DOING THE WORK
by Harris O'Malley

March 7, 2004
Switching Gears

Ah, spring. When a young man’s fancies turn to thoughts of all the tax preparations he should really be doing right about now…

Now that the first con of the season is over, I should, in theory, be kicking it into high-gear. Gotta arrange for the other cons of the season (and early enough that I can handle whatever fun the Con Gods throw my way), get cracking on the remaining pages for Berserker: The Wild Hunt, get my promotional machine rolling and generally acting like the professional I am.

That’s the funny thing about theories…

The one thing that anyone in this industry learns early on is real life exists only to conflict with working. Whether it’s family members who just don’t get the fact that drawing comics is, in fact work, odd jobs around the house or just the little things in life that seem like they can be delegated to others, only to find out that they’ve been humping like bunnies and now there’s more that needs doing than can possibly be done in a world that only has 24-hour days. Factor in to this the time-management ability of your average artist and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. That’s the funny thing about artists. We could rule the world (if we weren’t too busy drawing dinosaurs and giant monkeys) but we possess the organizational skills of short-bus-riding slime-molds.

It also didn’t help that I’ve been sidelined for the better part of the last week and a half after getting spectacularly and violently ill, and recovered just barely in time to start preparing for my first art show, which just happens to fall right at the beginning of a two-week festival of music, film and interactive academia, which draws thousands of people to Austin each year.

No pressure, right?

Some back story: I’m part of the http://www.austinsketchgroup.comAustin Sketch Group, a motley crew of comic artists, illustrators, tattooists, animators and the usual assortment of scum and villainy. Each Sunday, we take over a fairly sizable part of The Hideout, a local coffee-house, and draw, network and above all else, scare the hell out of everybody else in the general vicinity with the elevated levels of Geek that seem to follow us around like lost puppies. Part networking opportunity and part drinking society, we get together to sketch, hang out and occasionally conduct experiments to see just how a pub-crawl might affect our ability to produce a coherent comic book.

John, the head of the group (or at least, the one who seems to do the most organizing and ended up being the de-facto guy in charge) managed to convince our hangout to let us have an art show, sampling some of the best that we could produce. This, by a happy coincidence, is taking place during one of the busiest times of the year for downtown Austin, the http://www.sxsw.com South By Southwest film and music festival. Since the Hideout is one of the venues for the music end of things, this means that this has become an incredible marketing opportunity for us.

Of course, this has also lead to insane levels of scrambling to complete various projects in time, and then have them matted, mounted and possibly framed in time to hang them on Saturday. When Saturday finally rolled around, the general consensus amongst us was that not only was 9:30 in the morning just too damn early for a civilized person to be awake on a weekend, but that we had collectively had less than three hours of sleep the night before.

Considering the sheer number of exceedingly fatigued, overly caffeinated and/or hung-over artists, things went surprisingly smoothly. Other than some people who were woefully unprepared for actually hanging anything and who proceeded to mooch from all and sundry that is.

Ok, so that was me. I’d been up for 32 hours by that point. Blargh.

All that remained was to get the word out. Of course, since it was Saturday and the showing is on the following Tuesday, this necessitated more running around like the proverbial headless chicken to as many venues as possible spreading fliers and posters. Since I was headed out in that direction anyway, I volunteered to take some fliers out to some of the local comic, game and indy music stores on the north end of town.

Considering the state that I was in, this may have been a mistake.

While most of the stores I stopped by were happy to simply take the fliers and display them themselves, there was one notable stop that decided to be difficult. While the manager on duty wouldn’t object to my posting one on the “Gamers Looking For…” board in the back, he wasn’t entire sure he wanted any fliers up by the cash-registers and wanted to know more about the group and about the show. As I was making my pitch for the group, the store cat, for reasons only known to cats, decided I looked like a particularly comfortable seat.

Have you ever tried to make a pitch to someone with a cat sleeping on the top of your head? It’s quite the experience, take it from me.

Fortunately, fliers were distributed and word was spread. Now that it’s all over bar the screaming, all that’s left is to throw together some more ashcans to distribute at the show and pray for the best.

What could possibly go wrong?

Harris O'Malley can be read bi-weekly, Wednesdays here at PopImage.com


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