Hello dear readers,
Sorry I didn't blog in February. I meant to do a big exlusive blog on what it was like at Comiket, the largest self-publishing comic convention in Japan, and possibly the world... but that sounds like a lot of work, so you'll just have to make do with the mini version.;)

I had the immense good fortune to share a booth with my friend Darold and sell a printed version of Gemini (pages 1 - 55) at the convention! It was crazy and fun, and I had the pleasure of seeing a lot of familiar faces, coming out to support me! Support me and... crossdress, because apparently that is what you *do* when at a comic convention.
All three enormous halls were packed with people selling their comics. What was kind of disappointing to me was just how much of it was soft porn based on main-stream anime. The sheer volume of hand drawn panty-shots! Staggering! .. but not all of it was like that, and the original stuff had *amazing* artwork. Some mainstream artists secretly had booths selling self-published original comics at the convention, because they felt held back by the rigid guidelines of editors and publishing companies. These were the booths that had lines out the doors, down the street, and into the parking lot.
(this photo was from summer) ... Gemini was not like that ... this time. But there is time to create a following, right my friends? ;) To prepare myself for my massive fan base, I went and made a promo page for my comic in Japanese, with my own domain name and everything!
... yeah, it looks a little terrible, I know. I think I'm going to enlist the help of my friend in the design team to help me out. At least some time before next summer.

Getting ready for the convention took a lot of my time last November, I was working with Eikou, a printing company for self-publishers. Their process is great and streamlined, they email you and work with you through any problems with the proofs, even though they're busy working *tens of thousands* of other orders. But ... the only downside is, the page of very technical intructions (with plenty of printing-specific vocabulary!) is all in Japanese.

Luckily for me, some other foreigner has been down this road before me, and Studio Calcium wrote a great, in-depth guide on how to prepare your comics and apply for the convention. Without them both myself and my booth buddy would have had a much harder time of it.

Here's the result for the cover:

I applied for the Summer version of Comiket, and I'm meeting tomorrow with a professional translator to help translate pages 55-110 or so for book 2 of the series! (Last time I strong-armed a coworker into checking my Japanese translation, and apparently it wasn't that great because she rewrote it extensively and nearly keeled over from exhaustion. (Sorry Sakate-san!)
By the way, if there are any comiket lovers out there, let me know if you have a favorite booth I should check out. I found a pretty cool Harry Potter fanfic comic, and it WASN'T EVEN PORN. (wonder upon wonders!!) It's about Snape and Harry's dad when they were younger, and the rise of Voldemort. It looked really fascinating. ;)

I'll let you know how round 2 goes this summer!