn.