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The Drunken Comic Book Monkeys Versus the Clock By Brian Koscienski and Chris Pisano
Time is a voracious beast. It never stops eating; its appetite is never sated. It consumes all. It laughs at Einstein and his theories. Yet, this never-ending monster becomes surprisingly finite when there's a deadline. And our deadline is Baltimore Con.
We had one major change since our last blathering-- we decided upon a different printer to use. Doing more research we discovered a small run printer in New York called Dream Weaver Press. Not only did the idea of a smaller run sound appealing (if we can't sell 500 books, then why would we want to print 1,000?), but they do perfect binding. Since we're planning on doing a 96-page monstrosity, we decided it would simply look better square bound. Have you ever seen 96 pages stapled together? Not the prettiest.
Wanting to see what they could do, we collected a few of our past articles and sent them away to Dream Weaver Press. Four weeks later we had The Drunken Comic Book Monkeys, vol. 1, a nice 48-page collection of a few of our articles, essays, reviews, and rants. We were more than happy with the printing quality. Now, to get our comic together.
Our artists did a great job. They obviously have a better concept of taming the time beast than we do since they met their deadlines, a couple even met them early. However, we have a few tricks of our own. During that period, we discovered one of our artists, Dirk, lived near to us, so we invited him to our meetings. At Hooters. Dirk is a man, and like any man he can be easily distracted at Hooters. I'm sure on more than one occasion Dirk walked in ready to tell us to go to hell and he never wanted to see us again, but after a few brews and some time absorbing the sights to be seen, he would end the day agreeing to see us again. Over time, he even agreed to do five covers and our logo. However, it's a double-edged sword.
Since he's the artist, he gets all the attention. We lowly writers barely get a glance cast in our direction, and the ones that we do get can easily be interpreted as, "Why are you still here?" If this were a band, the artist would be the lead singer and we writers would be the unshowered, flea-infested roadies in charge of hooking up the bassist's guitar. Every time Dirk's at a meeting, a waitress sits next to him and begs to see his portfolio. NEVER has a waitress, or ANYONE in fact, asked to see one of our scripts!
Sorry, I digressed. So, we have artwork. We found a printer. We conned Dirk into doing our logo and covers. Since we can only afford black and white, we don't need a colorist. The last piece of the puzzle is lettering.
My character flaw is I'm cheap. Okay, that's not my only character flaw. I'm quite loud and obnoxious, but that's only a flaw when I'm in public. Arrogance is another one, but luckily I'm so egotistically full of myself I don't see that as being a flaw. I also think I'm funny, although I'm pretty sure I'm not. I also have the propensity to go on really lame tangents like this one. Where were we? Oh, yes-- I'm cheap. No, not miserly. Flat out cheap. So, instead of paying a few bucks to a professional for their lettering skills, I decided to do it myself. All of it. All 88 pages. All within one month. Including sound effects. Yes, I'm that much of an idiot. And yes-- to any letterer reading this, I can hear you laughing.
I just finished lettering last week. We wanted the comic to go to the printer three days ago. Yet, even as I type this, I'm still editing, setting up the layouts, making sure I have the pages in the right order (since we're doing it as a flip book, things are upside down and backwards, besides me), getting the files in the proper format, etc. Yes, we missed our own deadline. However, the conservative accountant within me budgeted some extra time for potential screw-ups caused by the neurotic maniac within me.
So, we're hoping to get the comic to the printer by the end of the week and we should have 500 copies of a finished product by the beginning of September, just in time for Baltimore Con. Needless to say, if you're at the Baltimore Con, look for our table and come on over!
Brian and Chris reside in south central Pennsylvania where Brian is often chased by angry villagers wielding torches and pitchforks due to his uncanny resemblance to Sasquatch while Chris can often be found in newspapers and magazines under the headline "Cro-Magnon Man Found." Their obsession with writing is pretty thorough; their compositions range from stories to novels to articles to comic books to poetry. They even went so far as to start their own publishing company called Fortress Publishing. Their main mission in life is to simply do what the screaming voices behind their eyeballs tell them to do.
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