Supanova - What was sold

This is a run down of sales I made during last month's Supanova.

Sureshot presents x 60
My aim was for about that BUT 25 of those were at wholesale prices to retailers or the 'end of con' special i ran. i also gave away about 10. So i only sold about 25 at cover price; still it covered the printing cost for the whole run so I'm pleased.

5031 x 7
Based on a web comic by Owen Heitmann, i only had seven and they were gone pretty much on day one.

How to Save the World: A Beginners Guide x 10
Half of these went to a retailer at the end of the con. This is such a frustrating book to sell; its comic size, great quality production and has a nice price and therefore good value (its 48 pages). PLUS its actually a very good book story and art-wise, but it doesn't sell well. I can only put it down to the cover, even thoigh its eye catching and well designed I don't think the target audience is attracted by it. From now on, i'm pushing the zombie factor.

Crab Allan x 3
I have to beg Weber to let me sell these but they do sell, slowly but at $20 that's t be expected.

Pretty Zombie x 10
That was sold on day one - 4 hours in. Cute Zombies plus obscene sex acts sell.

Angry Comic Shop Guy x 5
After they were the first book to sell out during the con i felt like a reatard that i left 5 copies on my study floor.

The Bear x 10
This is a hard sell, because its a 24 hr comic, rather cheaply put together with a boring cover. But its soooo good. So I would just beckon likley readers and hand it to them with the proviso "Read the first 4 pages if you don't like it walk away no harm done". And it worked 50% of the time which i think is pretty good. When i sold the last of these I did a victory dance.

Tales from under the bed x 8
I found these when i got up there and they sold pretty conistent, i did have to left over but i only found those as i was packing up.

Ozcomics Magazines (various) x 10
I didn't bring any up with me, the ones sold were ones left over from last year.

Batrisha x 4
Pop Culture X 5
The Batrisha's went easy to the kind of people who say "One of everything, thanks". The Pop Cultures took a bit of time but i probably could have sold more if i had'em.

I don't have exact numbers but on Tonia's side of the table; Pirates flew off the shelf, Eat Comics did ok, a hell of a lot of people flicked thru Something Wicked and i think Kitty Boy did ok. Actually I think most of Tonia's stuff was pretty consistent.

Compare this to last years Brisbane con's sales and it was a good improvement (on a per title basis) but mianly not having the disappointment of having to take copius amounts of stock home..

Movies - the listing part 3

Alex and Emma – just rubbish. I’m a fan of rom-com but it helps when the two leads a semblance of chemistry. Just shit.

ElizabethTown – just awesome. Crowe has done a movie about the beauty of failure, set in the heartland of America. The roadtrip at the end seems a bit long and tacked on but still a great film

Serenity – I did a crash course in Firefly/Serenity for Supanova. I can understand why it failed as a series and why Stealth made more at the box office. Its just disjointed and inconsistent. I’ll probably do a longer post about it later.

V for Vendatta – technically and thematically perfect but something was missing. It dawned on me I just didn’t care about Evey or V that much. And has Portman always had that mole on her cheek?

Constant Gardner – its nice when they make actual thrillers, as opposed to the pap that has 1.5 car chases and “a shocking twist!!!”. Its even better when they make films that are relevant. Smart, moving and exceptionally well put together. And I always considered John le Carre to be just another airport bookstore author, but this does make me consider picking up his books.

40 year old virgin – Just cheap and nasty; like a zgrade film for the comedy set. It felt like it was made by a bunch of arts students making shit up as they went along. The basic structure was solid but repeated scenes of people arguing and swearing for no reason was lame; seeing a 60year old Indian say motherfucker would have been funny if I was 9. A lot of set ups no pay offs.

Harold and Kumar go to White Castle – I’m a massive fan of Dude Where’s my Car (its perfectly written, every set up pays off, some jokes 3 or 4 times). It is genius. I had been hanging out for this for awhile (its by the same director) and it too passes mustard (on little square burgers).

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – Yeah Yeah (reminded me off the Big Lebowski in terms of devices and influences)

Just like Heaven – An Emma flick which was very meh.

Small Soldiers – Sunday arvo film watched while I was sick. Like most Joe Dante flicks it can’t decide what it wants to be (comedy? action? kids flick?). It was kind of violent for a Sunday 12pm movie, what with nail firing machine guns and whatnot. There was a lot of ’hey its that guy from that show’ (david cross, phil hartman, that guy from, you know, that show). It also had Kirsten Dunst which is always nice.

Like Mike – Again I watched this as I recuperated from the flu. It had Crispin Glover in and the bigheaded kid from Jerry Macquire. It was ok.

Honey I shrunk the kids – I was hung over and it was raining. I’m pretty sure I saw it as a kid but I don’t think it left an impression on my because I didn’t recognize a single thing.

the ire

Sellers who wait until buyers leave ebay feedback before reciprocating shit me.

OzComic 24 Hour Challenge - 2006

www.ozcomics24.com is open for registerations and general perusal.
So sign up because you know you NEED to.

Melbourne comics Blog

Discovered by accident it seems Mandy Ord and Nicki Greenberg have created a a blog about Melbourne comics.

(can anyone please provide an LJ feed)

free comic day photos

Seeing as Pulp Fiction Comics is about the size of most Service elevators, it gets packed when more than 10 people visit.

I've never sen lyrca flap in the wind before

Robin at Work

Robin at Play

The rock and the cock

Saturday was one of the best days I've had for awhile –

It started with a sleep in and my stating that I was going to do fuck all work around the house. Emma agreed – we’ve been either painting, gardening, installing, renovating, cleaning, fixing, building, or genrally doing shit around the house for close for 3 months and it was getting tiring.

So after crossiants and a relaxed coffee, it was off to the local shops. For the last six months we’ve gotten into a cool shopping rountine; midweek we hit the supermarkets for non-perishables and then off to the local shops for meat/fish/veggies/bread on saturdays. The change came because I’m not keen on the sulfur soaked vacuum sealed meat or 6 month old vegetables you get at the supermarket. Suburban supermarkets on a Wednesday night have a nice calmness about them; apparently empty aisles, bored shelf stockers, lame muzak and garish lighting puts me in a good mood. Also, on saturdays its exciting going into fresh food produce shops and seeing what’s in season, what’s on sale and what looks good; trying to figure out what to make with it all.
“look at those capsicums!”
“Stuffed capsicums!!”
or
“check it tommyruffs for $8 a kilo – we can do prosciutto wrapped tummies, on jasmine rice”
“no tummies with couscous with raw onion”
Ah – we are so easily excited.

After shopping, Emma dropped me off in town where I quickly spotted a rather weedy young man dressed as batman harassing families, telling them about free comic day.

Walking down the narrow stairs to Pulp Fiction Comics, it wasn’t hard to tell how packed it was. PFC Worker Matt exclaimed it had been like that all day. Well, when I say ‘exclaimed’ I mean it was probably the most animated/agitated I’d ever seen Matt, who usually wavers emotionally from nonchalant to slightly bemused. Peter was running the counter that had a line up of at least 10 people. Robin/Robyn was mingling, volunteers Jack and Jesse were directing people and the shelves of free stuff had at least 2 rows of people moshing for position.

I stalked shelves taking advantage of the sale that coincided with the weekend. On Friday it was 15%, Saturday was 20% and Sunday was 25% off the price; this was a progressive sale style which was MY IDEA which I stole from somewhere and told peter whilst he was working at the other comic shop. I grabbed the Rocketo trade, 100 bullets Volumes 8 and 9, Jeffery Brown’s AEIOU and the latest one (I’m guessing it has something to do with relationships), and Mouse Guard 1. Spotting a hole in the freecomic scrum I grabbed the Scott Pilgrim book and the Fantagraphic sampler.

After a chat with various peoples and purchasement of comics I left and headed for JB. I was in a buying mood and grabbed the Speacial edition of (cough mumble) Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the Johnny Cash San Quetin/Folson prison double album and the 3rd season of Northern Exposure. I had intended to get the latest Public Enemy album which I had seen a number of times during the past fortnight, stocked at JB. At least 7 copies in the eye height JB recommends/New release part of the HipHop section. I was slightly apprehensive because the last album sucked and they cancelled their Australian tour but I was also intrigued because it was produced or co-written by Paris. If it’s the same paris I’m thinking of, its pretty cool; I remember in about 1992 getting a tape of a Paris album which was solid, angry and political with juicy fat beats, it was quite good but I think it got swept over by the rising emergence of gangsta rap and the overall commercialization of hiphop (or rap as it was known back then). So it could be cool. But I don’t know because it had moved from the new release section, wasn’t under ‘P’ and no one knew what I was talking about.

Very weird indeed.

Anyway walking down the mall I thought I’s stop back at Pulp Fiction to see if anyone else was moving on to the Grace Emily pub. At this point I discovered my half open fly, so with some interim cover up action I thought I’ll fix that proper when I get to the foyer of pulp, where its private and out of the way. But then I saw Sarah in her Robyn/Robin get up, with Dave and other guy. That’s when I got distracted. We then walked the 1km to the pub, me and sarah upfront and Dave and other guy way behind so they didn’t have to be part of their weird looks and smiles that people give to someone dressed as a superhero.

Though the whole fly thing was resolved when having a beer, Sarah mentioned ‘I don’t want to embarrass you or anything but - your – fly – is – undone’ in that loud whisper you use when you want to keep something lowkey but everyone still can hear.

With my fly up, we all drank. Pizza was delivered and the 30 people who turned up drank and chatted comics and other important stuff. I brought some Sureshots to leave around and explained the concept and talked about Australian comics in general. I also got some interest for a Melbourne roadtrip to the Doujicon small press and comics festival. So that’ll be interesting. Besides it being good, I don’t remember much except for poor Owen Heitmann breaking a frame. But we all then stomped on bubblewrap. At about 9, four us stumbled onto the train and headed home.

Emma had been home, expecting a girlfriend to come over for dinner. She did ring me up at 5 to say that her friend was late and the wine I bought them was really nice and she had already drunk ¾ of the bottle and she was quite drunk and that her friend was late and she really loved me and I had bought nice wine. On hanging up I thought it was going to get messy, this was certified when she called at 8 asking where the Dirty Dancing dvd was.

I got home during the learning to dance montage, and whilst I expected drying toenails, face masks and scattered bottles, it was quite sedate. I excused myself, made myself a panini (that’s fancy Italian for toasted sandwich) fired up the brazier and drank wine outside. I did return for the final dance scene because “nobody puts baby in the corner” is a great movie line and its great fun to watch. Em’s friend left soon after and whilst I cleaned up, Em put on the Superfly soundtrack so we drunkenly danced around to Mr Mayfield because that type of shit is compulsory.

Sunday was fucked and involved only getting 4 hours sleep because I was dehydrated from the alcohol but too stupid to get up and get a drink, I had to drove 150kms to dad’s farm, i lost my petrol cap, I spent 6 hours picking olives which amounted to about 3 buckets which is essentially a waste of time, it rained, it hailed, it was cold, it was windy, I had to shit outside and then when I turned up to the Exeter hotel for the gallery exhibition no one was there.

get free stuff for FREE!!!

Get free comics from Pulp Fiction Comics, this saturday (6 May)!

dibs on the Scott Pilgrim book!

There's a sale with 20% off books (not everything but the majority) and 25% off the price of some books (not everything but the majority) on sunday.

Also see Batdan, Minnie Mouse, boy/girl Robin and other people in costume - then go to the Grace Emily for drinks.

BECAUSE YOU WANT TO

support your local sheriff/gun fighter/comic creator

Vote for Stikman here
Vote for radiotak, jacen, simon sherry here and here and here

asshole?

At saturday's Grates gig (it was good - i couldn't dance satisfactorily on my 'broken' toe though and it was a tad crowded with gawkers but still enjoyable) i had this conversation

Girl 1 - do you know where the ATM is?
Brett - if you go down the stairs and into the courtyard there's a cash machine there
Girl 1 looks quizzical, Girl 2 more so
Mark - Yeah, just down the stairs turn left and follow the building around the corner
Girl 1 - but where is the ATM here?
i look around
Mark - I don't think there is one
Girl 1 - oh
Mark - but don't worry, you're pretty girls you can find boys to buy you drinks
Girl 2 - Will you buy us drinks?
Mark - ....
Mark - um
Mark - no
Brett - That's cold
Mark - if we were single
Girl 1 (mishearing) - how do you know we aren't single?
Mark (pointing at Brett) - no i meant 'we', we're not single
Girl 2 - oh
Girl 1- oh

Girls walk off

Mark - i think i just went asshole
Brett - yes, and you just fagged us



did i?

Supanova , Day +1 (Watch Mark run)

My plan was to walk up early, go into the city, buy something nice for Emma, catch the train to the airport and fly home.

I slept in, I missed the train, I got off at the wrong station, I kept walking in the wrong direction or walking past where I wanted to be, bought the first thing I saw. Somehow I was able to get from Roma st station to Queen’s street mall (the far end) and back to Roma st in 30 minutes.

I barely made it to the airport and because of a backpack accident have a massive bruise on my arm which is ugly as.

And that was that.

highlight - making the flight
lowlight - i mentioned to a woman on the train "you've got some white powder on your shoulder and back". She tried brushing it off and when she was unsucessful with getting it off she gave me the most completely disdainful look i ever recieved. And the bruise.


(photo taken a week after the event)