"Working Holiday..."

By Tony Lee

So yesterday I’m in my local ‘Money Shop’ outlet (it’s the main UK outlet for Western Union, I believe) and I’m ordering a stupid amount of dollars for the San Diego Comic Con, which at the time you read this, is a little over two weeks away. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - San Diego is the ‘Wrestlemania’ of the comic’s world, and to be honest, it’ll have pretty much as many hot, sweaty men walking around in spandex as the other. Over a hundred thousand pros (professionals, not prostitutes – although when you watch some of the creators begging for pitch opportunities you do start to wonder where the line blurs), publishers and fans attend a convention centre the size of about four playing fields over four and a half days.

Now, the Money Shop are very good (if you live in the UK) as not only do they promise to equal any competitive exchange rate, they also promise to buy back unused money at the original exchange, something that most others don’t. And the girl behind the counter’s cute. So’s the man, actually. I think they hire young beautiful people just to get the punters in.

Now of course, thanks to the wonderful exchange rate we currently have with the dollar (thank you, mister Bush Jr), I get something crazy like seventeen dollars to a pound or something like that. So I wander in with my small handful of change and ask the day behind the counter to change it into Mickey Mouse monopoly money for me. So, while she’s counting the small sack of dollars into piles of filthy lucre, she looks up at me and goes ‘So, going on holiday again?’

Now, a couple of weeks ago, as you know I went to Rome and, as they’re not intelligent enough to use good old fashioned British Empire money, I had to change some Sterling (that’s pounds) into Euros (that’s multi-coloured toilet paper). She’d asked then what I was up to and I’d explained about the holiday in Rome. And now, here I am a couple of weeks later buying dollars.

Now, I go to answer that no, this isn’t a holiday, but I pause, flummoxed. What exactly am I doing? For the last two years the San Diego Comic Con, or ‘Archie the Duck’ as we like to call it has been anything but a holiday. In 2005 I was one of the three or four creators (including Dabel Brothers wunderkind and Midnight Kiss artist Ryan Stegman) that had to man the APC booth for the week – which meant we had to be there at nine every morning until kick out time, we barely had a chance to see anyone – so pitch meetings were a rarity. I think I managed about four in total all week, two with the same publisher – and apart from evenings, when I got to go out I barely saw the bloody sun before the con closed at 6 or 7pm.

Actually that’s a lie – I did get to wander around San Diego on the Saturday, for that was the day that I had to find a Kinkos that did passport photos, as I had managed to have my passport stolen on the first evening (when we were ushered out by security and not allowed back to the booth where it was, being promised that nobody would be in that night – which of course was a lie as the cleaners snuck in and went through the booths, taking from several including the APC one where they must have thought it was Christmas and took our nights takings (also not allowed to be picked up) and my passport in my bag) and had spent the weekend as an illegal alien. Oh, and when I met the police outside to report it. And when I visited Ralphs. So three times.

But it definitely wasn’t a holiday. It was work, plain and simple. When we weren’t signing, we were selling. We had been dumped right against the back wall, the furthest you could walk – and of course were nowhere near any other publisher. We had to work hard to get any sales. It was difficult. And I barely slept all week.

(Although that was due to drink, parties and Scandinavian Millionairesses, but we gloss over that, as a tale for face to face amusement…)

In fact, it was so hectic that at one point I bought a breakfast of a can of ROCKSTAR drink, a pack of STAY AWAKE pills, an energy bar and as much caffeine as I could imbibe. And it still didn’t stop me falling asleep at the back of the booth for twenty minutes with my sunglasses on.

In fact, the rest of the booth, seeing me silently sitting there thought I was working on a pitch and left me to run the booth – I awoke to find some kid showing me his art portfolio. I screamed, he screamed – he’d assumed that my silence was just artistic aloofness.

By the time I got home, having had to end my week in a frantic dash from Union station to the British Embassy to get a temporary passport (for over a hundred dollars) and then rush back to the airport, I needed a holiday.

And then there was last year. By now most of you know the problems I had with getting to San Diego in the first place – but if you don’t, let’s recap. I’m in JFK, on the plane to San Diego, it’s 6.30pm and we taxi to the runway - and then nothing happens. Over the next three hours while on the runway we discover that at this exact moment in time a) A freak thunderstorm has appeared cutting off our corridor, b) San Diego has a late night curfew for late planes and c) All the air traffic control in the West Coast has gone down. Three things that force the captain to reluctantly cancel the flight at 10.30pm - 3.30am GMT.

We all get off, and we’re lined up to see the one customer service lady, who has to deal with over two hundred pissed off people, all trying to get to San Diego. And the next available flight was Friday. Now, as you can imagine, I was a little stressed by this - I had no idea of how to get to San Diego. There were a couple of other creators on the flight, and we managed to get to the check in - where we booked ourselves on standby for the 6.40am flight to San Diego. If we missed that, there was a 7am LA flight. And then an 8am one. And so on. And LA was only 110 miles from San Diego. I could do that.

By the time we got everything sorted it was 1.30am - Still keeping tabs? That’s 6.30am GMT and, having started my drive to Heathrow at 7am the previous day, I’d pretty much hit my 24 hours straight. So by the time it’s 4am – that’s 9am GMT, we’ve re-checked in, gone through security again and we’re at gate 34 waiting for the 6am deadline on whether we get on the SD flight. I see on the standby list I’m fourth. It doesn’t look good. They’re already overbooked by ten people.

In the end, I missed it by one seat. A Chinese guy found his ticket at the last moment. I was still stuck at JFK.

By this point there were already 20 people on standby for the LA flight at 7am, so we discussed options with Maryanne, the checkout agent. I think our pleas of sleep deprivation got to her, as well as my explanation that I was an incredibly important comic God - because by the time we got to the 8am flight - ignoring the 7am completely, myself and three other distressed travelers got on, being one to four on the standby list of by now thirty people. But the gods of comic mishap weren’t finished with us - at Los Angeles we were told that our tickets weren’t valid for the LA – San Diego commuter flight, so we clubbed together, four of us – and for thirty bucks each hired a car.

We drove to San Diego, I got to my hotel at 4pm Wednesday, in time to shower, shave, go get my professional’s pass and then get into the preview night. By the time this was over, I was close to 48 hours without sleep and dead on my feet. And then I had a full schedule on the Markosia booth and meetings with pretty much every publisher there over the week – so again, I didn’t really see the town, apart from a Digital Webbing trip to Old Town one evening, and a daily trip to the Horton Plaza to upload my daily diary on their free wifi. But again, it was work. I barely saw the sun once more, instead staying in what was effectively a sweaty windowless hanger.

But this year? Well, even though my position at Markosia has changed, and I’m now the Group Editor (and with Harry Markos and Chuck Satterlee not attending, bar Brian Augustyn I’m the highest placed member of Markosia there this year), Markosia doesn’t have a booth. Which means that I don’t have one, either. At one point the Creator Direct guys were going to chip together, but San Diego’s seemingly current policy of pushing aside the small press in favour of larger movie booths nixed that idea. I’ve not got any current projects with publishers who will be there (Titan, Panini and Walker Books not having much of a US presence at conventions) and the closest I have is AiT/PlanetLar, where Larry Young will hopefully be showing some preview pages of next year’s Dodge & Twist that I’m doing with Paul Peart-Smith. So I’ll be booth hopping, a quaint term given to those who have no booth, or wares to shill, and end up skipping from publisher to publisher.

But with no booth, comes no selling of books. And no selling of books means no spending hours behind a booth. I get to wander in when I like and leave when I like. Sure, I’ll lose some sales, won’t get to do some signings, but if someone out there wants me to sign a book? They can find me and I’ll sign it. Simple as that.

What this means is that apart from the usual catching up with creators, editors, retailers and publishers I’ll have a lot of time to kill. Perhaps I’ll see some panels. Maybe I’ll go to Tijuana on one day. You know, tourist type things.

I have a few meetings already arranged, but most of them are aimed at bars in surrounding hotels. And my evenings are already filling up with the inevitable showbiz parties and drinkups, high level meals and burlesque shows.

But to all intents and purpose, I’m going to San Diego this year to a) see old friends, b) have a party, c) chat to a few editors but not really pitch anything (although this could change depending on current conversations with someone) and d) well, have a party. I know I said that twice, but it really is THAT IMPORTANT.

So understandably when the girl behind the counter asks me this question (the one mentioned at the beginning of this column, all those ramblings ago), I pause. Is it a holiday? Or is it work? Granted, many people seem to think that being a comic writer is more play than work anyway, but can I really justify this week in the sun as…

I look back to the girl, who’s still struggling with the garbage bag full of money.

‘No.’ I reply. ‘I’m a guest at a comic con. In San Diego.’
Her eyes light up.
‘Ooh!’ She says. ‘Tell us a joke.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Well, if you’re a comic…’

I explain the confusion. I explain how it’s a week of standing in a hot, sweaty airplane hanger of a centre, signing comics and talking to editors and fans alike, of hanging out with my peers and cult movie and TV stars, walking around booths designed at advertising upcoming games, TV shows and movies and revitalizing my creative muse for the year ahead.

‘I see.’ She replies. ‘Another holiday then.’

She was probably right, you know.

But I’ve got my spendies money now for San Diego and I’m ready to hit the ground running. I have my camp bed and sleeping bag, as this year I’m camping down in a friend’s room, as the J Street Inn no longer rents out weekly (damn them to hell) and I’m counting the days. But, not as much as celebrity chum and soon to be hotel roommate Sean Dulaney, who’s one of the finalists in the Platinum Studios Comic Book Challenge contest. Spare a thought for this poor bugger, as he has to pitch his entry with fifty others on the Thursday, and then doesn’t find out until the Saturday whether he hit the final ten. Feel free to buy him drinks all week saying things like ‘heard you got dropped. Sorry to hear it, man…’ It might not be true, but it’ll be funny as hell.

In other things you must watch out for, get hold of and watch USA Network’s Burn Notice. It’s MacGyver type action in a pitch reminiscent of ‘What if Jason Bourne was fired, and became Magnum P.I. ’… And it has Bruce Campbell in it.

And I love the fact that my spell check has MacGyver.

So no Dan bit today, so it’s more ‘One’ Drunk guy in a bar – he’s hard at work on issue #2 of Hope Falls. The first is done, and the rough PDF of how it looks has gone out to a few people, and the reviews are good. We go into Previews in a couple of months, so expect me to pimp it like crazy when it does. Remember to check for updates at www.hope-falls.com

And of course Midnight Kiss has gone to print. Remember - ISBN: 978-1-905692-16-3. Or you can buy it direct from Markosia at www.markosia.com .

The June PREVIEWS has it as follows -

MIDNIGHT KISS: THE COLLECTED EDITION TP
by Lee, Stegman, & Oats

The universe is a series of shattered Multi-verses, with every dream a different world. And through those worlds walk Matt Sable and Nightmare De'Lacy, saving a human boy from a great evil. But is he normal — or the last of a breed?

And how are they connected to the Land of Oz — and Jerry Cornelius?

Believe in Faeries... before they kill you. (C: 0-1-2)
MATURE THEMES SC, 132pgs, FC SRP: $16.95

The UK price for the trade will be £11.95

Right, that’s it for the week. At the time of writing I have about eighteen days and counting. The next one goes live the day before I leave, so we’ll see how stressed and screwed up I am then…

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Tony Lee is the award-nominated writer of things including The Tizzle Sisters with G.P Taylor and Dan Boultwood, Starship Troopers, Doctor Who, X-Men, and Midnight Kiss. Later this year Tony has stories involving Wallace & Gromit and Shrek coming out. At the end of the year he hopes to have Dodge & Twist out by AiT/PlanetLar. In 2008 he has Robin Hood – Outlaw’s Pride with Sam Hart.

Michael Moorcock says that ‘Tony Lee is one of the best story-tellers working in comics today’.

Dan Boultwood is the critically acclaimed artist of things including The Tizzle Sisters with G.P Taylor and Tony Lee, and both Monster Club and Comicana for APC.

Together they have written and drawn The Gloom (out later this year as a collected edition) and the upcoming Hope Falls, out in November from AAM/Markosia. The website is www.hope-falls.com.

Tony’s website is www.tonylee.co.uk. Feel free to email him and interrupt his day.

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Discuss this column at the Only A Forum forum.
© 2008, Tony Lee

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