Went to the PNWA Convention yesterday. God knows why; I've spent literal decades being sneered at when I say I do comics (with that little cringe and eye-twitch). Admittedly, I'm shell-shocked (for those of you into psychological terms, that's PTSD), I even titled my little talk Eyes and Hands, and gave it a real under-the-radar tone, to hope to at least fool a couple of people into coming in and seeing what I did.
Surprised was I when three people showed up, eager to hear everything I had to say or maunder about on. One guy was even using Comic Life to create fumetti with his gaming figures, and doing a perfectly readable and shareable job of it.
After the talk, stayed around for dinner, and found -- to my utter surprise -- that all these writers were surprised there was a comics panel at the show and were sorry they'd missed it.
All I can figure is the old farts who thought comics were an Inferior Art Form are dying off, and thank all the Manga people who are running around in love with words and pictures. A whole generation of older writers are seeing that what we do is valid.
AND -- for those of you artists who are trying to find writers, these people are NOT embarrassed to admit they are Prose Genre. They will be perfectly happy to do you a script for a nice payment and then go away without demanding rights or artwork. These are script jockies and screenwriters, nice hard-working people.
Let's hook up our industries; artists and a very available pool of professional script writers. I want to see what happens.
BUT: there was only ONE sales outlet -- previous consignment through Barnes and Noble. Because B&N owes me money, their shop at the convention lost my consignment form. Yup, actually NO other way to sell books -- a one-distributor gateway they keep locked. Why do they let themselves be treated like this?
