If you’re coming to the 2011 Alternative Press Expo (a.k.a. APE) in San Francisco this weekend, don’t forget to come by our booth. It’s an amazing little convention for independent comics, and I highly recommend stopping by if you can.
I’ll be sharing the booth with game designer Ben Lehman, who will be representing Cel*Style, a collective of designers of anime-inspired tabletop RPGs. Unfortunately Jake Richmond (of both Cel*Style and Modest Medusa fame) won’t be able to make it, but he will be sending some Medusa stuff along too. Piggy is planning to come on Sunday too, and we’ll be right next to our friends from Lovesick Robot and diagonally across the aisle from that awesome guy in the priest collar who collects and sells Chick Tracts. Along with like a million other awesome people, Jason Thompson (creator of King of RPGs) will be there at the Couscous Collective booth.
We’ll be in booth 273, which puts us towards the back, but we’ll be in good company there. We’re going to have Neko Machi mini-comics and buttons for sale, plus free stickers, and I’ll have print copies of Maid: The Role-Playing Game (which are actually kind of hard to come by at the moment). Ben Lehman will be bringing along various Cel*Style games–including his new games Clover and Hot Guys Making Out–and free Modest Medusa booklets.
3Comment
Neko Machi’s hiatus has gone on a bit longer than I’d like, but as much as I love doing this comic there are other things that will always have to take precedence. I’m really looking forward to what we have planned for the future of Neko Machi, but life has just been crazy for me and especially for Piggy, so I just can’t set a date. In the meantime, aside from reassuring you that we’re not dead, I wanted to tell our readers about what we’ve been up to (aside from stuff like writing a list of 700 Catgirl Names and starting a Daily Catgirl Tumblr). I’ve also been writing for Neko Machi of course, and writing with this new approach has actually been a lot of fun.
Golden Sky Stories
Back in 2008 I published a translated Japanese tabletop RPG called Maid: The Role-Playing Game, which was an amazing (if exhausting) experience. Now I and my longtime friend Mike Stevens are publishing another game called Golden Sky Stories by the same brilliant designer. Where Maid RPG is comedic insanity and a brutal satire of the whole maid thing that was sweeping Japanese geekdom at the time, GSS is a wonderfully heartwarming, unique game with more of a My Neighbor Totoro kind of vibe. In it you play henge, animals with just a bit of magical power, including the ability to temporarily take human form (though it’s easier for them to leave their ears and tail showing). We’ll be doing a Kickstarter fundraising drive to raise money for the first print run soon. And yes, you can play a cat. :3
Dead Boy
Part of why piggy was so insanely busy is because she took on Gerald von Stoddard’s Dead Boy comic. You can see a preview of it here.
We’re All Star Children
Piggy has a few different OCs of various kinds, but the one that always seems to stand out (enough that I got her a custom plushie as a gift a while back) is Rose Marie, the sullen little demon girl. Star Children is the story of Rose Marie that she’s been wanting to do for ages. Other projects have been keeping her from updating it as much as she’d like, but it looks like a really amazing, ambitious project.
With a W For No Good Reason
The new and improved Neko Machi is going to be a little more story-oriented and less of an outlet for putting stuff from my everyday life into comic form, and on a whim I decided to start doing this scribbly, spontaneous little comic (Tasha’s Comic was a key inspiration). I pretty much just do it whenever I feel like it, which is why I was doing it 7 days a week for a bit and have kind of… stopped for now. If for some reason you’d like a window into my real life, do feel free to check it out.
Other Stuff
- A while back I hit on the idea of making a tabletop-style RPG contained in a smartphone app, which won the Brain Full of Games contest. I decided to revive my 4-koma manga inspired slice of life schoolgirl RPG, Raspberry Heaven, as the first RPG app I want to do.
- Another project that’s been dragging on too long is Nekomimi Land, a novella about a guy who gets turned into a catgirl and taken to a dystopian fairyland of catgirls. I was always worried about finding a publisher for it, but with recent advances in self-publishing I’ve decided to finish it and self-publish.
- I’ve been working on an RPG for 90s comedy anime fantasy style shenanigans a la Slayers and Dragon Half, called Dragon World. You’ll need Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World to play it, but I’ve been having a lot of fun playing it with my friends so far.
Like Kin-Yoobi Con, doing a booth at the Alternative Press Expo was a learning experience. It was fun, but also exhausting, and left me with some things to do differently next time. We weren’t able to get the prints done that I’d been hoping to, so for Neko Machi I just had buttons and mini-comics like before. I brought copies of Maid RPG, and Ben Lehman was along with Cel*Style games, including his brand new Clover game (the copies of Hot Guys Making Out didn’t make it from the printer in time). My friend Mike Stevens drove and helped out, and his girlfriend Jenner lent a hand too. It wouldn’t have been impossible without them, but near enough to it, so I’m very grateful for all their help.
A box of Neko Machi stuff, two boxes of Maid RPG, and a backpack of random stuff
We got to SF at the last minute, and wound up scrambling to get everything set up as the con was opening up, which was exactly the scenario I’d wanted to avoid. (And we managed to repeat that on Sunday too…) Apart from that it went pretty smoothly though. We were situated between the Lovesick Robot booth and Emma T. Capp’s booth, which was an odd experience to say the least. Emma is a 14-year-old comic-selling machine, and I’m not the first person to remark that I wish I’d ever at any point in my life had the drive that she has right now. Jackie and Brent of Lovesick Robot make a bit of everything—zines, T-shirts, prints, buttons, etc.—and the venture is now Jackie’s full-time job. I wish we’d had more time to chat, but running a booth at APE gives you a fairly brisk pace of people coming by, and both days we had to part ways after the con.
The Neko Machi/Cel*Style booth (that’s Jenner there BTW, not noticing me taking a picture)
APE has its own peculiar audience, and the degree to which it’s different from Kin-Yoobi Con was really striking. Our anime/manga-inspired stuff appealed to a certain segment of the crowd there, but they were a noticeable minority (and now that I think about it, there was less of that than in prior years). While APE is ostensibly about independent creators bringing their own unique visions, people there ultimately still gravitate towards stuff they already know. Doctor Who and Nintendo stuff was apparently selling really well (and I will admit to having picked up a $5 “Doctor Mew” print), and I spent the weekend watching Jackie and Brent sell tons of silly Keep Calm mashup prints while wishing that we’d gotten the Nyan Catgirl one ready in time. Still, we sold a fair amount of buttons and especially mini-comics. One thing I did differently was to change the mini-comics’ titles from “Catgirls Being Random 1 & 2” to “Catgirls Being Random” and “Catgirls Being Friends,” which resulted in the majority of mini-comic purchases being of the 3 for $5 deal.
↓ Read the rest of this entry…
