DOING THE WORK
Harris O'Malley

February 24, 2004
OOP! ACK! The After-Ape Report

Like I said last time, comic conventions are focuses of nerd energy and there are forces in existence in this universe that just don’t want creators to attend them and throw up various barriers in one’s path to keep you from getting there.

After my little escapade with Delta, I hit yet another snag.

With many conventions, an exhibiting creator will want to ship his or her stuff ahead of time, ensuring that you won’t have to pay the usurious fees airlines charge if you attempt to travel with anything larger than a small handbag and the ever fun obstacle course that is maneuvering large boxes from the airport to the mass-transit to the hotel and then to the con the next day. Many conventions will have either an Exhibitor Service attached to the convention-space or have deals with local unions to help with the shipping and set-up.

APE is one of the latter. And they have fairly strict deadlines about getting one’s shipments in on time. And since I had already had much of my time sucked away after dealing with the customer-disservice bots… let’s just say that I was running on borrowed time and leave it at that. And seeing as a self-publisher is chronically short of cash, the shipping options were limited.

This, of course, is exactly the sort of set-up that the Gods love. I couldn’t have invoked Murphy’s Law any more effectively than if I had been in a wacky comedy and the fate of an orphanage depended on my getting a special document to city hall on time.

UPS decided to not show up at the pre-arranged time to pick up my books. At all. And this, of course, was on a Friday, which meant I was screwed until the following Monday, giving me less than two days to get my books in on time. This, in it’s turn, necessitated my calling the central office, demanding to know what was going on and the central office putting me on hold and calling the local dispatch. The local dispatch, in it’s turn, would then hide under it’s desk, ignore the shrieking phone and put it’s fingers in it’s ears, chanting “I’m in my happy place. I’m in my happy place.”

I, on the other hand, spent the greater part of the weekend sacrificing chickens and burning St. Celica candles in the hopes of appeasing whatever gods I’d managed to piss off by this point.

To make a long story short (“Too late!”), after much bitching and mailing of chicken heads, UPS came on Monday, upgraded my shipping for free and sent everything on it’s merry way with less than five days to the con.

I spent the rest of the week waiting for the third shoe to drop. Because there are always three shoes. Those gods have weird anatomy problems, donchaknow?

Fast-forward to Friday. The planes are on time. I even get a row to myself on the Dallas-San Francisco flight. My luggage arrived safely. I got to the hotel on time. My reservations were in order. And my stuff had even made it to the con safely.

I developed a bleeding ulcer waiting.

Turns out I needn’t have bothered freaking out. When the third shoe did finally drop (because it always does), the gods had turned their attention onto some other poor schmoe, so their parting shot was that my Palm Pilot went tits-up right at the start of the day on Saturday.

Of course, I also learned that my carefully engineered, brilliantly planned banner stand, lovingly crafted from PVC pipes, which had caused me so many headaches at so many cons previously, fell apart under it’s own weight five seconds after I assembled the damn thing. So there may have been a previously unknown fourth shoe.

Still, I did manage to scavenge parts of it to serve as a nifty t-shirt display to be strapped to the wall behind me.

Harris O’Malley: Master of the Plan B.

Once the anxiety was out of the way, APE was a blast. My brother showed up to serve as booth-monkey and my friends and I got to enjoy the slightly shell-shocked expression he would wear for the rest of the weekend after having been presented with the long line of geeks, nerds, Goths, punks, transvestites and an array of pre, post and transitioning transsexuals. Your standard crowd of unconventional conventionalists, in other words. Also: my buying audience.

This APE also marked my participation in my first panel discussion ever; I was asked to be on the Self-Publishing 101 panel with Jane (Vogelien) Irwin, Rick (Teenagers from Mars) Spears and Justin (True Travel Tales) Hall. Hmm… the publisher of a beloved modern-day fairy tale, half of the much-cooler-than-I’ll-ever-be pair that created an indie-classic and a similarly talented creator of a fascinating travel journal–cum-comic series and me. One of these things is not like the other…

Surprisingly enough, the panel was not, in fact, the pants-wettingly terrifying ordeal that I had anticipated and there was a refreshing lack of people in the audience waiting to stand up and yell “FRAUD” at the one poseur on the panel.

During the con, I was seated next to Rafer Roberts of PLASTIC FARM fame and his lovely and talented wife Nan. Nan was gracious enough to watch my table while my brother and I were at my panel. Afterwards, I return to find that there had been a sudden spike in sales while I was away. Later, when I manned Rafer’s table while he participated in his panel, there was a similar spike when my brother sat in for me.

Needless to say, while I fully intend to hire Nan away from her hubby for full-time con duty, I’m not entirely sure I like what that particular trend seems to say…

Oh, and might I propose a new rule? Anyone who stops, picks up a book, reads the ENTIRE thing at the table, then puts it down and walks away is now fair game for any creator with a handy baseball, a dead-eye aim and a strong pitching arm.

Not that I would know anything about any surreptitious head injuries that may or may not have happened to people who allegedly match the above description during or after the con. Nosireebob.

But I should not neglect the main attraction to APE besides the fantastically talented creators, the abundant creative energy and enthusiastic audiences: the partying. APE is the number-one, hands down, place to go if you love yourself some drunken bacchanalian revels to put the Maenads to shame, cultivating, of course, with the Isotope APE After-Party. My only regret is that I am a light-weight among prodigious partiers; due to my having no liver (a long story for another time) it didn’t take very long for the Speakeasy microbrews to send me from suave and stylish man about town to an owlishly-blinking man who would be willing to debate with Tom Beland whether Gwen Stacy or Betty Leeds was, in fact, hotter than Mary Jane. I wisely bowed out of further revelry that night, which, as it turns out may have been a good thing. There was karaoke later that evening, you see. And after my rousing rendition of Meatloaf’s “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” last Mardi Gras, I have been banned from singing karaoke, as seen in U.N. Resolution NT1701c.

So there were sales and friends were visited with, massages shared and after the con, it was generally agreed by various creators that if I don’t make it as a publisher, I double very nicely as a throw-pillow. And then we all were forced to wake up at o-dark-hundred to take our cranky and hung-over bodies back to our respective places of origin, shrieking in pain as we felt every single molecule in the air playing the drum section of 2112 on our heads to throw ourselves upon our art boards again with no real chance to decompress.

And frankly, I wouldn’t trade it for anything else in the world.

Harris O'Malley is a writer/artist/publisher of BETWEEN THE CRACKS. He lives in Texas.


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