Jack didn’t make it over the candlestick this time
At the battle of Little Big Horn (Custer’s last stand), I imagine one of the U.S. solders, wounded , crawling away from the battle and thinking ” To hell with it, even if I manage to crawl away, I’ve got six arrows sticking out of me, I might was well finish myself off”.
I imagined that a lot during CCI this year. Beginning at the first hour of the con, when I realized the printer misprinted the new collection. They were all backwards. Meaning page 1 was the last page and the last page was page one and so on. All of them. Please don’t chime in with ” call it the Manga edition!”. I get it, it’s a clever spin on things, but I heard that from pretty much every single person. CCI is about new readers and you can’t move the amount of books we could have moved based on the novelty of a screw up. You can’t. This isn’t the first misprint I’ve dealt with. It’s a sales pitch people don’t respond to. You are trying to get them interested in something new…while explaining it is wrong. It doesn’t work on a large scale, and at a convention of this scale and reputation, where you are looking to not only impress new readers, but other publishers, distributors, stores, and the like….it harms you far more than it helps you.
The books were wrong, the time, effort and advertising that went into it was wasted, the time and investment in the show was wasted. We didn’t have enough product to recoup the investment let alone make the profit we should have easily made at a Comic-con with 160,00 people at it and that’s all I’m going to say specifically on that, here, online, or in person to anyone until I’ve spoken to my attorney. So please do not ask me anything more about it or comment online. I don’t feel like explaining in court what is and is not a fans idea of a joke, sarcasm, or misconception .
It’s pretty tough to go through fives days of a Comic-Con, knowing you are screwed. That there is zero chance the printer can do anything about this in time to get correct books here before the show is over, and even if they do, the soonest they would get here would still mean you lost two full days of sales.
So…that talk about risk and staring at financial ruin I go on about every year in regards to Comic-Con International….that ain’t no joke. There are two times during the year that many people decide they need their fix of Arsenic Lullaby, one of the is the X-mas season (because the holiday’s are…y’know, the holiday’s) and the other is Comic-Con International. Your have a disaster like this during one of them and you can pretty much imagine what I’m in for. If I seemed out of sorts, or was a bit more brief or even curt with anyone that weekend, that’s why. I haven’t totally figured out how I’m going to push forward after this catastrophe, but it’s possible, so i guess I’m going to. The next four months are going to suck, I can tell you that much. It’ll be like year one, working two jobs and drawing a book. Of course, I could draw a lot faster back then. I remember year one, is really sucked…even looking back on it nostalgically…it sucked. But hey, that’s karma for you.
and yes, I’m pretty angry. See this blog? Four short paragraphs with no exclamation points, no words in all caps, no name calling….that’s me angry. Just for future reference.
I don’t want any comments or emails about this, especially one’s that start with ” I know you said you didn’t want any comments or emails but…”. I just don’t. I am always honest in these blogs. I give you the highs, I give you the lows, I let you know when I’m on top of the world and I let you know when I am face down on the ground. So, I let you know about this. That’s all I have to say, don’t really feel like putting a funny spin on it.
That’s all for now.
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When Douglas is not complaining, he and his work can be found at www.arseniclullabies.com
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