In a twist of fate that could only have been heralded in by the fiery demise of Butter Jesus last week, ‘Francis Sharp in the Grip of the Uncanny!’ has been chosen as a recipient of the Xeric Grant!

The Xeric is a grant that is given to comic book self-publishers to help them with the enormous cost of printing and distributing a book. When you have a major publisher behind your work, you don’t normally see the costs associated with undertaking a print run. When you’re a small-time self-publisher, you need all the help you can get. Me and my coauthor, Anna Bratton, are extremely grateful to the Xeric Foundation Committee for giving us the opportunity to do a real printing of the first book in the ‘Francis Sharp’ series.

You may be asking yourself, “Didn’t you already print this book?!” Well, technically we did. It was a small run (50 books) that was done by an on-demand press in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, called Bookmobile. Bookmobile did an amazing job for on-demand book, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

We went with Bookmobile for the first micro-batch of ‘Francis Sharp’ because of the prohibitive costs of printing a high-volume run on an offset press. We were only able to afford to print 40-50 on-demand copies at a time, and we were depending on the revenue from those to allow us to print another 40-50 of those if the first run sold out.

With the Xeric Grant, we will be able to print a higher quality book in larger numbers, making it possible for us to distribute and sell them in stores without constantly running out of books due to our lack of cash monies.

So, in short, look for the first ‘Francis Sharp’ book to come out in August of 2010, hopefully in a bookstore near you!

Friends, gather around, and let me tell you the tale of…

This was my second MoCCA attendance (the first one I went to was in 2007), and my third time in New York City.

Let me just start out saying that I am not a girl cut out for the big-city. The mere fact that I was surrounded by millions of people on one little island in the middle of a veritable Superfund site was enough to get me all riled up and irritated. NYC just involves way too much walking, way too expensive everything, and not enough green space to make it bearable for more than a week. The wide selection of food, drinks, and entertainment was nice, but not enough to make one fall out of love with Minneapolis.

Minneaps might be one of the smallest metro areas in the country, but it’s manageable!

New York has it’s charms though, and I have to say, I was definitely charmed by the hotel we stayed at in Manhattan. It was Hotel 17 in nicer, quiet neighborhood. The whole place was awesomely retro-looking and had wood-paneled EVERYTHING. You want a wood-paneled elevator? Stay here. The staff was also super-friendly and despite having shared bathrooms on each floor for showering, the place was spotless and very clean.

Our room was on the sixth floor, and we got awesome views of a park, some old-timey churches, and an apartment where I watched a guy lounge naked on an Ikea Poang chair for nearly 10 minutes while he talked and gestured wildly to a lady dressed completely in black. Good times!

I really loved the historic armory the convention was hosted in, and it didn’t feel claustrophobic at all (as it did on the first floor of the Puck building, in 2007.) The big, airy space and the fact it was April kept the place at a reasonable temperature with all the people inside. Everything was pretty well-organized, and aside from a chair-theif who struck before we arrived, we didn’t have any major problems.

The table that Becky Laff, Ursula Husted, Anna Bratton and me shared was smack in the middle of the convention, so people had that glazed-over look to their eyes by the time they arrive at us. Despite that, our big book sold out! And be ’sold out’, I mean that it sold 23 copies. But hey, that’s pretty good considering we only printed 50, and took 25 with us (the extra 2 were give-aways to two other people). At $10.00 a piece, we have enough to print a re-order of those copies for the upcoming summer conventions if we need to.

Kevin Cannon also drew me a sweet fan art of his character, Armitage Shanks. In return, I drew him Armitage Shanks fighting a sandworm on the desert planet Arakis.

So, this would be a good time to mention, if you are interested in the book I drew and co-authored with Anna Bratton, feel free to check out the entry previous to this one. It’s the first real release (after re-doing the art from the first 20 pages I drew in 2006, then abandoned for a while) of our “Francis Sharp in the Grip of the Uncanny!” book. If you want to order one, just use the contact info in the post I linked to, and I will send you one.

I didn’t really buy anything at the convention, since I was already busting the bank just getting to New York and MoCCA, but I did receive some minis through trades that were definitely worth mentioning!

If you like sweet screen-printed covers and a strange tale, check out Damien Jay’s “The Natural World”. I didn’t realize how awesome it was until I got home and read it, then went immediately online to order the next issue. This was by far the best find in a stack of dubious traded minis, and I felt the need to give this guy money.

Another cool trade was “Of What Kind” by Adam Szym. Very cool , full-color deal that was a hilarious mix of high fantasy and a strange interlude involving the characters from “Lord of the Flies”. This guy is definitely getting some dolla billz if I see him at a convention again.

As always, One Percent Press had a gorgeous array of minis and I received some in a trade with them. They are the mini masters, if that is even a title.

Other noteworthy trades include ‘Angry Dad vs Gay Son’ by Will Varner (HILLARIOUS!) and this anthology of werewolf comics (can’t find the website or the editor’s name.)

Aaaaand, that’s about all I can remember or feel like typing after a month out from MoCCA. Here’s to an awesome 2011 MoCCA and my ability to afford returning to it.

Please enjoy some photos from the trip, though there are not many:

My and my homies at the convention, stolen from Big Time Attic’s blog via Kevin Cannon. I’m the one in the black shirt, trying to make it seem like I didn’t get shafted paying $200 for my tiny bit of table-realestate.

View from the hotel room

The haul!

Well, it’s finally done! “Francis Sharp in the Grip of the Uncanny! : Book 1″ , by Anna Bratton and myself, is finally complete! It is 86 pages of all the stuff you’d expect from me, such as children, children lost in woods, woods, more woods, and weird creatures. Actually, here is a better preview of the story:

It’s not easy growing up in rural New Jersey during the 1930’s, especially when it gets in the way of your occult fantasies. But when little Francis Sharp’s imagination gets the better of him, he finds himself lost in a much stranger world than he knew existed. The woods behind Francis’s house really do hold some unearthly secrets, and getting back home might not be an option . . .

Stranded in Valleyghast, a bizarre city of smokestacks and monsters, Francis must rely on an eccentric pair of goblin cousins for help in finding his way back to Jersey. But what mysterious forces conspire to keep him here?

More ordering info to come soon!

Here are also a few sample pages from the book:

A-aaaaaand… perhaps Book 2 will be out around Christmas? Perhaps…