Friday, September 14, 2012

Performance Art Part 1

  Hey, hey, Meat-Heads! So this past weekend I attended my first comic book convention as an exhibitor, and in short, I really enjoyed it. After years of walking the floor, I decided that with the publication of Dead Meat it was finally time to take the leap over to....THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TABLE!!!!!

 
(Never shy to shoehorn even the most passingly relevant Simpsons clip into a post, am I)

This marks the first time Doug and I have teamed up on a piece!

  Having never done this before, but having seen many others do it, I KIND of knew what to expect, but there was a big grey area of unknown--would anyone stop? Would I be stationed in a corner next to the bathroom? Would I be sat next to a comic book superstar thus making me irrelevant? Would I sell anything? Would people like my stuff? Did I bring enough stuff?--all these possibilities and questions were swirling around until we actually got there and set up, at which point I realized it wasn't so bad. My table mate Doug and I set up all our stuff, then readied ourselves for the coming onslaught of convention goers, comic fans, art lovers, and people dressed like obscure characters, and found ourselves TOTALLY overwhelmed when the doors swung fiercely open and ushered wave after wave of aboslutely NO ONE past our table. In fact, we didn't even realize the convention had started until one of us looked at his watch about a half hour after the opening bell. This didn't bode well. All of those previous concerns came flooding back, and I prepared myself for a very boring, very stationary weekend, so we resigned ourselves to passing the time doing drawings like these: [/caption] HOWEVER, as the day went on, we actually found numerous people passing by our table, checking out our stuff, and even buying some things. We weren't doing as well as the girl to our left who was handing out free rubber duckies, but hey, that's a genius marketing maneuver on her part and it definitely did her well. Actually, speaking of that, I did find myself in a rather odd position. As I said, the girl to my left had rubber duckies, and Doug, to my right, had beautifully painted Star Wars art (www.dougcowan.net) so needless to say, they both got a LOT of traffic from kids, and the family set, and there I was, right in the middle, with my gritty black and white drawings of people and things in various degrees of intimacy with high-velocity ammunition. It was sometimes a little awkward ("Hey you like ducks? Check this out--it's a drawing of a dead kid!"), but I got over it relatively fast as I started to get a pretty good response, and, more importantly, started to get COMMISSIONS! This is where the real fun started. As I believe I stated here somewhere before, I was selling 2 versions of Dead Meat #1, and one of them had a blank cover which was meant for me to draw on, so I was fully open and ready to draw on command, and I was put through the paces. I had odd character requests, and most interestingly, I was commissioned to do THIS:

Do you ever dance with the devil in the bottom of the ninth?

  Drawing on a baseball is something I'd never done, but it got such a good response it might be something I start doing more often! I also got to sell some sketch cover books, including this one, which was purchased by a very nice guy named Sean:
As you can tell by his shirt and his reading material, he knows what he likes!

He actually requested to be part drawn as part of the team, without even knowing that the characters were created in very much the same way as his request, so that was a fun one to do! Anyway, overall, the convention was a great success for a first convention, and I can't wait to do another. I still have some books left over which are definitely up for grabs (if anyone is interested in one, you can just email me at cmccormack414@gmail.com), and in my next blog post I will talk more about how I felt about drawing in command in a live-commission setting! Thanks again to everyone who came by, everyone who bought a book, and to my table mate Doug--because If I had been doing this by myself I probably would have died from boredom. Please check out his work at www.dougcowan.net--it's really great.

 Until Next Time, EAT DEAD MEAT

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