I live in Alexandria, which means that SPX is a local show – I went to high school up the road from the convention center. As locals, we also tried to be hosts. I made a Google map of places to eat. My wife bought pastries at the hidden Entemann’s outlet store (that we discovered when we were putting together the map) and took them around the vendor room on Sunday morning before the doors opened.

Friday afternoon, I picked up Dan Barlow at the airport because it was stupid of him to spend an hour and a half on the Metro up to Bethesda; I live ten minutes from the airport and was planning to go up to SPX for Friday night socializing anyway. We drove around Rockville and visited F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grave, practically the only tourist attraction that Rockville can lay claim to.

The show itself was amazing. We ran into a lot of old friends and saw a lot of new faces. I recognized two bartenders and a slew of friends and neighbors from the DC metro area were in attendance. I talked to Darryl Ayo on Saturday, a conversation that probably would have been better if we’d been in a quiet bar sipping whisky. As it was, we were both working and I’m always conscious of crowding the table. (I hate it when that happens to me, even when I want to talk to the person.) I also got interviewed by Rusty and Joe from Full Sanction, who were doing video interviews with any creator that felt like sitting down with them, which was fun. I can’t wait to see the result and I really want that experiment to stick around next year.

Every time I talk to Carla Speed McNeil, she hands me valuable, hard-earned advice and I do my best to pay attention to it. One time she told me to make sure I have something new on the table every year for that one fan who will buy anything new. Check – this was the debut for books 4 and 5 in the Oceanus Procellarum series and long-time readers bought copies of both books.

The next time she gave me advice, she told me to make something “book shaped” that people can walk away with for not very much at all. Accordingly, I made a little sampler comic for the Oceanus Procellarum series. I gave the pitch – “The hidden truth is that when a character encounters the truth in the story, he remembers that he’s in a story.” – then pointed out that I understood that buying a full book was a big ask for a first time reader. But! I had a $2 sampler. “If you like the sampler, you’ll like the series. If you don’t, you’re out two bucks.” I sold out of my sampler. And someone bought a copy of the main book after reading the sampler. Thanks Carla!

Another thing I did was hand out free propaganda – the one page strip about Practical Ideas for the Passionate Comics Reader on one side and an ad for Oceanus Procellarum on the back. Someone read the ad and bought the main book in the series, which pretty much means that the free propaganda that I shoved in everyone’s face all weekend long paid for itself.

Unfortunately, I ran out of propaganda about midway through Sunday. Between that and selling out of the sampler, there was a notable drop in sales on Sunday afternoon – a generally slow time anyway. Of course, that’s when I went shopping for bargains. Sometimes that strategy works and sometimes it doesn’t. I was not in time to get all three of Jen Vaughn‘s menstruation comics for my wife because one had sold out.

I came home Saturday night with aching feet and discovered that the shelf porn I’d sent in to Robot 6 had been posted, which was a great morale booster from an odd direction.

All in all, this was a great weekend. I really felt like I hit my stride, sales-wise. After four years of so-so activity, it was good to see the hard work paying off. It also made me feel like I’d figured something out, which gave me a nice endorphin rush. Going back to work today was a struggle.

I started the year weak as a kitten after a surgical procedure to correct a heart arrhythmia over Christmas. Ninety plus days later and I’m off the follow-up meds and feeling strong and productive.

Four of the five books in the Oceanus Procellarum series are at the printer (I sold out of the first printing of Book 1). If you are interested in reading the series but don’t feel like paying $20 apiece for physical books, the first two books (Weapons of Devotion and Class of 63) are available online – the third (Taste of Flesh) is being serialized right now at the rate of four pages a day. Books four (Kampyle of Eudoxus) and five (Morose) will go live in January of 2012 and 2013, respectively.

Copies of all books will be available at SPX. Look for the man in the purple suit.

The comics that I’ve made this year are being published in a webcomic series called Irregular Variables. After producing 200+ of the 500+ pages in my aforementioned graphic novel series last year, I decided to give myself a break. This year, I will only make self-contained comics of less than 16 pages in length. To date, the Irregular Variables I have published are:

Tressage – An out-and-out art comic that started with a conversation I had with a bartender about standardized symbol sets. I’ve learned a lot more about the topic since I made the comic, but that’s okay because the comic itself really veered into conceptual territory pretty much from the second page.

Why I Remixed Star Wars – A number of years ago, I completely remixed Star Wars for what I felt were perfectly valid, artistic reasons. Read the comic if you’re curious – that’s why I made it.

Art Cars of H Street – I took a scrapbooking class in February. I’ve been fascinated by scrapbooking for a long time. Because I cannot draw, I’ve spent a long time trying to find new and different ways to illustrate the stories I write. I stumbled upon scrapbooking almost by accident and figured out that it has all of the elements of traditional comics. In fact Karon Flage once called scrapbooking, “Comic book making for midwestern housewives,” which is about as accurate as it gets. This particular comic was made using pictures I took with my iPhone during the H Street festival in 2010.

Shape and Color – Another piece from my class. I ran out of material and started improvising with what I had at hand. The great thing about working on 12 x 12 pages is the amount of room there is to play with.

The Great Escape – Last year, I picked up some batik elephants at World Market for about $12. On a warm Sunday afternoon in February, I took them into my backyard and made a comic with them using my iPhone. I remixed the pictures on my iPad using the TiltShiftGen app and made them into a 16 page comic with the Strip Design app (also on the iPad). I’ve made plenty of photocomics before, but I’ve never made a completely silent comic.

I have made other comics, which are scheduled to be published as follows:

Theft of Excellence – This comic shows off my meager cartooning skills and my not-so-meager painting and collage skills. The lament that I heard from my peers was that the scans don’t show off the texture of the pages. Go live date: April 11th.

Leaving Nebraska – This comic was illustrated by Sarah Anderson, who did a piece in Kampyle of Eudoxus. Her work was good enough to make me want to do something else with her. I dusted off this character study I’d written and sent it to her to see what she would do with it. Go live date: April 18th.

Rue the Day – I found the first scrapbooking class interesting and informative enough to sign up for the follow-up, where I made this piece. It’s a visual poem as much as it is anything else. Go live date: May 2nd.

Books of Novelty – I don’t really have much of a destination in mind when I start designing a pair of pages. Mostly, I’m paying attention to color, shape, composition and the materials that I have at hand. Meaning (and thus, storytelling) is usually a distant thought until the very end of the process, when I’m ready to decipher and distill something from what I have created. Go live date: May 9th.

Y-3 – Another experimental scrapbooking piece. Instead of actual journaling, it features asemic writing. Go live date: May 16th.

I’ve got a few other projects in the works, including a few anthology submissions. I’m taking the third, follow-up scrapbooking class as well, so I should have some more pieces to put up in the months to come.

I have been making digital collage for the better part of a decade, long enough that I am comfortable and confident in my abilities – almost to the point of complacency. In the Spring of 2009, I decided that I wanted to try something different; I wanted to try making art with my own two hands. Something analog.

At first, the intention was to find out what I could do – what I could do well and what I couldn’t. As the pile of pieces grew, I made the mistake of thinking that I could take those pieces and turn them into comic pages (they were drawn on comic book backing boards, after all).

I envisioned a narrative set in a world where random colors and shapes in the background were commonplace and created a set of characters to populate that world. I came up with a story structure that I’ve always wanted to try and I pulled the whole thing together.

I’m not going to say that it was an unqualified disaster, but it certainly wasn’t my best effort. The most important thing I can say about the Lungs of the World was that it taught me a number of things.

First, I learned that I have to start with a story. This was probably what got me into the most trouble. The pages were just random doodles that I built up until they fit into the story that I was putting together as I went along. This is not an optimal way to make sequential art. Lesson learned.

Second, I learned with kinds of effects work and what don’t. I expect I’ll be exploring this in the months and years to come, but I don’t know how much of that will be for public consumption.

Third, I learned that I have some small ability to create characters that pop, visually. This is not insignificant. Good design can make a character iconic, which allows it to live beyond the timespan allotted by the pages that it starts on. This is absolutely something that I will be working to improve upon; it’s a skill worth cultivating.

Today, on Christmas, the last four pages go live. The story hangs together, after a fashion, but it’s closer to a heavily roughed in sketch of a narrative than a polished piece destined for retail sales. I am deeply grateful that webcomics allows creators like myself to present experiments to the reading audience with no real financial commitment, but my intention was not to fall flat on my face; but then again, it never is.

More than anything, the Lungs of the World is a cautionary tale, a reminder to myself that it’s okay to try new things, but that not everything I try has to go live.

I keep buying art supplies in the hopes that I can make interesting things with them, but I never do. Over the course of several weeks, I used those art supplies to make random marks all over a pile of comic book backing boards – on the theory that if anything good came out of the experiment, I might be able to show it to people.

After a bit of tweaking and a lot of page shuffling, I finally figured out what kind of story I could tell with these random pieces that were not specifically designed to go together. I even had a page that gave me the name of the story – The Lungs of the World.

It’s an experiment, in every sense of the word. I was trying different techniques to see what worked, artistically. I used a classic story structure that I’ve always enjoyed, but one I’ve never tried before. I’m trying a new distribution method and I’m looking to apply the lessons learned from Weapons of Devotion – which ran in the spring of 2009.

There will be four new pages of content every Friday from July 10th through Christmas, 2009. It’s a complete, stand-alone story that probably won’t have any sequels, but I don’t like to make idle promises.

The webcomic can be found here. Enjoy!

The conventions I usually go to do not have a lot of people in costumes, so it was really neat to see these people wandering around. There were three scouttroopers from the 501st that were amazing.

I also talked to a lot of interesting artists, whose names I’m not sure I rememeber. Good thing I got business cards.

I was interviewed by Chuck Moore of ComicRelated for their convention podcast and I saw the live demo for Longbox. Very interesting stuff, with a lot of potential.

Wrapped in Armani or tied up in Japanese rope bondage knots, the external accoutrements (should) only ever serve to enhance the natural curves of the individual (concealment is a close cousin in purpose, admittedly). At the same time, this dual role of clothing spotlights the underlying reality: everyone on the street, on the bus and in your office is naked under their clothes.

This is hardly a profound revelation, but the amount of avoidance, distraction and cultural morality that is directed towards nudity and its implied sexuality would suggest otherwise. In fact, there is a great deal of social stigma associated with nudity, enough that the mere act of being naked is considered shameful. By extension, the act of observing nudity has been shackled with similar shameful connotations. For all their power, though, these connotations are externally applied and do not necessarily reflect the power that nudity provides to our lives (through reproduction, to name but a single circumstance).

I believe that there is an inherent artistic component to the basic composition of the human body. I do not believe that I am alone in this; various attempts have been made to take the sexual implication out of the nude figure through artistic representation, with varying degrees of success. In recent years, however, there has been a backlash against this, with so-called Erotic Art, a term that signifies that the artist has (consciously or unconsciously) captured the sexuality implicit within the context of the nude and, in doing so, not apologized away the relationship between the two.

I’m all for this. It makes sense, really. So what do I do about it?

First of all, I am unashamed of the fact that I look at pictures of naked people (or whatever you want to call it; pornography, erotic art or clinical photos) wherever and whenever I can. There is an undeniable sexual thrill that comes with this, but that’s not my primary purpose; I’m looking for interesting or well-composed pictures. While I do take note of what the specific image is, I tend to pay attention to and find myself commenting on good textures or colors and good curves instead.

It sounds strange, but that’s where my attention is drawn. A poorly focused full-beaver shot is not necessarily more seductive than the curve of a hip in good lighting and a well-composed picture of a body in fishnets can be more erotic than either. By now, my friends are used to comments from me disparaging the quality of pornography in certain venues and the fact that I appreciate the artistic photo shoots in Playboy more than the centerfolds.

What I am forced to apologize for is my really dirty secret: I am the modern age equivalent of a pirate. Entire books have been written on the subject of how different cultures have dealt with the rise of technology and its effects on this kind of subject matter. (Go read the Christy Report, for example.) Instead of lingering over the history of the format, we’ll take the fact of Internet pornography as read and move on to the specific issues associated with nudity on the Internet and how they apply to this specific instance. Anyone with a decent computer, basic applications, basic skills and an Internet connection can acquire an extensive home pornography collection for their hard drive in only a few hours. I have all of these and an active interest.

But, like I said, I don’t just acquire Internet porn for the purposes of sexual gratification. And, while I don’t doubt that there is a deluge of redistribution piracy in nudity and other content being offered on the Internet (among other media platforms), that is not the only other use such images can be put to. Using commercial graphics programs (Photoshop being the best example), any image can be manipulated to such an extent that the final product bears little or no resemblance to the source image.

Such is an unforeseen and – frankly – ungovernable aspect of the degree of technological and cultural overlap in our lives, especially in the United States. Arguably, it is also a valid art form, one that comments on and mirrors contemporary imagery, similar to the Readymade art of the Dadaists. The art of collage has become subtler, but the fact that is has begun to reach the shores of painting drives and entrances me.

I mix images together using layer effects and filters, combining the colors, textures and shapes of the various pictures until something new and different is created. Often, there are two or three source images and as many as nine or ten different layers in a given image. These images can take as much as an hour or two to create and a lot of thought and patience goes into each one. Often, there are various versions of the same picture, due to the fact that each version is too good to throw away.

The fact remains, though, that they are photographs – they come from snapshots of reality and remain snapshots of reality. The reality that each source image references is still visible and evident in the final product, even if the image is no longer immediately recognizable as a photograph. At the same time, the captured reality has been altered and reshaped until it no longer describes a reality that we inhabit. Instead, the reality that these remixed images describe is of an abstracted sensuality.

The curves of pornography remain, but removed from their context to such a degree that they are barely recognizable as such. For some images, aspects of the color, texture and composition of these otherworldly images capture the eye, only to reveal specific details upon further inspection. In other instances, the images are mere enhancements that do nothing to mask the tribute they pay to the source image. Both are valid art forms, in my opinion.

What’s more, they are separate and distinct from their roots, enough so that they could be called originals. In the end, though, beauty (and its attendant implications of sexuality, originality and morality) is in the eye of the beholder. But the beholder is not the only person whose opinions seem to matter.

The primary concern among distributors of any kind of content is anonymous viewers stealing images and redistributing them as their own, which (rightly) falls under copyright laws. But what about private collectors? And what about collage or works that contain a portion of, but are significantly different than, original pieces, a noted exception under copyright laws, very similar to what is done with sampling in music? Where is the line between Negativland and Andy Warhol?

Does fair use apply to images found on amateur erotica sites? These images are not offered for reasons of profit, but instead for the purposes of sexual fulfillment, by the people and for the people. In such cases, should it matter if these kinds of pictures are used for something besides purely pornographic pictures? Is it a noble endeavor to want to add artistic meaning to an image that was not created with artistry as the primary purpose?

More interesting is the idea that only blatant plagiarism could ever be considered as a reasonable use for these images. Whatever the original intent of the creator of the source image, the concerns about their ongoing distribution and intent of that distributor are identical. Given the relentless strip-mining of popular culture that has served up entire pastiche and nostalgia platters without any pretense at originality combined with oversaturated cross-media tie-ins, the reaction is understandable.

I have shared some of the images that I have manipulated with the authors of the source images and the responses have been varied. While I have been complimented on the artistic elements of the new images, the more common response has been outright accusations of theft. One photographer said “I will say that you seem to be interested in artistic expression and I would encourage you to push yourself toward an original creation…inspiration from others is always evident but you must make your art your own,” which somewhat misses the point.

The purpose of art should be to inspire. That the person being inspired is another artist, who uses the inspiration directly or indirectly, seems to be rarely considered when the works are being created and should not cause detriment to those artists who are inspired. That another artist has drawn something from the works presented to such an extent that they wish to tell the creator of their inspiration about it should not be discouraged.

Furthermore, the reaction of these artists begs the question, Why does it make them uncomfortable that their art causes me to want to create instead of masturbate? If I had written to them describing how wonderfully aroused their images made me feel, would the reaction be different? Is the role of the viewer merely passive? Or is the viewer somehow instructed to create a reaction to the static image presented, no matter what the subject matter?

When people view pornographic images for the purposes of sexual gratification, do they masturbate to the images alone? Or do they create a scenario in their head based on the images that are presented? I wonder.