Comicon photos. Mostly around the booth. I swear, we didn't get out much. See David Horvath, Nanospores, Jeff Soto, Mark Murphy, our booth, Tom Devlin, Guy Delisle, Dan Nadel, Scrappers and Bwana, and many others.
Here's some more photos, including the GR sponsored bonfire pics via Anne Ishii
The weekend is over as fast as it started. From having to lug boxes up stairs, through people, down aisles to our table, then to having to repack them, thankfully in smaller amounts.There's less to see in sf than ever. I don't care to see most of the booths anymore, but there are a great small amount of tables that make it all worth it. I'm less into exploring the goodness of most of the spaces like I used to. Now I sort of know what to see. Indie comics, a few toy folks, and maybe a single wildcard of something different. This year, I don't know what that wildcard was maybe kami robots, as seen in GR? Gargamel who seem to be the coolest kids around? They're 5 deep from Japan, listen to thrash, and make the best indie vinyl toys ever. Grasshut? Bwana scrappers lemerde martin! Sparkplug, Buenaventura, or picturebox? There are a bunch of others, and it'll be nice to see them all again hopefully sooner than a year from now.
See martin's... Tired out for sure. It's busier for sure. Things are rockin'. So I'd get into what these comicon parties are all about... I went to a couple of them. These days, toys are vinyl gold. The limited edition Comicon anything by a good artist is as important as being there. It's not good enough just to sell general merch, but to be the one who can one up the other person. Toys, prints, toys, stuff, whatever. It's all good. Ebayers line up to pick stuff up only to flip it anyway... I get less excited about it, but maybe it's because we don't make toys. Tonite was our own bonfire party. Not bad, had fun, a decent amount of people came though, and well, tomorrow is the last day. It's madness at the con, but it's fun. You see people you won't ever meet if you weren't there, and it's one of the places where we actually find out that people read GR. I'll get more into that later.
Comicon started as a nightmare. Imagine driving down with a rented van, loaded with stuff, packed... and then to go to the loading docks before it closes, and being told that they're closed.
So that meant carrying all of the boxes from the parking lot, up stairs and into the convention center. Sounds easy, but try maybe 10 trips, maybe more. So that said, we got the booth 50% ready, which was a miracle on it's own... and it was a great start. Many readers came to say hello, most of who we didn't know. That's always great. You see, we work on GR, but I swear the letters are dwindling. We seldom hear any compliments, if anything, we hear the negative stuff. Today David Horvath's Flatwoods monster was a great seller. How David can just keep a great thing, great, is amazing. It's a nice night, see the pic above. That's my room and the xmas lights. Isn't it weird how the xmas lights make a meh place nicer? UMA toys are tomorrow at 10am. It's going to be fun.
whoa. this is an advertisement by kaikaikiki in the next GR
No preview of the mag, but here's a preview of an ad. I'm sure the advertiser would never be bummed at this. See me in the pic? It was Geisai. I was a judge there and it was a pretty rad event. I got to see a lot of my personal heroes and see others who I haven't seen in a while.
I don't want to be a mouth piece for Takashi Murakami, but this dude is on to a lot of cool stuff and another cool thing is that he brought a bunch of "us" (journalists, artists, fans, and more) together.
It's drawings like this that makes a lot of things ok. What's the thing to the left of "viva"? Is it a bottle of water?
Does this have anything to do with us though? I dig the peanut snow man and the fruit. This whole thing is cool. We'll be at SD Comicon this weekend, and we're at booth 1729. It's near the middle and it's the spot we're always at, across from our pals at Top Shelf comics. Come by, say hi, introduce yourself. We may not always act shy, since we can't be at a convention, but we're pretty awkward. See you there.
So after a lot of work, 49 is at the shop. It felt like a double issue was being made. This one is packed to the gills with a lot to read. It's not thicker, but it's just one of those issues when many things come together all at once. Some things didn't come through too, and maybe there's where the extra space came from. The good part of this issue is that in that scramble / struggle to make everything happen, we had more fun. Go figure that's how it works sometimes. But now that 49 is done, issue 50 is upcoming. What should we do for issue 50? Is it just another issue? Is it special? We're going to have to figure it out and make you something fun to read and keep.
Got a sample of the Tekkonkinkreet all in one, thicker, cooler, better, this is a must get when it comes out in September.
I won't tell you how awesome this is and it's great to be part of it. I have a quote in the back of the book and on the DVD. Watch for GR49, there's some Tekkonkinkreet in there too. GR49 is going to be a hot issue.
After Louie Cordero's art show last night, which you should all see, we ate, then went to Kwik E mart in Venice. It's already my third trip or so there, and no Buzz cola... But they did say that today they'd have some. I got there and sure enough, they had 'em.
I bought 18 cans, and am trying to share the love.
Women's softball. It's neat to watch since I play slow pitch softball, but it's really pathetic how bad the umpires are. Are they on the pay off too like the NBA? These guys or I mean gals, they suck just like in our games. What's up with the power tripping? You give some people power, and they just get drunk with it. That's just how life works I get, and it's a typical thing that happens everywhere especially in softball.
Won big tonite. 24-8 or something like that. I guess that puts GR in a weird spot for softball, we're not in first place, but at the moment, we're in first place I think, but that's because the real first place team has two games that aren't completed because of lights!
Someone out there is watching for us. But we'll see what happens next week. We have Comicon. Wed-Sun. I can come back to play Thursday, but that's 2 hrs back and 2 hrs back up. Is that last game, one that I should make that trip for? I'm batting lead off, and I've been feeling pretty good lately in terms of playing. Have any suggestions?
Mr Vick may have done some gross shit to dogs. Torture, shocking, beat towns, shooting. I swear Asians get a bad rap for eating dogs, this guy though... he's worse. Jail time doggg... no 1000 yard rushing years no more. After that, enjoy the CFL and the Arena league.
Wii time. Yes, finally. I have a Japanese machine with bootleg games. I basically only play tennis with it, and now in two days of playing against the computer I'm at 1540 and I just beat two ranked 2000. Anyone else play?
The name sounds undangerous and almost uncreative. What's a name like this all about? It turns out they're one of the more respected bands in Mexico. I figured, they were some crappy band who got lucky, but in the end, they're more akin to REM and many other bands, or something like that, which is alright with me. Check their site out here.
First off, you can't beat Julia Huang's bento. You don't even see the sashimi that's not included in this pic.
Being the world's tallest is tough, everytime he does something, it's news. Saving a dolphin, getting married and now meeting a small dude. Check it out here:
Wouldn't you know it? Both are from China (Mongolia).
What’s the famous Haight-Ashbury district like these days? The Haight is a weird combination of kind of old head shops and kind of new clothing stores. But it’s more for young people. There’s a great clothing store called Villains. There’s a store called Giant Robot that sells Japanese toys. There’s True, which is a great store that sells almost what you would call urban wear. There’s another great bookstore, the Booksmith on Haight.
Now you see it. The new site. Yes, we need to move to a format that can house some ads. Why? It's because that's where some of the ad funds are going. We need to do this, hope you don't mind. Meanwhile, click on them, it does help us out.
I stopped by your blog and saw your paintings. Recently I have been reflecting upon childhood summer vacations. I suspect it has to do with the slow realization that I am an adult now that does not get summer vacations. Seeing the figures partaking in activities and the objects/colors associated with summer vacation somehow really resonated with me - riding bikes, hiding in boxes, forts, green and blue, older brother mowing the lawn, being lost in the woods. The size of the figures in relation to the whole piece elicit the emotions of what it meant to be small in a grown-up world.
I am not sure if this e-mail makes any sense, but I wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed your paintings.
This has to be one of the nicest comments on my first two paintings ever and on the Gocco print.
Since I've been getting a bit of encouragement for my first paintings, I'll show you a gocco print I did for the Tree Show as well. It's coming up this weekend. Shameless promo.
I think the sky has some weird issues with the ink and screen, but oh well, that's Gocco, some people do them perfect as if the project wasn't Gocco in the first place, but having some unexpected surprises is fine with me. I don't know what I'm doing with it anyway.
Gonpachi restaurant is part of a chain of Japanese restaurants. They recently opened in Beverly Hills and supposedly spent 18 million dollars on decor. Upon walking in from the parking lot, it's a complete face lift from the Ed Debevic's that was here ages ago. It's like walking into a Japanese castle, the garden and pond is immaculate and manicured by hopefully a garden master.
The inside is like walking into a movie set. It's two levels, the second floor looking more like a Chinese movie tea house that you see in tons of films. You can imagine ninjas and samurai fighting in a place like this. It's amazing looking, and hard to believe. If you come at the right time, you can see them making the soba in a fish tank like booth. Showing off your homemade soba is a novelty that seems to not really pay off for most people. We'll see about this...
The menu isn't really outrageous and expensive as I'd expect. Soba is 7.50, the small izakaya dishes are $3+, sushi is fairly regular priced although I didn't think the sushi was special. I'd suggest the crazy shrimp ball, that seems to be a favorite. Try a little of everything, and you'll see Gonpachi is something like a mix of Nanbankan in West LA, Otafuku in Torrance, and a sushi place. The decor though, can't be beat.
This is Jake. A young man who sells fruit. His family owns a farm that's in Pico Rivera. It's a series of greenhouses, and they rock some of the best veggies at the farmer's market in Santa Monica. Jake's a good man, and he also works at George's hardware.
He recently slipped two disks in his back lifting a bag of fertilizer. Eviently, he keeled over and couldn't get up. Life Alert! What was that thing?!
Anyone out there have a storage space? Today, we got one. A decent sized one to fit a lot of things: back issues, books, and who knows what else.
It's interesting since for a bit over a hundred bucks, (Or if you're a big spender you can opt for a big ass Beverly Hills spot for hundreds) you get a space where you can do just about anything in. Some people have a shop and they work on wood projects, etc, some probably run ebay businesses. Dead bodies? That too. You always hear about people not paying up on their bills, and then the storage space goes to someone through an auction. Then you hear of nasty photos been found, and then those get published, since the ownership of them go to the buyer of the space. Dead bodies? Yes that too. Babies in jars? Yep. Storage spaces are neat like that. Ours is far away in a non-disclosed location in a non-disclosed city, hope we keep paying the bills.
