That ThoughtBubble Thing: Sunday (a small diary)

UP AND AT THEM: 8am's kind of a lie-in for me these days, even if I didn't fall asleep til, like, 5. Jude's on the bathroom floor again. Earplugs next year, yeah? But we're up and bright, if not exactly breezy, and soon on our way to Tile 'Em High for another day of free parking. Oh, and that ThoughtBubble thing.

KARMA PLUS ONE: There's a girl hanging round the Tesco at the Armouries. She looks like convention fodder, perhaps she just had a late one, yeah? She asks what time the con opens and looks crestfallen when she finds out it's an hour away. She's been up all night, she says, and is waiting for her friend. Ah, wait of shame. She looks like she might die so I call her a taxi and off she goes to a warm bed. I'm such a dad sometimes.

GUSH: Like a hungry tiger I'm waiting to pounce on Kate Beaton when she gets to her table a few minutes before the show opens. I HAVE MY REASONS. I used some of her strips in my 'zine and never thought it would ever be an issue but she's here. In the same room as me (it's a big room). Okay, it might have been more of an issue if my 'zine had flown off the shelves and people were waiving it in her face but it didn't, and they didn't, but - still - I wanted to say sorry. Always ask for forgiveness, never for permission, right? As it turns out, she's SUPER cool about it, and says she usually ignores people who ask, anyway. I give her my 'zines, buy a book, embarrass myself by gushing, and skip off, happily. I LOVE HER.

SHOPPING: It's my turn to shop today and I hit the Savile Hall looking for goodies and new and old friends. I caught up with Jennie Wood & her guy pal Daniel, and found out the secret of the bauble (they didn't get away with it), and chatted with Rob Cureton and bought his Scene City #1 (the kind of comic I'd have made myself 15 years ago). Tim Winchester won't take my money, but there's plenty of lovely people who will. Tim's lovely, too, by the way, and he has a new book out NOW, which is why he told me to save my money. the big fool. I bought Bat Herr by Benjamin Wright (funny & twisted), Giant Fighters by Isaac Lenkiewicz (folksy & cool), Giant Days by John Allison (reaching beyond the mini-comic in quality, really), Sir Colin & The Dragon by Philippa Rice (the best thing, ever), and some other nice things I'll be blogging about next week. I also got...

THE NAO OF BROWN: I'd been wanting it for a bit, ever since I heard Glyn Dillon was coming back to comics. You see, I've got a massive hard-on for all those Deadline guys, and always pester Shaky Kane to do me sketches of characters he hasn't drawn for twenty years. So I thought I'd save my money and buy it from the man hi'self, because that's always nice, right? I picked up a copy of the book (weighty!) and handed it to him, expecting him to ask me for £15 and, transaction done, we'd both get on with our days. Instead, he picks up his pen and starts drawing a girl's face. Nice, I thought, a little head shot. He then draws a box round it, and underneath writes FOR ALAN, G. He then picks up his watercolors, and paints the picture of the little girl. All the while I'm stood there, mouth agape, holding my £15, feeling a little whelmed. Once he's finished his watercolors, he opens a little box and takes out a custom-made stamp (a washing machine - it's clear if you read the book), and stamps the frontispiece, before taking another stamp and stamping somewhere inside the last few pages. He then gives me my book. Extra yard, yeah? I show Hey Jude, and (Not That) Ian Brown, and they run off to buy copies. Well played, sir. Well played.

KARMA PLUS TWO: I bought a mini-comic on the Saturday that detailed a guy's journey into using anti-depressants, and I enjoyed it, and admired his honesty, so I sought him out to tell him so. But he was ill, and his friends said he wouldn't be there, so I left him a little note. If you're going to put yourself out there, the least I can do is thank for you it.

BACK TO THE COALFACE: You know what? Sales are pretty good for the first couple of hours, doing half of what we did all day Saturday. The chat is pretty good, too. Some of the people we'd met at the party dropped by, including my Turkish-Swedish pal and Jennie "Batgirl" Wood, in a purple catsuit - Batgirl on a day off, I guess. I was a little low on Saturday, after pretty disastrous sales (by our, probably unrealstic, targets), but I'd epiphanied it out and felt a bit more comfortable on the Sunday. Because, hey, money is just small pieces of metal and paper that float in and out of your life, right?

COSPLAYERS: They're fun to look at, right? And some of them are even quite sexy! And that's just the boys!!! ZOMG!!!! But you know what? They don't buy shit. Parasites. Beautiful, sexy parasites.

KARMA PLUS THREE: Doing the rounds of the New Dock again I come across the Leeds Uni Anime people again, and tell them I enjoyed their little comic, and that they should thank that guy Mark for doing such a good job of selling it. Maybe it got him a threesome or something?

CHANCE ENCOUNTER: So we're getting towards packing up, right, and this guy starts chatting, and it's soon apparent that he's not really here for the comics. Long story short, his little company is setting up a new social network tool, aimed at creatives, and yatta yatta yatta. It would be perfect for a lot of you people who can actually make a career out of this kind of thing, and if he gets in touch I'll pass it all on, but he did chat some things through with me that made me look at what I'm doing in a different way, and change EVERYTHING for 2013. More of that soon. But, yeah, guy whose name I can't remember (no surprise there, I'm so bad at names lately), thanks for the chat and the ideas, and I liked your hair.

ALL DONE: And so back down the M1 home, going over every minute detail of the weekend while the tunes of 1992 play on, play on. We put together our pitch for The Phoenix, plan our next steps for the London Super-Con, and all that jazz. I get home so massively tired and emotionally drained. Same time next year, yeah?

That ThoughtBubble Thing: Saturday, pt2 (a small diary)

DINNER OF KINGS: Footlong veggie delite, on herb & cheese, please. Yes to cheese, no to toasted. Lettuce, tomato, lots of peppers, and a few cheeky gherkins. Light mayo, some southwest, and some salt. £4.29? Sorted.

ZZZZZZZZs: Jude snoozes while I read what I bought. He needs it. T-shirt decision: pink Galactus or Scott Pilgrim? I've been wearing the powder pink PBF t-shirt all day, and feel good about that, so pink it is again. Nice. Jude awakes! We run, like drunken monkeys, towards fun, fun, fun.

HOW MUCH?!?: The Corn Exchange is a beautiful building, half indoor shopping centre, half planetarium. We are early but certainly not the first. People are milling. We should mill, too, we decide, but not until we've drunk some drinks, and at £4 a pint this isn't the place for pre-drink drinks. We leave in search of cheaper beer...

BROWN BREAD: Trouble is, in swanky, done up beyond its roots, Leeds city centre, the only places that look like you might pay less than £3 a pint - and, come on, this is the North! - also look a bit stabby. This is emphasised by the following overheard conversation:

A: Where you been? We thought you were brown bread!
B: I'm never brown bread, me!

We settle on a really cool bar called Milo's, and end up paying £3.75 for a bottle of Quilmes. There's a moral there somewhere but keep it to yourself, yeah?

SOCIALISE: Is an anagram of So CIA Lies and also something we NEEDED to do. Jude had been around the Savile in the arvo, and met a few peoples, so they would be our crutch - so, yeah, Rob Cureton, that's pretty much you. I also had spies amongst the crowd - well, not so much spies, more friends, but spies sounds cooler, so we also hung out with Monkey Bob, (Not That) Ian Brown, el Jefe Chahal, and Melinda Gebbie. Clang! But! Make friends, make friends!

APRIL NASH: So we knew April Nash would be there. But we didn't know April Nash. I was going to make Jude go and find her but he did it, anyway. And April was with Jennie "BatGirl" Wood, who was pregnant with a giant bauble, and instantly in the black with us. Daniel Gitanes Cuire was there, too. Quick chat, run away! But, yeah, hi.

CHEESE WHEEL: At some point, after trying to convince Jason Aaron that he'd get on famously with sworn enemy Alan Moore, and after threatening to hug and punch Kieron Guillen for Kid Loki, we found a buffet. It had a cheese wheel, and I buddied up with a guy called Sean to journey round a world of cheeses. I ate camembert for the first time. Didn't much care for it. Dan Goodbrey ate cheese with us, too. Commestibles done, I made plans to see Sean the next day. Reader, I never saw him again.

COME TO SWEDEN!: So there's a guy. I'll call him Erkan, but if you recognise who he is and know better let me know, yeah? He's a cool guy, and lives in Sweden, but he's Turkish. I try my only Swedish on him, and tell him I love him, and he laughs a big laugh. Has a great laugh, does Erkan. We chat and he says I should come visit him in Malmo(?) and I might just do that one day.

DANCING QUEENS: It was Prince wot done it. I had no intention of dancing. And, indeed, had spent some time deriding those who were. But godammit if Get Offf didn't get me on. The dancefloor that is. There were other dances, yes, to Abba, and Dexys, and I don't know what else, but once you're dancing it's probably time to go home.

GOT MILLAC?: I'm available for adverts.

BATHTUB CONVERSATIONS: At 3.45am the last thing you want to be doing is sitting in an empty bath talking to a friend whose mum has just died. But at the same time, I wouldn't have done it differently. My friend is sad, and worried, and angry, and can't see past the funeral, which I tell her is ABSOLUTELY OKAY. I have no real experience of death so all my words cone from comic books and sitcoms. I hope it helped, even a tiny bit.

SLEEP: 4.30am? Been up for almost 24hours? Yeah, sleep.

That Thought Bubble Thing: Saturday (a small diary)

FREE PARKING: Yeah, but no. A quick Google finds Tile 'Em High, a tile store that has free parking bays outside a few minutes walk from the con. Sadly it is deceased. A tile store no more. Ex Tilis. Or something. Happily, the parking bays still exist. Sleep well, friend, and thanks for the free parking.

EARLY START: We're not the first in. We're the third. And the other two have loads to do. We have a few books on a terracotta blanket and we're set up 8. It already looks like we have nothing. Everything I wanted to do, everything that would make our table stand out, I just didn't get round to. "Never half-ass two things, always whole-ass one thing," said Ron Swanson. Tick!

ROLLER DERBY GIRLS: There are roller derby girls here.

TABLE NEIGHBOURS (TEIGHBOURS): I'm a stalker, yeah? So I'd already looked up our teighbours on that internet thing. Actually meeting them was nice, and made my homework less creepy. YES IT DID. To our left was Lauren Dennis & John Pearson, who did nice pretty art prints and a comic with Sean Penn's cock in it. On the right, Arthur & David Goodman, of Square-Eyed Stories. Arthur & David's work immediately made me want to improve my cartooning, the bastards.

ROLL UP, ROLL UP: ThoughtBubble has two halls - the Savile Hall (I'll never play your games, re-namers! If Peter Sutcliffe, a man who - I presume - has a previously unblemished character, says he's a good man, then he's a good man!) and the Royal Armouries. We're in the Armouries. Everyone else, it seems, is in the Savile. All day. Actually, that's not true. By 3.30pm they start to trickle into the Armouries. We sell almost as much in the last 90 minutes as we did in the 330 minutes before that. Oy! Sales are disappointing, at least in terms of our hopes & dreams, which may have been wildly inaccurate. I begin to get a little low.

ROLLER DERBY GIRLS: But who can stay low when there are roller derby girls? One even buys my 'zine, which is good because it has roller derby in it. Ka-ching!

NICE PEOPLE: Sales may be slow but the trickle of nice people is good. Conversations with girls dressed as Obi Wan Kenobi, and boys with cardboard heads, talk about Raoul Moat, merby, and My Little Pony. Smiles and compliments, nods and giggles.

WHAT I BOUGHT: I didn't escape from the tabel much, but I bought a few things from other people in the Armouries. Goodbye Kitty by Rus (beautiful, sad and uplifting), Suddenly Something Really Interesting by Garry Mac (personal and familiar), an anthology comic from the Leeds University Anime Society (because Andy on their table was really nice), and Square-Eyed Stories #25 (funny and incredibly accomplished).

EXHAUSTED: Selling, as opposed to sitting behind a table, is incredibly tiring. But - BUT! - there's a party to go to. Weary feet trudge back to the car - still there, thank God - and we drive back to the hotel, the sounds of 1992 barely registering. Let's party, yeah?

That Thought Bubble Thing: Friday (a small diary)

THE WEEKENDERS: "We're going away, fadder, for the weekend." Judenalan. On The Road. 6 CDs of songs from 1992 and comics to sell at that Thought Bubble thing.

A HOTEL: You can always trust a Travelodge. You can't always trust a Travelodge receptionist whose directions to the car park involve going up an alleyway, jumping over a gate, and through a subway. The Travelodge doesn't do milk. It does Millac. Got Millac?

A BAR: So, what's the deal with The Stone Roses Bar? "The boss got permission from Ian Brown. They've never been in." So, what's the deal with two cocktails for £5.95? I was afeared of asking.

BRYAN TALBOT: Look, there's Bryan Talbot. Repeat.

A TRAMP: I don't think he sits next to the cashpoint in the rain just to direct people to the next one when it's out of money but he earned £2 for doing so.

THE SUPERTRAMP: "What would Supertramp's powers be?" He can do anything. "Why is he still a tramp?" He can't get his shit together. He's a MASSIVE mental.

ANOTHER HOTEL: Did you hear about the man who walked into a posh hotel holding a packet of crisps he wished he hadn't just bought? He ate them in a corner.

A BATHROOM: So I snore. This is not news. Not to me. Jude, however, found that out. What I found out was that it's hard to get into a bathroom for a wee at 5.50am when there's a Jude sleeping on the floor in there. We had to get up early, anyway.

That Thought Bubble Thing

So I went to that Thought Bubble show. It’s, like, this big convention thing, in a museum complex in Leeds. It has a bit more of an independent flavour than the usual comic conventions, so there’s some really nice people there. Not that the usual people aren’t lovely, too. You know what I mean.

Anyway, I had a blast. I got home Sunday night a physical and mental wreck, with a gnawing sense of something wrong which will probably manifest itself in the form of doubt at some point. But – BUT! – I sold some comics and ‘zines, and drank some drinks, and met some super, super people, and I’ll tell you all about it as the week goes on and I regain something resembling my faculties.

Hi! How are ya?

So, yeah, time to start something new. Again.