The Egg Situation at Breakfast on Monday is off the hook; it’s a scramble/caprese deal, more delicate and loved that even Ray Smuckles would manage.

The structure of the programming has loosened; yesterday, a considerable number of games were conducted, role-playing and otherwise, and space in the schedule is being made so that people can improvise. Scott C talks about how to find inspiration while Sophie Lager (a local artist and musician, and all-around awesome lady) shows me how to cast yarn onto needles. I spend the rest of Camp adding knit stitches into something that nothing in particular, letting the physical work allow my mind to drift¹. I suspect Scott C’s journey through art and artists that inspire him will always come to mind when I have needles in my hands.

When I first mentioned to Dylan Meconis at last year’s Camp that I wanted to learn to knit, she immediately declared that I’d be great at it. It’s all just math, Gary she told me. Now I can see the geometry of the yarn hangs together, and I’m reminded of ropework that I’ve practiced in my habit of rock climbing. I’ll eventually abandon the mutant first project (Meconis told me to pick a skein of wool in a color I didn’t care about, so I wouldn’t be precious about unraveling as needed) and start a second practice work: 20 stitches wide, careful counting, uniform slack. It’s got about 1000 stitches in and I haven’t picked it up for nearly two weeks, but I’ve got flights for work next week and I suspect it’ll be in my carry-on. Eventually, I may even learn a second stitch.

I learn a bit later that as long as I keep my hands within my peripheral vision, I can knit and use language; brains are funny things — I learned from a decade of work commuting that I can’t listen to podcasts or music and talk or read or fill in a crossword, but I can do sudoku. Likewise, knitting and conversation flow together when Lucy Bellwood hosts a conversation on how to sustain a [creative] career. Bellwood’s rightly known for her large personality and adventurous nature, but she’s also the perfect moderator of a discussion that deals with smaller, quieter issues — emotional stability, worries about money, confidence in your work and place. The leap she took in sharing her little jerk and speaking about him honestly has made her a center in this quirky culture.

The sense of community is more powerful than I recall from last year, maybe because this year I’m a little more in control of my impostor syndrome. It’s revivifying to be around people who are insanely creative, innately good-hearted, willing to let down their hard-earned defenses (remember, most of them make their living in large part on the friggin’ internet, and a majority of this year’s attendees are women), to talk honestly about their ambitions and their own little jerks.

I’ll tell you that this discussion took place, for this block of time on Monday afternoon and throughout the rest of the weekend. That’s all I’ll tell you. But I will urge you — if you haven’t already — to find a similar intentional community within your own geographic/professional/whatever circles and to allow yourselves the same sort of discussions. I said it more than once to friends since I first attended, but I’ll say it now for public consumption: for me, attending Comics Camp is better than a year’s therapy.

Part of that is because Pat Race (and he’s far from the only person that makes Comics Camp run, but he’s the heart and soul of it) is very, very aggressive about soliciting and acting on feedback. He wants to know about how we’ve experienced the logistics and arrangements, the activities and scheduling, both before and during Camp. He talked about how school the visits worked, about how after three years the students finding continuity; he asks our opinions on the Library show and the involvement of the community at all stages. It’s universally agreed that everybody loved what Lily and Ishmael Hope shared with us, and would like to see more exposure to local culture in future.

Maybe it’s because it’s the last day, but the main lodge seems to hold more people than any time since arrival; our banner is hoisted, POoOP Number Two voting continues, people circulate in ever-changing swirls. After dinner, there’s a rundown of how Tuesday morning will go — breakfast, followed by cleanup, and a bus departure for those on the cartoonist-heavy flight to Seattle at lunchtime. And there’s a special presentation to Jeste. You may recall that when introduced to us, Jeste announced she had a requirement. You’re all cartoonists, she declared, and nobody’s drawn me yet.

Well. Let it not be said that cartoonists are not up to a challenge.

Over the weekend the Jeste Shrine takes form; from the high altarpiece — it reads Our Lady Of Dank Snax — which lights up to the many, many portraits, it continuously grows and changes. Each time I take a picture, it has a new representation of Jeste that needs to find room for inclusion. I think my favorite is by Vera Brosgol, who’s drawn Jeste like one of the summer camp kitchen ladies in Be Prepared. She’s a bomb-ass chef, she fed us better than anybody would expect from a summer camp kitchen, and she is beloved.

Tuesday morning passes quickly, but not before a drizzly group photo; my flight isn’t until stupid early on Wednesday; others will be around until late afternoon or evening. Those of us not on the early bus spend a little extra time cleaning the lodge and kitchen, before making our way back to town. Shing Yin Khor and I have Mexican, then are called over to the local distillery for delicious gin drinks by Marian Call.

That night, I end up going to see The Avengers: Infinity War with Call, Race, and some of the other local Juneau folks, a reintroduction to the machinery of mass culture after days of being away. I’d started tapering off my email checking and Twitter habit before heading into the woods, and the lack of cell signal means I went into the movie entirely devoid of spoilers. The trip home and the days following will see me slowly reintroduce my regular life.

I love Camp, I love the people there, I love Juneau. I couldn’t live there, partly because I’ve made my home in the place that feels like home, but partly because living in Juneau would make the place start to feel ordinary. It’s where I can go to reset, to spend some time (never enough) with an intentional community of my people, to take what I learn from them home. I know that’s sounding distinctly Campbellian, and I’m no journeying hero².

Juneau gets to be my Rivendell because it’s a journey away; the people I meet there are sometimes in my neck of the woods, and their welcome in my home is perpetual. It’s not for everybody, particularly in this very cynical age³, but if it’s in your means, I urge to you visit the Mini-Con as you are able, or apply to attend the Comics Camp, or to build your own intentional (if intermittent) community in a similar vein. It’s not a time or a place, it’s a process and a commitment to each other. Join ours, or build your own, but in a world that seems out of control, take a step back and seek out a bit of re-creation.

One final thing before we go: Aud Koch (who I’d not met before, and who was a fellow inhabitant of my very polite cabin) has shared some pieces from her sketchbook. They’re really pretty.

Pictures:

Pack out always has a bit of confusion, cartoonists love doggos, and Amalga Distillery has the Portland International Airport carpet of wallpaper.

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¹ Which may explain that what started as a 15-stitch wide swath of yarn eventually turns into a 28-stitch wide swath of yarn. I’m not sure how I managed to make things wider (or why I didn’t notice earlier), but Sophie assures me it’s an advanced technique that I’ve stumbled on to.

² Mostly because the hero doesn’t get to return to the land of wisdom and peace on a yearly basis, as I plan to.

³ And I am a very cynical man, but Comics Camp is enough to make me declare my allegiance to sincerity.

Sunday at Comics Camp always means one thing: in the morning, newcomers discover that last night’s dinner — sandwiches and such — were just for convenience. Jeste is bringing the tasty at full speed with heaps of sliced fruit, oatmeal, stuff to put in oatmeal, sticky buns, and an enormous hotel pan of migas; breakfast will not lack for tasty eggs and it’s just going to get more impressive as she takes the measure of her helpers.

There’s a split in the first programming block, with each of the two sessions having an upper limit due to materials constraints; on the one hand, you can learn to do accordion binding and build a notebook (Erika Moen does one that’s an absolutely gorgeous tribute to her beetlings), on the other hand, you can learn Ravenstail weaving. Having come to Camp determined to learn to knit (a decision I made last year and am only now acting on), I opt for the weaving.

Lily Hope is a Tlingit weaver, who learned from her mother, who learned in turn from one of a handful of surviving master weavers; there are a dozen or two people in the world that can do what she does, which is to make the warp and weft threads dance and to tease the geometric, always-symmetric designs from wool. She sets up a standing loom that contains the starting portion of a ceremonial shawl (as she describes it, it’s sort of a shoulder throw or shawl, and good thing too or it might never be finished), the result of three months hard work. An accomplished weaver, she tells us, can do about one square inch of design in three hours.

She sets us up with key rings tied with warp bundles and a pair of weft threads strung about them as starters, and two sets of instructions (one written, one visual) before walking us through the basics: tie two threads together, one in front of the warps (always an even number), one behind. Drop the behind weft, thread the front weft behind the next bundle of warps, bring the behind thread in front. Repeat across the warps and tie it as best you can at the right side (Ravenstail weaving is always left-to-right, and the design always rides on the front of the piece only). Repeat with the next pair of wefts; don’t let the warps tangle, don’t let the wefts slip, don’t miscount, don’t tie off too tight or too loose, don’t let the tails get in a snarl.

We move our fingers clumsily, slowly improving as she talks about the differences between Ravenstail and Chilkat weaving (Chilkat is adapted from the aesthetics of formline carvings found in house screens and totems), about the traditions of gifting across clan boundaries, and the meaning in the work. Human figures in the weaving are never shown with five-fingered hands, because it ties the work to a particular person, she says; the intent isn’t to say I was here, but instead to say A person made this, and who is less important than the people that person came from.

That idea isn’t always easy to get across; she’s had commissions from people that love the blankets and robes she produces and insist on the making designs as authentic and traditional as possible. She has to explain that the most authentic work must reside with the clan; to make a piece that’s appropriate for ceremony but that won’t be used in ceremony, that will hang on the wall of a collector in the Lower 48, can’t be done. If they want authentic, they need to talk about donating the piece to a clan that will make use of it; if they want to keep it, she’ll put in elements that are meaningful (representations of her family and her children), but which are not traditional designs. It’s a conversation about what makes your culture special and gives it meaning, and how far that meaning can be transported to other places and people.

She watches as we make our way through work that can be frustrating; I’m pretty good at the right-side knotting, but my warps keep tangling. My mind drifts to ideas of how I could add mechanical aids to the process (just a small bit of weight at the bottom of the warp would be helpful; I’ve seen it done by weavers of everything from Bruges lace to Shinto shrine decorations). I also consider that getting frustrated at a difficult task that takes a lifetime to master after about 20 minutes is also not a good look¹; she takes that time to tell us that we’re all doing very well and we’re really focusing on task much better than her usual students. Then again, her usual students are fourth graders, so….

The 90 minutes goes by and I’ve got about ten rows done; I’m keeping my elbows in close like I’m told, and I’ll spend much of the rest of the day completing this one small set of black and white chevrons with yellow accents. It’s still in my lap as we head back to the main lodge for the best-attended session of Camp. Lily’s husband, Ishmael, is going to talk about how indigenous stories and traditions can be brought into modern contexts without losing their meaning.

Ishmael is a poet, storyteller, writer, videogame producer, and steeped in the tales of his Tlingit and Inupiaq heritage. He talks about how a culture can’t be window dressing in a story, a game, a movie — the concerns of the people that live it must be given primacy if there’s to be the authenticity that the outsiders (who asked for input, after all) claim to want. He tells the story of a young boy taken by the Salmon People to learn the value of the food that he turned his nose up at; his storyteller rhythms are hypnotic, lulling; his voice conjures images in your mind. At night around a fire, the shadows would dance into shapes to illustrate his words.

There’s a lilting musicality to his story that fades as he speaks prose again; I’ve not woven a thread in an hour, but the design appears to be more recognizable than it was before.

Georgina Hayns teaches soft sculpture — two pieces of fabric, a design drawn in mirror image on them, representing the front and back of character, which will be stitched together and stuffed into a flat pillow shape. Whales, horses, blobfish, T-Rex (one guess who made that one), and a Scott C nightmare rabbit are among the designs that are painted, then stitched up and eventually stuffed. I watch, but have no character that I want to create; I continue weaving as the pillowcritters take shape (most of which will be finished over the next day; the paints need to dry, after all).

After lunch, Vera Brosgol teaches fabric arts for the homicidal: needle felting! You take a pile of wool over here, mush it up into a rough shape over there, and then you stab stab stab stab stab with a special barbed needle until it compresses and sculpts into the desired shape. More stabs allow you to connect different bundles of wool together. If you’re smart, Brosgol says, you stab not against a pile of wool held in your hand, but one that’s resting on a dense sponge; she asks casually if we’re up to date on our tetanus shots, but does not ask if we’re smart. In the end, only two people stab themselves and only one draws blood, so yay.

The Stabatorium is filled with aggression release as most of us make mushrooms (a relatively simple beginner project); Ryan North makes a small head that’s meant to be David Malki ! and Nikki Rice Malki’s year-old son. Jeremy Spake makes a little guy that looks remarkably like the old Henson coffee advertising Muppets, Wilkins and/or Wontkins. I decide that a pile of red wool will make a nice Amanita, the deadly mushroom genus responsible for more deaths than any other; I mention that Amanita‘s mycotoxin works by melting your liver, which would ordinarily be responsible for removing the toxin from your system. Sneaky buggers, them shrooms.

I do my turn in the kitchen on dinner prep — many veg are cut, salmon in a green curry sauce is prepped with a multi-veg slaw; it’s terrific, and I see how improvisational Jeste’s cooking is; she knew the salmon was going to be the centerpiece, but the rest of the meal came together over the 90 minutes or so that we were at work. She asks Georgia Patton, my fellow kitchen helper, if she’s ever worked in a professional kitchen before. You’re competent, Jeste says; this is high praise from any chef.

After dinner, the Pacific Order of Onomatopoeia Professionals reconvenes for the first time since last year’s First Annual Regional Terminology Summit. When POoOP president Tony Cliff announced that this year’s meeting would in fact take place, I spent the best part of a week trying to come up with an appropriate backronym for the event. Then Raina Telgemeier casually dropped the perfect label: Number Two.

I may have come up with a winner with the sound of people making out with tongues: le kiss. The results will be compiled by the estimable Mr Cliff soon enough, and as with last year’s FARTS, will be binding. Cliff, by the way, brought two copies of his soon-to-be-released third Delilah Dirk book, and there was not a single time that either of them was not being read. He’s pretty great at creating comics, and has lots of impressive onomatopoeia inside (even more impressive, I just spelled that word correctly on the first attempt for the first time in my life).

My weaving is done, some five hours of work in total; I’m surprised at my dive into the work of fabric, then surprised that I’m surprised. Over the past couple of years I’ve realized that the very male realms of engineering (in general) and making (in particular) greatly undervalue the textile arts. The draping of a garment from a 2D pattern to a 3D person, with a soft medium that changes with temperature, humidity, wind, and gravity, that behaves differently depending on how it’s cut and constructed — fashion is the most hardcore materials engineering discipline there is.

In retrospect, the tactile crafting going on this first day (Jason Alderman decided to attempt a full stuffed animal rather than a 2D+ pillow form; I saw him sketching out gussets), a buffer from the real world before we get into the deeper feelings in another day. Andy Runton and I catch up on years of not seeing each other; he’s been too absent from the new releases list for too long and his return will be welcomed by many, not the least me (my youngest nieces and nephews all got the Owly books; now the oldest are having their own kids, and I’m just saying that a new edition of them would be well received over the next couple of years, publishing industry).

Yarn, thread, needles, wool, books, stories — the tangible (and the made tangible by force of words) have stitched us together on this first full day.

Pictures:

Lily Hope is one of maybe ten, maybe fifteen people in the world that can do what you see here, and it took her three months. The little baby socks keeping the bundles of warp threads organized are a nice touch. The pattern that we’re weaving can be seen in the pixelized design maps; I really cannot overstate the degree of concentration that was required to make progress.

George’s horse looked great! Everybody else was a day or so away from their ravens, whales, T-Rexes, blobfish, and scary-ass rabbits. Felting, by contrast, is simple; just stab stab stab until things come together and then you have a pile of mushrooms and also Young Master Malki !.

Balloting for new official terms would continue for approximately 30 hours; you can’t quite read what the candidates are, but Cliff should be releasing the results in a week or two, and we’ll share them then. In the meantime, here’s last year’s again.

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¹ Then again, she casually mentions that if any of us are engineers who can design her a loom that can collapse in a connected fashion instead of having to be completely disassembled when she wants to move it to a different place, she’d be grateful. Tradition and technical advancements can be compatible.

I feel I should say that one of the neatest things that Pat Race did with respect to the Mini-Con this year was to have his little logo bear redrawn by an indigenous artist in a traditional style; it’s a small thing, but it’s meaningful. Not sure it would have fit on the cookies, though.

I also feel I should say that if you can start your day (a very busy one, packing up your hotel room an delivering them to a U-Haul; setting up, conducting, and tearing down a convention; traveling to a campsite) by having tea and yogurt parfaits with a pair of very skilled (and colorfully coiffed) creators, you should do it; it even better if one of them can tell you all about power tools and her plans to construct a killer Halloween haunted house.

Thus fortified for the day, we made our way to the Juneau Arts & Culture Center on a somewhat overcast, somewhat brisk day. The weather was fortunate — last year Mini-Con feel on the first really gorgeous day of the year, sending a large portion of Juneauites into the Great Outdoors for recreation; a slightly blah day increased the turnout in our corner of the Great Indoors.

Speaking of which, if you ever get the chance to exhibit at Mini-Con, take it; the JACC features a nice green room away from the con floor for when you’re feeling like you need a break or a snack. If you really need isolation for a little while, there’s even a recording studio, so there’s a place that completely soundproof to hide from the hurly burly. Setup ran smoothly (it is, after all, a small space), and the Snack Castle rose once again under the watchful stewardship of Jason Alderman.

It occurs to me I didn’t mention Snack Castle last year, and neglected to take any pictures of it either year … Alderman, tasked with running the snack sales, built a castle out of scrap cardboard. It had turrets, battlements, crenelations, murder holes, and a working drawbridge. This year, there was talk of converting it to a Snack Mastaba¹, in honor of the Egyptian pyramid precursor that Spike taught us about the prior night at the library. Alderman kept all who would have sacked the Snack Castle at bay and oversaw peaceful trade, save for when he was sketchnoting (more on that below).

In addition to the vendors on the floor and the regular signings at the Alaska Robotics table, there was a steady stream of programming across the road in the meeting rooms of public broadcaster KTOO. Jon Klassen, Michaela Goade, and Andy Runton spoke about making children’s books; Ben Hatke and Lucy Bellwood argued over whether longbows (bows!) or tall ships (boats!) are better²; Molly Ostertag, Spike, and Ryan North talked about achieving social change in (and via) comics.

Raina Telgemeier and Vera Brosgol talked about their autobio comics; Georgina Hayns and Jeremy Spake talked about puppet fabrication; Dik Pose and Tony Cliff MacGuyvered together a Mac, a webcam, and a chair to make a stop-motion animation rig; Molly Lewis lead a uke jam session; unstructured hangout sessions were held where attendees drew (with Ostertag and Dylan Meconis), talked publishing (with Spike David Malki !, and Anne Bean), wrote songs (with Seth Boyer and Marian Call), drew some more (with Hatke and Scott C), and talked writing (with North and Molly Muldoon). What I’m saying is, if there was some aspect of creativity that struck your fancy, you either got to listen to very accomplished people talk about it, or got to hang with them and do it; it’s a very street-level kind of convention.

And in the middle of it all, a platter magically appeared in the green room, filled with local jerky and salmon spread and crab dip. And lo, the cartoonists did descend upon it, scooping great swaths up into their hungry maws. Weirdly, the amount of crab dip never seemed to diminish, but instead fed them all. And they left the green room saying A miracle occurred here.

Okay, probably not and I don’t really like crab, but I’m assured that the dip was delicious.

Back on the floor, Raina spent well over her allotted hour doing portrait sketches in support of a local bookstore on Independent Bookstore Day; her line eventually was cleared, and a bunch of kids went home with pictures of themselves all Raina-style. Dylan Meconis was doing watercolors of pets and OCs, because she’s been that kid wandering the con floor, working up the nerve to approach a creator, and will always pay back the kindness she was shown. Story times were held in the local branch of the library, with Klassen, C, and Brosgol reading from their books to assembled families.

And then it was time to break down, load up, and head out to the Camp; there were intros, and kids (both Ben & Anna Hatke and David and Nikki Rice Malki ! brought offspring, who were both remarkably even-tempered and delightful for being 3 and 1 years of age, respectively), and dogs (many skritches were had by Pippin and Brio and Nova). Gear was packed out to cabins, a light dinner was had, and Camp chef de cuisine Jeste Burton³ let us all know that she had a requirement — about which more later. The last bits of structure for the evening involved the Science Fair — people formed into impromptu groups, and then giving a topic on which to produce an informative poster. Don’t call it an icebreaker, don’t call it a teambuilding exercise, call it an excuse to get weird with new friends and very possibly the contents of the booze table.

Come to think of it, the act of physically creating things outside the typical comics wheelhouse would become a theme for the weekend, with a heavy dive into the fabric arts to start. But we’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Pictures:

The JACC main hall is not very large; think the combo auditorium/gym in a typical elementary school. The meeting rooms at KTOO for panel talks (Childrens Books with Goade, Klassen, Runton from left; Lucy “Boats” Bellwood and Ben “Bows” Hatke locked in intellectual combat) and hangouts (Malki ! and Spike on publishing) were very comfortable.

The exodus of exhibitors made their way to the U-Haul to move stuff to Camp; this was a considerable improvement on last year’s transport, where the last 5-6 rows of the bus were taken up with luggage and people were crammed in. Look at the spacious luxury! A mere 45 minutes later these smiling folks would be taking stuff to their cabins and deciding what to do in the coming days.

Did you want to learn about shoes? Or perhaps the duct tape that might hold shoes together? How about berries, or the door that leads to the stairs that leads to underground. Sure some of those other projects might have had “better composition” or “prettier art” or “actual facts”, but did any of them have rats running around on a corpse in a murder hole that’s populated by godsdamned mole people? I think we all know which one was best.

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¹ Just a big ol’ pile of cardboard, with the actual for-sale snacks buried in a secret chamber far underneath; customers would be forced to plunder the sugary tomb.

² Hire these two to liven up any panel discussion. They play off each other beautifully.

³ Who managed approximately 1000 meals with a dozen different dietary restrictions and preferences, and the help of two or three civilians on any particular prep or cleanup; the woman is a marvel. And I would commit actual crimes to get pan full of the sticky buns she made for breakfast.

Friday is a busy day for comics types in Juneau; Pat Race, Aaron Suring, and the other Alaska Robotics folks have been in contact with schools across the region, and there will be fifty assemblies and class talks that take place today. Consensus best one: The Toronto Man-Mountain went to a junior high class that’s been intensively studying Shakespeare and his choose-your-own books are a hit. They got all the jokes and smutty bits Willy S hid in iambic pentameter!

In the time before, after, and between their visits, a steady stream of creators passes between the lobby of the Juneau hotel where most are staying, and the aforementioned Rookery for coffee, tea, snacks, lunch, and good times. I was talking with Erika Moen¹ (force of nature and Beetmistress General) and Molly Ostertag (creator of my favorite book of 2017) in the lobby and we wandered into The Rookery for hot beverages.

This was where Georgina Hayns — late of Laika Studio, now taking time off before deciding on the next stage of her professional life — found us with a box that claimed to contain … I want to say a medium-sized florescent light fixture, but maybe it was a smallish set of blinds? Anyway, about the length of a box of aluminum foil, with a 50% larger cross section. Do you want to see ParaNorman? she asked, as if people say no.

This, she explained, was her own puppet (gifted to her by one of the animators), and she let us get our grubby hands all over it. Having had the opportunity to play with multiple puppets from Kubo And The Two Strings last year, I knew that Norman’s face would pop off and proceeded to do so immediately; it’s possible that Ostertag and Moen thought I’d just mutilated Hayns’s priceless possession, but any trepidation quickly gave way to fascination with the puppet.

Here’s the thing — the Laika animation puppets defy that simple word. They are perfectly designed objects that are both practical and aesthetic at the same time. There are few things that blend function and form so well, I told Hayns — the Zippo lighter, the Fender Strat, the Swiss Army Officer’s Knife — but ParaNorman (and Coraline, and Beetle, and Eggs, and all the other stars of Laika’s movies) falls squarely into the category. I appreciate the artistry, and the engineering in equal measure. Plus, check out the wardrobe. Somebody had to reproduce the scuffs and tears in Norman’s clothing across dozens of iterations of the puppet.

Friday evening is given over to a public show at the Juneau Public Library; Seth Boyer, Marian Call, and Molly Lewis sing songs and play comics folks on with appropriate snippets (Raina Telgemeier enters to her name being sung to the tune of My Girl²; Molly Ostertag gets Concerning Hobbits from Howard Shore’s Lord Of The Rings soundtrack) as they each spend five minutes on something interesting. Raina does a reading from Smile, and Ryan North reads his recently-announced children’s book How To Be A T-Rex³.

Ostertag talks about how to run a D&D game; Andy Runton shares an Owly short; Vera Brosgol shares the research that went into her stellar Be Prepared (a book she shared the beginning pages of here last year). Ben Hatke talked about why drawing Wolverine in nonstandard costumes (ex: Vampirella) and saying Bub is always funny; Jon Klassen did a reading accompanied by Boyer on guitar — Can you make it sound like Zorba The Greek? asked Klassen. As it turned out, Boyer could.

Shing Yin Khor shared her love of roadside America’s greatest public art series, the giant fiberglass muffler man in all his infinite variations; Dylan Meconis shared a story-in-a-story from her forthcoming Queen Of The Sea, and C Spike Trotman talked about why everybody who thinks aliens built the pyramids of Egypt is an idiot who doesn’t know their history. Lucy Bellwood spoke about, oddly, not boats, but the process of creating 100 Demon Dialogues and the attendant little jerk; Scott C closed things out with a discussion of his past career and how one comes to do a painting of Jeff Goldblums or Carl Sagans or whatever strikes your fancy. How many Carl Sagans are there, you guys? Can science answer this for us? Maybe.

There was an afterparty in a house designed for large groups of people to mix easily and comfortably; there was amazing ice cream (charred coconut and wild blueberry) and chili and cornbread and far too little sleep. The morning would require packing up, packing in, running a convention, packing out, and heading to Camp. Juneau was behind us, and a long road ahead.

Pictures:

Not so many this time, since I was running A/V for the Library show. But you still get to see Norman, the incredible detail in his clothing, and what he looks like without a face.

Here’s a fun game: how many famous cartoonists can you find in this picture? For reference, that room at the Juneau Library was entirely set up, populated, entertained for two hours, and cleaned up again in about three and a half hours; much of that was down to the well-organized MCing of Pat Race, who kept things humming.

Seth Boyer and Andy Runton were the only performer and presenter I managed to get pics of. Like I said, I was busy.

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¹ Who did not get murdered by a serial killer. It’s not my story to tell, but if you know her IRL, ask her.

² Taaalllkin’ ’bout Raaaainnnna, Raina!

³ Best part of this book? It’s got multiple places where whoever is reading (or reading along) gets to ROAR, which makes kids really happy.

For anybody that’s read this page, you may recall that Comics Camp was a major formative experience for me in 2017; if you wish, you can read about 10,000 words on it here.

The first I realized I was truly on the verge of Comics Camp this year was 26 April, early afternoon in Juneau; I was 13 hours and four time zones from when I started my day at Oh-Stupid-Thirty, and I stared out of my fourth floor hotel room and pretty much directly into what looks like the kitchen of a house not that far behind the hotel. Juneau is a very vertical city, populated at all times by ravens, at some times by wolves and/or bears, and pretty much nonstop by eagles if you’re near the dump. A raven alighted on the roof of the house whose kitchen I was staring into, nonplussed.

The thing about Alaska Robotics, the one-day con they put on, the myriad of school visits by creators they arrange¹, and the Camp associated with all of the previous, is that it’s run by the very best people, attended by even more of the very best people, in a location that is almost as far as it could be from my home. As I find myself past the half-century mark, the travel necessary to attend these marvels is taxing in ways it would not have been ten, or even five years ago. And as I find myself in an increasingly chaotic society, those rigors of travel become a price I am increasingly willing to pay.

Thursday is the travel day for most who are making their way to the Mini-Con/Camp², so the afternoon is largely open; I dropped by the Alaska Robotics Gallery (a comics/game store, with art supplies and magnificent works of local artists) to get my volunteer assignments for the Mini-Con, as well as my staff t-shirt. I also make arrangements for my assisting gig at the kick-off event of Comics Time in Juneau; the musical cohort of Camp — Marian Call, Seth Boyer, Molly Lewis — will be playing at local cafe The Rookery³ and there’s seating to arrange and a door to watch.

The show is the latest iteration of Call’s Space Time series, which often involves writers, scientists, Flight Controllers and Directors … you get the idea. Tonight, it’s Three musicians and a series of comics artists that will be livedrawing along to the music. There’s a local poet, Catherine Hatch, talking about relationships and fighting and compromise If You Want Your Laundry Folded. There’s a reading from The Little Prince (the meeting with The Businessman); the tone slides from earnest to silly to contemplative and back.

Lewis sang her ode to Juneau hirsuteness, The Year Of The Beard. Boyer brought the room to tears with the saddest, most melancholy song in English. Call shared the story of how her signature tune got turned upside down and backwards via a musicbox and a Moebius strip, and became a tribute to last year’s eclipse. Georgia Patton, Lee Post, Lucy Bellwood, Lucas Elliott, and Kerstin La Cross took inspiration from the songs and created Art.

And through it all one thought resonated, but was finally brought to voice in the refrain of the second to last song of the show, which is also the last song of Call’s latest album:

Beggar, Banker, King, and Pawn
We’re only bones with stories on

We are the sum of our stories, the ones we tell each other and the ones we tell ourselves. The storytellers were gathering, and Juneau was poised to listen.

Pictures:

The crowd gathers, and the performers perform. Pictures drawn to Good Morning, Moon, No Paper, The Year Of The Beard, Pantsuit Sasquatch, Frozen Man, the story of The Businessman, Good Night, Moon, I don’t recall which song, Mediocre Algorithmic First Date, The Avocado Song, don’t recall again but man, it’s pretty, All Star, Like This, Grandpa Had It Right, and Space Weird Thing.

Music:

• Something Fierce by Marian Call (includes Good Morning, Moon; The Avocado Song)
• Standing Stones by Marian Call (includes No Paper; Like This; Mediocre Algorithmic First Date; Grandpa Had It Right)
• Fun Singles In Your Area by Marian Call (contains Space Weird Thing feat. Molly Lewis)
• Frozen Man by James Taylor (covered by Molly Lewis feat. Marian Call)
• The Same Old Songs, But Live by Molly Lewis (includes The Year Of The Beard)
• Pantsuit Sasquatch by Molly Lewis (demo)
• Get Rekt by Seth Boyer (does not include All Star, but that’s why we have YouTube)

Spam of the day:
Sent away until Camp recaps are done.

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¹ More than 50 of them this year; last year, it was closer to 35.

² At least, those who are coming on the exhibitor side of things; attendees will be making their way to Juneau from across Alaska, but not until after work on Friday in many cases. Alaskans think nothing of hopping down to the local airport and flying for hours in this fashion; organizer Pat Race would recount stories of traveling a thousand miles or more in order for his high school soccer team to play in an away game. Things are just bigger up there.

³ Run by lovely people, and home to some of the most outrageous cookies known to humanity. Try the Chocolate Chip, Cornflake, and Marshmallow cookies.

And then it was done; breakfast on Tuesday was followed by an all-hands talk about what Camp had meant, what lessons we were going to take with us from this intentional community of weirdos who normally are very isolated for much of their careers¹. What we’d learned and how we’d changed. Here’s the one line I wrote afterwards:

Gods damn, this place is better than a year’s worth of therapy.

(This was not far from where I’d written, for about the fourth time, I am fucking lucky.)

We’re not all going away until the year’s elapsed, naturally; the nature of modern communications and social media means that the impromptu tribe is never more than an hour or two out of communications with itself. The kitchen was scrubbed² and food packed out, luggage gathered and cabins swept³, and the bus loaded with those Campers that were on the 1:30pm flight to Seattle (enough that maybe they shouldn’t all be on the same flight; in the event of a disaster, your average cartoonist is both stringy and not terribly nutritious).

Those remaining — locals, people with later flights — made sure that the remaining stuff (mostly food and ukuleles) got loaded out and away from prying wildlife. Remember I told you that ravens would fly into cars to start poking around? During the packing up process, I closed the gate of a pickup truck’s bed cover; it was opened again so that somebody could add a box o’ stuff and in the five seconds that nobody was directly looking at the truckbed, a raven flew in, grabbed an entire loaf of bread in her talons, flew about 10 meters away, and started snacking⁴.

I was given a lift back to town by Tara (a self-proclaimed benevolent mercenary⁵; she’d worn a lab coat all weekend after the Saturday morning science march at the state legislature building), who showed me around the upper reaches of Juneau, through valleys and hiking trails, and into the historical site of Douglas Island.

Douglas is where the gold mining took place, and as fate would have it, it was just about 100 years to the day of the cave in that closed the Treadwell mine for good; the ruins feature bits of old buildings, old machinery rusted to Hades and back, the occasional intact shell that looks like a place to dump bodies. There’s a beach there, too — built not on sand, but 80 acres of pulverized rock and mine tailings that the gold was pulled from; lots of people walk their dogs there now.

Dinner with the other stragglers, a stupid-early taxi to the airport for a 5:30am liftoff, and then back to a world that is not Camp, not Juneau, not Alaska. I was left with the same feeling that I had the first time I visited New Orleans, where I felt an undercurrent that seemed to say You’re not home, this isn’t America anymore. This is New Orleans and we’re older than America, we’re something different, we won’t ever be the same as places you’re used to. Deal with us on our terms.

Comics Camp is different from every place we came from (even for those locals that just went up the road for a bit to join us), a place built on the people that gathered there for a long enough time to get to know each other, a short enough time to not know everything about each other, a temporary place to recharge us before we returned to our homes, ready to make more.

And now you’ve got maybe an idea of what it was like, except for all the parts that I’m still figuring out, and all the parts you had to be there for, and all the parts that aren’t anybody else’s business. Oh, and in case you might think it’s just an exercise designed to let Pat & Aaron just hang out with friends for a weekend, here’s what the state of Alaska thinks about their promotion of the arts year round.

It’s a hard, largely anonymous task they’ve taken on for themselves, which is helping artists up and down the state — and across North America — to find their people and create more art. Please consider the last seven posts less a massive self-indulgence and more a 10,000 word Thank You to some people I can’t ever thank enough.

Now.

All of us: those that went to Camp, those that were there last year, those that wanted to go and couldn’t, those that figured it wasn’t for them (spoiler: it’s for everybody), those that wouldn’t go near a group outing in a hundred years, every single damn one of us, there’s just one thing left to do.

Time to make stuff.

And come to Camp! We’ve got s’mores.

Confidential to P & M In Juneau: Hey! You’re getting married! There is no limit to the amount of joy that I’m wishing you both.

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¹ And for once, I’m going to consider myself a full part of the cohort; my job may appear to be social on the surface, but it’s actually fairly isolated. Much of my teaching schedule is done remotely, via computer and phone. When I have an in-person class, it’s with students that I’ll never see again. I’ve not had a boss in the same state as me for most of 20 years now.

² I mentioned to my wife, who just got her ServSafe certification, that we were cleaning the (not particularly dirty) freezer and fridge interiors with bleach and she was impressed.

³ Again, my everlasting respect to my fellow Nagoonberry Cabinmates; I don’t think the lights were ever switched on or a full-voiced conversation took place until we were packing up in broad daylight. People came into the cabin with flashlights held in their teeth and an easily-ignored flurry of zipper and velcro noises accompanied the bed-settling routine.

Even the very occasional snores formed a sort of complementary soundscape, like a lightswitch rave without the siren noise. Libby, Angela, Aubrey, Katie, Rebecca, and Kazu, you have my everlasting sleepytimes gratitude, and next time I see you the first round of drinks is on me.

⁴ We decided that such brazenness deserved a sacrifice and I tossed two more slices to the piratical corvid; her beak was full, but she hopped over and snagged up the additional food in her beak before awkwardly flapping off to find a hiding space. Well done, you thieving genius. Remember me when I return.

⁵ Tara, get a website I can point people towards because you are a neat person with lots of knowledge to share and I want to point them towards you so they will get smarter and better.

Comics Camp had people that don’t make comics; there was a lawyer¹, filmmakers, and four of us that decided as Camp was breaking up that we were the non-comics-creating enabling types². Then there were the ones that I think even the comics creators looked upon as opening themselves up to artistic critique in a way that was almost incomprehensible; say what you will, you don’t normally create comics in real time in front of people³.

But the musicians, they’re putting all they have out on display and the feedback is immediate … you either grab the audience and they’re with you or you don’t and they aren’t. It’s a special kind of public vulnerability.

Fortunately, the musicians we had at Camp are all mad-skilled seasoned pros; I’ve come to think of them as a gang of master performers — a Five Man Band that’s been through Rule 63 and doesn’t care about the traditional labels — able to pull off any musical caper you choose to throw at them. I’m giving them their own writeup primarily because of the Monday night sing-along that broke out late, but this will involve performances (planned and otherwise) from throughout the weekend. If you like, you should go look up the work of Seth Boyer, Marian Call, The Doubleclicks, and Molly Lewis. I’ll wait.

I knew Seth Boyer primarily for his collaborations with Call; he’s played guitar in every one of her performances that I’ve seen, but a lot of people know him because a year and a half ago, he did the near-impossible by making All Star by Smashmouth into a legitimately touching song with the help of a grand piano. Like all of his performances that I like best, it’s tinged with sadness and sincerity; even as you convince yourself that it’s going to be played for laughs you find yourself getting swept up in emotional depth you didn’t think was present.

Sure, it’s funny to think of a big beardy guy in a Gone Squatchin’ trucker hat to be singing the most famous I want song of all time, and yeah it starts off with a giggle or two, but Boyer means it all — every bit of longing, every bit of vulnerability. It was a guitar in his hands and the first lines of All Star were almost too soft to notice, then people began to gather and musicians stood next to him, and a few dozen voices rose together on the chorus, following where this bear of a man led. He’s The Emotional Center and he doesn’t care if you believe he looks the part or not.

In a world where the economics and public perceptions of various styles of music were about 87° out of phase with this one, Marian Call would be singing in music halls and opera houses, her crystal-clear voice cutting through arias and Richard Thompsonesque story songs alike, acoustically perfect spaces resonating every note and typewriter clack. In a world that’s 0° out of phase with this one, the people that book music halls and opera houses for some reason look askance at songs about the influx of cruise ship tourists into coastal Alaskan towns, covers of Homestar Runner tunes, and tributes to Shark Week.

That last one’s stuck particularly in my brain, because it demonstrated the other thing I’ve noticed about Call besides her eclectic musicality — her clear vision of where she wants a song to go and how it should be received and engaged by her audience. During Shark Week at the Mini-Con concert (around about 50:30 or so), Call found the precise degree of encouragement necessary to get a somewhat laid back crowd to indulge in (her words) a little bit of bloodlust, please. The song doesn’t work without that enthusiasm, so she made it happen by force of will.

The attention to detail touches everything from her music (notes and wordplay equally) and its message⁴ to the data resulting from a world-wide hashtag she created; the logistics of a performance and minor Camp hiccups all get jumped on and resolved before anybody realizes she was there. In our musical gang, she’s The Fixer.

Molly Lewis is a paradox; happiness and sadness flow from her songs and performances very nearly simultaneously. Ten years ago she put a video up on YouTube of the most improbable ukulele cover the world had seen: Britney Spears’s Toxic, which has since become a mainstay of her concerts; the performance matches her bouncy, joyous approach to music. But in her hands any song under the sun — an examination of Lincoln’s assassination, say — can turn from goofball to melancholy in the space of a heartbeat.

Or, for that matter, she can turn from one song to another and back almost before you’ve realized it⁵, and turn language on its head in service of a gag, pun, or just for the sheer joy of it. Oh, and she has minions now, with at least three or four members of the Republic of the Uke-raine plucking away on strings at any given time. Without question they would follow her anywhere, their marching songs (somewhat jangly, somewhat frantic) the last thing you hear come the revolution. With the quick shifts and reversals — in tone, topic, word choice, everything — it’s clear that Lewis fills the role of The Acrobat.

The Webber sisters — Angela and Aubrey, collectively The Doubleclicks — are quiet until it’s time to not be quiet, reserved until it’s time to color outside the lines, using their natural camouflage until it’s time to show just a bit of teeth and menace. As far as potentially merciless predators go, they’re also extremely considerate cabin-mates, AAAA++ would bunk with again. There’s hidden depths there, in the songs and in the performances, that I think don’t always get their due recognition.

A typical Doubleclicks song will feature themes of awkwardness, introversion, empathy, trying to fit in; if we were all just a little bit better, just a little bit nicer, they tell us, we’d all be collectively a hell of a lot happier. But there’s a spine of steel beneath the calls for kindness — rejection of their desire for basic civility will not result in begging for acceptance, but a quiet, unwavering, very polite screw you. That’s when Angela, who looks like the lady you drop your kid off with at daycare, fixes you with her glare and lets you know exactly what she thinks of as the appropriate response to the challenges of everyday life:

be yourself
count on your inner strength
find your people
hunt the weak

She means it, too.

And the whole time, Aubrey’s been unobtrusively forcing you to reevaluate everything you thought you knew about live music performances; her cello fills in behind every voice and instrument, lending depth and character and elevating the whole, and she does it all on the fly. It’s not a flashy role, the cellist is pretty much never the one at the front of the stage soaking up the love from the groupies; her solid-body cello⁶ kept her from moving around much, tethered as it was to a power outlet so that it could be amplified.

But.

Remember that video up above of Molly Lewis playing Toxic? Sounds great, but what if it sounded even better? Once Lewis started playing on Monday night I watched Aubrey wait a moment, find the chords she wanted, and start to play every other part of that song; it was everything that some insane Swedish pop song producer knows will never be noticed in the video or the single or the remix or the concert performance, but without which it just won’t sound right.

I watched her do that with a dozen other songs, too, extemporaneous fills flowing in ways that you see late at night in jazz clubs but which you don’t usually see in the bowed instruments. And with a prompting of two words from Marian Call — Power Ballad! — she did it during the performance of the brainstormed musical on Sunday night.

Call had come up with the tune she wanted to sing a few minutes earlier; a few scribbled chords were shown to Boyer so he could strum along. Because of the power cord’s length, Aubrey wasn’t able to see those quick notes and so she paused, she listened, and she created a counterpoint⁷ that somewhere caused an insane Swedish pop song producer to quietly mutter helvete. The Webbers round out our Musical Caper Gang as The Muscle and The Improviser⁸.

We’re coming to the end, but for now (someplace, forever) there’s still a dozen and a half nerdy voices singing along to Smashmouth and Britney, Bowie and The Beatles, Savage Garden and Jimmy Eat World, the Crystal Gems and Simon & Garfunkel, led by a musical Voltron that combines to something magical.

Photos

• If memory serves, I’ve now seen Seth Boyer play guitar for Marian Call in Juneau, San Diego, and two or three times on streaming concerts. It’s a delight every time.
• Unfortunately, I didn’t get any shots of either The Doubleclicks’s or Molly Lewis’s sets at the Mini-Con concert. Marian & Seth brought ’em back up to join in on the songs.
• She got the bloodlust going; before her entreaty, maybe five people were doing the chomp, chomp bit. After, it was everybody but the camera operators.
• The shirt reads I’M FAT LET’S PARTY, and there was a sign taped to his back but you kind of had to be there.
• That cello was one of the most beautiful mixes of form and function I’ve ever seen. It goes in my personal museum of design alongside the Zippo lighter, the Fender Strat, and the the Swiss Army Officer’s Knife (the basic two blades, two tools model).
• Superheroes. From Mockingbird #8, written by Chelsea Cain, pencils by Kate Niemczyk, colors by Rachelle Rosenberg, letters by Joe Caramagna, cameos by nearly everybody.

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¹ Light-ning LAW-yer!

² There was a put-your-hands-in and raise ’em up going Whoa cheer and everything.

³ Even Kazu Kibuishi & Lucas Elliott’s livedrawing was solely illustration; there wasn’t a full story being told.

⁴ Take a listen to her latest album, if you haven’t. Pay particular attention to the song order.

⁵ Her performance of Toxic at music night suddenly shifted on the chorus to Love Shack just long enough to register with the crowd, then back again.

⁶ A beautiful instrument that can be played standing, and also she very kindly did not murder me when I mentioned I’d love to take it apart to see how it worked.

⁷ My knowledge of music theory is thin at best; I think I’m using the word I want to.

⁸ Which, as it turns out, isn’t too far off the roles they played in their appearance in an Eisner-nominated comic. Serendipity!

Monday.

Monday was probably the most deep and meaningful day of Comics Camp, but much of it is going to go unremarked upon; this was the day when the assurance that everything was solely for the ears of those present allowed people to open up and discuss things that would not be discussed in public. Plans for future things that may change radically between now and an indefinite then were also tossed around at length. Money was talked about frankly. You weren’t there, my pen was largely still; them’s the breaks.

Certain aspects, however, have had public components, so you get to be pointed in various directions.

Andy McMillan, one of the two Andys behind XOXO Festival, is working on a new project: The Liberty Foundation. Its purpose will be to support independent artists by providing both funding and the tools to turn their artistic practices into sustainable, ongoing businesses; the precise mechanisms by which this will be achieved are still in development, but McMillan will be sharing when he’s ready via Twitter. If you found the Creators For Creators grant of interest, I’d advise you to keep an eye on The Liberty Foundation.

Katie Lane has been mentioned on this page more than once, and she held a Q&A session¹ where anybody with a question about where the law intersects with the arts could get informal advice. Key word there, informal; while Lane is a lawyer, with few exceptions she is not your lawyer and as such was not providing specific legal advice². She did talk generally a good deal about intellectual property, the importance of getting things in writing, and the value of treating legal negotiations as an opportunity to understand the opposing side and come to a place of mutual benefit.

That last bit really struck me; Lane isn’t out to win, she’s out to find a solution that is beneficial to all involved — if only because an agreement that makes everybody happy is less likely to be (expensively!) fought over later. If I lived in Oregon, she’d be my lawyer for everything.

She’s also damn good at explaining things in terms anybody can understand, as when she used a Capri Sun pouch and two water bottles to illustrate the differences between sole proprietorships, LLCs, S-corporations, and C-corporations³. Asked about the one thing to look for in a contract that should be of greatest interest (or ring the loudest bells by its absence), she cited clear terms regarding what rights are assigned and termination of those assignments.

There was ice cream at lunch: spruce-tip in a vanilla base, and blueberry with lemon curd. They were great.

Kate Beaton and Vera Brosgol talked about childrens books. I was most startled by the number of revisions that an oversized book can go through, including the number of versions where King Baby was very much an unlikeable jerk. It takes a lot of work to tread that line where your characters are likable yet interesting. For Brosgol’s case, she noted the value of having characters in your books shout, because when you read to kids they all get to shout, too. She also had her own editorial struggles, especially with respect to word choice; no matter, little kids now know the words samovar and wormhole.

Lucy Bellwood (Adventure Cartoonist!) has been rather open in public about her finances of late (case in point, from earlier this week), and so led a frank discussion on money⁴. You get the same advice that others shared: there are resources out there to improve financial literacy, like Oh My Dollar and Bad With Money, and services that can help you stay on the right side of money issues, like Tax Jar.

Not being a freelancer and having had the advantage of a decades-long professional career, I got a variety of new perspectives on what fiscal reality is like for those who haven’t followed my particular trajectory. Everybody had something to contribute, though, from the just-starting creators being assured that damn near everything is deductible (including Comics Camp, which is professional development if anything is) to my advice regarding credit cards⁵. Also: advice regarding crowdfunding, not getting screwed by clients that want to slow-walk paying you, and the value of learning from those that went before you (cf: Spike’s Kickstarter comic, Erika & Matt’s book Numberwangs [NSFW]).

In keeping with the theme, Pat Race and Aaron Suring talked about the process of developing the idea of Comics Camp, and the development of financial resources that allowed them to make it a reality. The amount of effort they went to put this thing on — twice now! — without bankrupting themselves is pretty damn impressive. They should turn it into a case study on financing arts support and take it on the road as a seminar (with a modest, but realistic registration fee; they shouldn’t be bearing all the costs of making the arts community smarter by themselves).

Dinner was followed up by Katie And Ryan’s Very Serious Talk About Being Funny, with everybody’s favourite Canadians; Beaton and North had run the session at Mini-Con on Saturday, but they talked more about their personal philosophies of humour. Beaton credits writing laugh-chuckles as making her more empathetic, while acknowledging that finding something that makes her laugh prompts her to immediately destroy that joy by picking it apart like a gross sponge. North noted that comedy is one of the two easiest genres to write in, because if you’re doing it right there’s an immediate physical reaction⁶; you can’t make others laugh if you don’t first make yourself laugh.

Then they made us do worksheets. New Yorker cartoons with the captions erased (it would be cheating to fill them all in with Christ, what an asshole), comic strips with the last panel missing (including a series of Cathy strips where you were not allowed to simply write ACK!). It was a tough exercise, and even tougher to come up with something original; there were huge thematic and wording overlaps in the New Yorker captions among those present.

There was a photo op for all the self-identified bearded Campers and short presentations hosted by McMillan — titled Presentations By People Who Didn’t Have Presentations Talky People Shut Up Time — for any topics not covered elsewhen at Camp. This included a fast five minutes from Molly Lewis on Bullet Journaling that I suspect has led more than one Camper down a hole of special pens and washi tape⁷.

During that time I was tapped on the shoulder by Seth Boyer who said he’d heard I mix good cocktails; I gave him something I’d been working on that weekend called the Aurora Georgealis and it prompted a spontaneous Wow! of appreciation that made me feel like I belonged among the artists and creators.

For those of you wanting to make your own, it’s derived from your basic sour:

1 oz liquor
1 oz citrus
1 oz simple syrup

Shake, strain, garnish as desired.

By choosing an appropriate citrus to match the spirit, you have almost infinite flexibility. The liquor I chose was an aged dark rum; earlier in the weekend the citrus was blood orange, but tonight I was using the last of the breakfast juice, which was a combo of orange, peach, and mango. Because it was a bit sweet, I cut back the juice to 3/4 oz and added several squeezes of lime. The simple syrup had been previously dressed with two airline bottles of white rum, lime juice, lime zest, and vanilla, making an impromptu falernum. The name was inspired by Georgina Hayns, whose enthusiasm for the borealis was matched only by her enthusiasm for helping me perfect the recipe.

And then, before everybody slipped away, the music started. I realize that I’m over 1500 words in already and so I’m going to talk about the impromptu singalong and the musicians of Camp in their own post. They deserve it.

Photos
Not so many today; turns out that sitting around talking about serious topics isn’t that interesting, visually speaking.

• Lessons from Vera and Kate: If you’re going to remember one thing when writing for kids who may be reading for themselves or may be read to, it’s that kids are smart. They’ll find the hidden jokes on the page, or the goat that follows the old lady from the mountain to the moon. Not talking down to kids also means not talking down to the adults that read to them, so avoid the fake, pseudo-Suessian rhythms that are going to sound awful when read aloud.

  Also: farts are always funny.

• Two people that present as very nearly effortlessly funny, Katie & Ryan will tell you at length that funny is a muscle that must be trained and exercised.
• I could only come up with three captions, all of which were substantially identical to multiple other people. That means I’m either as funny as professional cartoonists, or I’m astonishingly unoriginal.
• What I was working with. It was fun.

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¹ Titled Lightning Lawyer! You have to sing it, though, for full effect: Light-ning LAW-yer! As a matter of fact, if you’re ever around Lane in person and her name is said out loud, you are obligated to sing it.

² Specific legal advice is not offered in public, and you pay for it.

³ I’ve made my living for a quarter-century by teaching technical topics, mostly by means of creative analogy. This was the best I’ve ever seen.

⁴ Which she introduced (with characteristic enthusiasm) as Money! You want it! What is it? How do you get it? And how can you keep it?

⁵ Three rules: 1. Always pay them off every month; 2. Never accept an offer that’s blind-mailed to you; 3. Don’t pay for the privilege of carrying a card.

That last one I amended in conversation with fellow camper Tara, who was wondering about the Alaska Air miles-earning credit card, but which carries an annual fee. If you can keep to Rule 1 and you get enough miles or other benefits (like free checked bags) to offset the fee, that’s fine. I was thinking more along the lines of the Amex Platinum offer I got in the mail this week, which offers me the exclusive prestige of Platinum (ugh) for the trivial cost of $450 per year. Screw that.

And, full disclaimer, under the assumption that I’m going to any future Comics Camp that will have me, I went and looked at the Alaska Air credit card and figured that it makes sense financially for me (especially after I discovered they fly nonstop from Newark to San Diego, with First Class on Alaska only about $200 more than steerage on United).

⁶ The other is erotica. Ladies.

⁷ Don’t ask.

I’ll be honest; Sunday started a bit stressfully for me; Pat Race had asked me to give a presentation on the history of webcomics, and I was in absolute terror it would devolve immediately into uselessness:

Hey, Ryan North? Remember when you pranked Wikipedia about chickens? That was great. And Kate Beaton, you did a comic where a duck said “Aw yiss”. That was great, too.

And to be honest, I have to this day little memory of what I actually said. I have notes, mind you, that say things like The first webcomics are about as easily identified as the first jazz or punk songs and (double-underlined) Algonquin Roundtablesque!!

I remember my main thesis being that webcomics (aside from being a useless term, but we haven’t come up with a better one yet) is less a medium of distribution and more of an attitude: creator ownership, minimal gatekeeping, merchandising on the back end for scrappy entrepreneurship. It’s an attitude whose technical and business rules are constantly changing, and whose only constant is the ease of collaboration. Not just between cartoonists, either; I remember this bit:

So one day I leave my offices at Bryant Park in Manhattan, and as I walk by the southern end of Times Square, I noticed a full-sized billboard advertising W00tstock 2.0; it’s portraits of a former child actor/writer, an SFX goofball that blows things up for science, a pair of internet musicians/pirate fetishists, and it’s all been done 8-bit style by a quasireclusive pixelsmith.

If Dorthy Parker got drunk with fewer writers and more sculptors, aviatrixes, and telegraphers you’d approximate the degree of cross-media collaboration you have going on now. Instead, you’ve got Marian [Call] including NASA mission controllers in her shows and Molly Lewis gets hired by quasi-respectable party game designers to write a Christmas song about a Hawai’ian goddess with a flying vagina¹ because why the hell not.

Shortly after that, I shifted away from talking and turned it into a discussion session, getting people to share what they saw webcomics as, where they started, what their experiences were; considering that the room contained the likes of Kazu Kibuishi and Ryan North, it seemed a pretty good course to follow. Fortunately, the invaluable Jason Alderman did his thing and sketch-noted the session²; if you follow his twitter, you’ve seen these before when he attends sessions at various conferences. He doesn’t just take notes, he renders the speakers and finds their key points in real time, turning them into the most beautiful recaps imaginable. When you meet him, demand to look through his notebook, because you will very quickly get smarter on a wide variety of topics.

It was a good time; people went out of their way to thank me for the discussion later, and having the first time slot meant I was able to relax for the remainder of Camp … thanks, Pat! Even better, I got to see the next session, where Jeremy Spake and Georgina Hayns (mentioned yesterday) brought out the puppets and armature they’d shown at the Mini-Con, and really got down to details with us. For 90 glorious minutes we learned about fabrication, the CNC and 3D printing techniques used to construct the puppets³, and had our minds blown by the intricate details. Much more about this down in the photos section. Let me just leave you with a quick thought, though — when the stop-motion needs to look especially smooth, there are variant puppets with multiple limbs or whatever so that, say, an arm can be in multiple places at the same time. It’s the stop-motion equivalent of smear animation.

At lunch, I learned just how different life in Alaska can be; Sarah told me about living on an island approximately 100 km west of Juneau, where a fortunate quirk of geography allows a straight line of sight to a cell tower that provides enough internet to permit a freelancer’s life. She consults on land use and conservation policy, mixed with teaching art and movement. The nearest neighbors are 5 km away, and overwintering is a matter of personal choice and preparation. If the apocalypse ever comes, I want to convince her that I’d somehow be useful to her because she represents my best chance at survival.

Figure drawing took up a chunk of the afternoon, as did various project noodlings. Alderman brought along a little hand-cranked music box mechanism and a set of paper sheets that could be punched with holes to specify what notes would be played; think a very small player piano⁴. Call punched one of her songs into a strip and then wondered if it was possible to turn that into a Moebius song. Turns out it was, and the very quiet music became nicely amplified if the mechanism was held firmly against the body of one of the many camp ukuleles. Did I mention that there were 40 ukes delivered to Camp, leading many to take up the instrument? Because that happened.

Raina Telgemeier taught about how to present and get paid to do so; Tony Cliff showed how to snazz up those presentations with fancy flying transitions. Dinner featured the most nutritious cut of steak, and my turn at clean-up meant I missed much of the most significant session of the weekend as Cliff convened the Pacific Order of Onomatopoeia Professionals First Annual Regional Terminology Summit⁵ to decide once and for all how to spell certain sounds in comics. Suggestions were gathered, voting was conducted⁶, and Cliff released the final results [PDF] a couple of days ago. Comics creators, please note that the results linked to are definitive, official, and must be used as shown on pain of looking very foolish.

The last program of the night was the most insanely creative thing I’ve ever been involved in, but I’m going to be purposefully vague; as I mentioned at the start of these recaps, some things that took place at Comics Camp can — should? may? — only exist in the context of the time and place they took place. To delve into them too deeply is to rob them of meaning.

So it was as we gathered to create a musical — a main character was brainstormed, the introductory, “I Want”, villain, and emotional turning point songs were outlined, and we broke into four groups to actually write the damn things. I will show you in the photos section some wisdom from Marian Call, who shared her process for getting that first line of a song written; I think her technique applies to nearly any creative endeavour. Ultimately, I contributed two titles⁷ and one good line⁸.

Just about an hour from the start of the exercise, The Doubleclicks started playing the first song and the others followed as quickly as one musician could sit down and the next stand up. I am being completely honest with you when I tell you that more than one of them has been rattling around in my brain near continuously ever since; they are legitimately that sticky. Surprising everybody and nobody, there was a Hamilton-style rap from Pat Race.

I called it early that night, and so it wasn’t until the next morning I learned the anticipated northern lights were thwarted by cloud cover, but Ben Hatke mitigated the disappointment by teaching people how to breathe fire. In case you ever wondered what mineral oil tastes like, about half the Campers can tell you.

Photos

• Along with everything else, Jason Alderman’s handwriting is extraordinarily neat. Sketchnotes of my talk on the history of modern [web]comics.
• To start our deep dive in the Laika’s finest, let me note that it’s possible to take a photo where just about everybody’s eyes are closed. From left: Jeremy, Kubo, Kubo’s internal armature, Beetle, George, Monkey, Sarah, Kazu.
• The puppets all start with an internal armature; here you have a full-dressed Kubo and his internal structure. You can’t see it but it’s got tensioning screws for each and every joint except for the fingers and the jaw. The fingers don’t have metal inside (too small), but are fully poseable. The jaw isn’t jointed, but implied by the shape of the face plates.
• Okay: faces. They each consist of an upper half and a lower half; they allow for different mouth positions and expressions, and they pop right off. High strength miniature magnets hold the plates in place, and each piece is inscribed with a unique serial number describing exactly what it is. Popping off just the upper face gives access to the eyes and eyelids, which can be individually positioned however you like. Here’s a better shot of the upper and lower eyelids.
• With the face plates in place, seams are still potentially visible — as here, in the bridge of Kubo’s nose — which are removed digitally. George mentioned that on Coraline, Henry Selick argued strongly to leave the seams in, as an acknowledgment of the physical nature of the stop motion creative process.
• The models themselves hide access points for tensioning their armatures, and connection sockets for when the model must be supported externally due to posing; in Kubo or Monkey, it’s under clothing or fur. In Beetle, there are little pop-off panels and bits of cloth where joints meet. Monkey’s fur is made from a four-way stretch fabric which has been impregnated with a silicone; it stays where you pose it. Kubo’s hair is human hair, likewise laced with silicone for posing.
• I’ve over-lit this shot so you can get a good look at the clothing; Hayns said that cloth is a particular challenge because it doesn’t look right at scale without significant effort.
• Everything on these models is poseable. Beetle’s six limbs can move widely enough to draw his bow, for instance. It’s not a different model or a different bow. We were all very careful in positioning the models, despite the fact that they’re meant to stand up to significant wear and rough handling. There’s just so much care in their construction, we couldn’t treat them cavalierly; they are legitimate works of art and the highest craftsmanship.
• Figure drawing; the fellow providing that rock-solid five minute pose (!) is Khail Ballard, and you should read his stuff. Ballard also played the lead in that night’s musical.
• You thought I was kidding about the ukes, didn’t you?
• Voting underway in the wake of the POoOP FARTS debate.
• How to get to that first line, by Marian Call. I’ve been thinking about this one a lot.

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¹ The fact that I got to nod at Molly Lewis while saying that last part is a highlight of my life.

² Bonus: preliminary sketches of the library kickoff show!

³ Of which there are potentially dozens of each character — and each animator has a precise preference about how much tension there is in the articulation, which presents design challenges you can scarcely conceive of.

⁴ A discussion of which led to me holding forth on one of my favorite topics — how Hedy Lamarr used player-piano rolls to defeat the Axis in World War II and at the same time invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum, which makes your cell phone possible.

⁵ I’ll wait.

⁶ While I did not make any spelling suggestions, I did exercise my voting rights.

⁷ The “I Want” song, Proof, and the villain song, Sweet, Sweet Untraceable Cash.

⁸ Near the end of the first verse of Proof; the music for that song was all Marian Call, the remainder of the lyrics were by her, North, Telgemeier, and Hollis Kitchin, who runs the best bra shop in Juneau. Other groups were headed up by the Webber sisters, Lewis, and Seth Boyer.

Saturday in Juneau was going to be busy — campers would be checking out of their hotel, depositing luggage for collection and transport, setting up for a public convention in the Juneau Arts and Culture Center, having a one-day convention, tearing down, and getting on the bus to camp, all by 6:00pm. Worse, they would be doing so under the most trying of conditions imaginable: it was sunny.

Juneauites¹, it was explained, would never waste the opportunity to have a sunny day in the outdoors — at least, not until a ten or twelve of them in a row happen, by which time you’re exhausted from so many daylight hours and being active and the crash happens. The previous year, I’m told, it was raining and thus shoulder-to-shoulder in the JACC; this year was merely a respectable crowd for a one-day free event, which was starting at 10:00am. Breakfast, brisk walk, pack-in. With no specific duties for most of the day, I spent a lot of time as a runner and line-wrangler for Floor Boss Jessica.

The room was centered on two large table islands, one of which was where Alaska Robotics arranged signings. Kibuishi, Caffoe, Beaton, Telgemeier, North, Hatke, Brosgol, Carson Ellis, Tony Cliff, and Scott Chantler all did two hour-long signings, in twos and threes and (for the last two hours of the day) fives. Want to have some fun? Keep lines of people that want to get books signed by Kate Beaton and Raina Telgemeier from wrapping around and tangling with each other; it is legitimately the best problem to have.

My major contribution for the day was working the associated public concert; next door to the JACC is Juneau’s public radio/TV broadcaster, KTOO. The musician campers (and local singer/songwriter Theo Houck, who performs under the name FySH) were going to be performing for 90 minutes, the middle hour of which would be recorded for broadcast across Alaska public TV²; the chief limitations on the broadcast section were to keep the language friendly and to avoid covers³. Both portions of the concert featured live drawing by Kibuishi and merman maestro Lucas Elliott.

If you’d like to experience what it was like well, hey: video. And in case you only have time to watch a portion of it, I’d recommend you check out FySH’s portion (starting at the 15:00 mark) ’cause boy howdy, kid can play. I use kid not condescendingly, but because FySH is seventeen years old, has been songwriting from the age of eleven, and did a Santa murder ballad. It was great set. Not that the other performers were any less great, mind; I’ll just be talking about them later in this series. For now, suffice it to say that what you’ve no doubt heard about the drums being the heart of live music performance is wrong — it’s the cello.

Post-concert saw a lull and then an uptick in the showfloor crowd; people that had been there in the early part of day left to enjoy the mere eight or so hours of daylight remaining; those who’d been in the great outdoors came by on their way home. Flagging energy was sustained by the most delicious almond brittle known to human tastebuds and then it was over. Showgoers left, tables got packed up, stock from the snack table gathered for weekend consumption, and a schoolbus appeared for the ride north.

A long line of cartoonists and other ne’er do wells made their way along the last few hundred meters to the lodge, dispersed to drop luggage at their cabins, and returned for a casual dinner and announcements. Item one: lots of programming to start on the morrow⁴ with a schedule of sessions posted. Item two: close car and cabin doors, as at least one raven had already flown in to start exploring because ravens, man. Item three: name tags are over there (get to know everybody as best you can), snacks are over there, graphic novel library is over there, board games library is over there, s’mores ingredients are over there, and booze table is over here. They all got plenty of use.

Item four: everybody please sign up for a shift of either prep or cleanup for one of the meals, and try to eat with different people each chance you get. Item five: your phone doesn’t work out here, so leave notes for one another on the message board. The night featured meetings and re-greetings, with multiple groups heading off away from the lights to look at stars and the Northern Lights and a cut-throat game of Secret Hitler. Or was that Sunday? Maybe Monday? Time started to blur a bit and we’d only just started.

Photos

• Saturday morning; this is from the same hotel room as yesterday’s picture.
• The Juneau Arts & Culture Center. Lots of things happen here, and you’re never far from the wilderness.
• The show floor in diagram form, and POV from the snack table. The biggest crowds were at the signings, and at the Laika display near the back corner. Jeremy Spake (in charge of armature construction) and Georgina Hayns (head of the puppet department) brought working puppets from the production of Kubo And The Two Strings, of which much more tomorrow.
• The concert featured a studio audience space and played to a full room. The musicians were, from left, Angela Webber, Aubrey Webber, Marian Call, Seth Boyer, FySH, and Molly Lewis. Keep an eye out for FySH in the future — he’s going places.
• Teardown (fueled by the last of the brittle) and the bus crowd. After luggage took up the back few rows, there were exactly enough seats for the people not driving their own cars, as long as you put large people and small people together. Me and Seth Boyer got to know each other pret-ty well on that ride.
• There was significantly less trudging than the photos seem to indicate. It’s possible that this raven is the one that was investigating the interior of cars.
• A pretty good fraction of the campers gathered for introductions and to exchange information.

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¹ I looked it up, but I still like Junevers, if only because it sounds like jenever.

² And possibly yours; your local public TV station can contact KTOO and request a copy of the recording for broadcast.

³ The warmup and cooldown sections were just for those in the room, and featured a killer Seth Boyer rendition of Part Of Your World that needs to been seen to be believed.

⁴ Pat Race put me in the first programming slot, talking about the recent history of [web]comics.