Five Things I Learned At The Editors Association of Canada Conference 2008

1) How to tell if a presentation to EAC members is going well: they won’t interrupt you to ask questions that’ll take you in the direction they’re interested in hearing about.

2) How to tell if a panel presentation to EAC members went well: members of the audience “swarm” the panel members after the panel’s allotted time and keep the discussion going. (“Swarm” is, to my mind, a bit of an overstatement for what was maybe, maybe a dozen people between three panelists, but it was the description used by someone who’s attended a lot of EAC conferences and, I suspect, never seen Kevin Smith take an impromptu walk on the floor of San Diego’s Comic Con.)

3) Editors eat very good food--at least, they do at EAC Conferences…

4) I can spend ten minutes talking about word balloon placement in two panels. It’s easier than I thought, actually. I’m told my solo presentation lasted 17 minutes; going in, I was certain I only had enough material to last five, if that.

5) Loose notes don’t work for me when it comes to public speaking. I’m quite comfortable reading verbatim from something, as I do when I do a comic reading, and I’m OK talking off the top of my head. What I’m not good at is having loose notes to refer to. They were a distraction. I was absolutely positive they destroyed any credibility I might have had when making my presentation.

Apparently, I was wrong. Panel moderator Peter Roccia’s been relaying the responses he got to the panel to me, Jay, and Mike, and they’ve actually been positively glowing. Which almost makes the week of stress and Saturday’s Night of Existential Insomnia worth it.

Still, as with the public readings, now that I’ve done this, I’ll feel somewhat more confident if I’m called upon to do it again. At least, I will be if I’m going to be speaking to/with a group of people who seem to understand why keeping a left to right reading flow in a comic page’s text is more important than maintaining the inviolability of a panel border.

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JOIN THE REVOLT

That’s a possible tagline for a new strip I developed over the weekend.

Finding myself inspired to give more consideration to DC’s Zuda Comics contest than was previously the case by a talk with RED ICE writer Scott O. Brown, and with some time on my hands during the aforementioned Night of Existential Insomnia, I came up with an idea that I will probably be entering in said contest. Nick Johnson’s tentatively on-board to draw the thing, and I spent what little of today’s time that could fairly be called productive writing the initial eight page--I mean, eight screen story.

The idea and especially the execution of the piece make me laugh, but I don’t know how many people are actually going to get what I (and hopefully still Nick, after he reads the script) am going for. I’ve got a bad feeling I’ll be running the risk of turning into the comics equivalent of Andy Kaufman with this one.

Oh well. When the muse offers inspiration, I take what I can get and ask questions later...

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