Billions of bilious blue blistering bloggers

Tintin and Snowy by Jeff Lemire, kicking things off with a bang

It’s alive! My Tintin sketchbook was born at San Diego this summer — I’d been wanting to start one for a while, jealous of Brett‘s Kirby book and Sean‘s Bowie book. Since they had those themes sewn up, I went for Tintin characters – a pretty safe choice, beloved by the highbrow critics but also by the inner ten-year-old in all of us, famous but also somehow underexposed in American comics circles. Reading Tintin albums from the public library was one of my formative early comics experiences, and probably shaped my conviction that comics can be truly populist and still good.

Since this was largely a business con for me, I didn’t get the book into as many hands as I might have liked, but hey, that’s what the next ten years are for. There’s a natural preponderance of Top Shelf artists and friends, since they were readily at hand… but I never could get Andy Runton away from his adoring fans long enough to grace the pages. Next time, Runton…

Anyway, click here for the goodness.

An immaculate Tintin by James Kochalka

Text messages I have sent

From my first San Diego Comic Con:

Tues July 24 8:49 pm
California nicer than expected. Everything looks vaguely like an Eagles album cover. Having beers with the man who drew From Hell (more Scottish than expected).

Thurs July 26 10:31 pm
Having drinks w chris butcher (=wallace from scott pilgrim), retailer from toronto. He made a palladium mega man rpg once. Realized today: this=the life i want.

The second one takes some explication: my brother and I grew up obsessively playing Mega Man II and Palladium’s (crappy, in retrospect) role-playing games, and two years ago I did a summer research project analyzing the music of the Mega Man series; to find those two elements in one of my favorite comic bloggers was a head trip. He and I have a karaoke date at some point; the Top Shelf guys think I sound like Peter Murphy, a claim I must investigate further. I think at the time I was going for Bowie.

The final sentence refers to a separate epiphany I had on Thursday, walking downstairs after a lunch break and thinking about all the fans, and the depth of their genuine enthusiasm for the stuff, and how warm and approachable the pros are, and realizing that chatting with a hundred people per hour had not tired me out but actually was the source of all my energy, and thinking I am good at this; I can make a difference. Suddenly I knew it was true.

So that’s one question answered. At least for now.