As someone who came into quote unquote prominence in the early Internet - and I say Quote Unquote because it was a matter of being big in a much smaller place - creative work existed within some very particular dynamics. The work we were trying to do was text and images, which the Internet of the time was adept at - it would take a little longer for people making music, video, or games to get the same opportunity. This meant that "distribution," previously a very thorny concept, could be a couple badly formatted tables and an FTP client. We still managed to find abuse at the hands of various demons trying to get paid for it, but this new problem is at least a novel one and the old one was gone forever.

I saw that Rob Liefeld was mad at some treatment he had received from Marvel, and having seen a bunch of incredibly bad movies and shows from them myself, I came to feel that we were brothers in this ill-treatment - a fraternity of grievance. Getting recognition, let alone money, from those structures is a long shot. It's like, yeah, the character you drew made other people almost three billion just on the films. That should be plenty to get you into a party. But they aren't wealthy because they're nice.

Rob Liefeld's art is kind of weird if you aren't super into comics and it might just be weird generally. I understand that Chiropractors engage in a form of pseudoscience but I think some of the characters Rob has drawn should at least try it - try to get the life they deserve. It's so consistently wrong that we must consider that it's literally some kind of dysmorphia - this is what he sees when he looks in the mirror. But I do have a funny story about Rob Liefeld even though it only tangentially involves him that I thought was… well, you be the judge.

We had never been to Baltimore Comic-Con before, and we haven't gone back since; we started focusing on the PAX shows. But we had a table that was sorta facing the main doors, where people might see us directly upon entering, which seemed like a hopeful sign. At SDCC, online weirdos like ourselves were recognized by the show as being somewhat adjacent to the medium they were trying to celebrate; as a result, they had a kind of quarantine area where they put all of us. The show had morphed years ago into being a kind of ground zero for pop culture generally. By comparison, Baltimore was clearly the Comic kind of Comic Con.

The line in front of the booth formed fairly quickly, so, good news there. Anything you sell is something you don't have to ship, so The Calculation is always present. I saw someone absentmindedly fiddling with a poster, so I moved in for the kill - asking if they'd like a poster. We could even sign it, if they wanted. They could even get two posters - one to Rock, and one to Stock. Without looking up:

"I'm not in your line."

I looked down the line that had coalesced in front of our booth. It went for quite a ways; surprisingly, it went directly across the aisle to the left of our booth - fire marshal ain't gonna like that. It continued, then, up another aisle until it reached its terminus somewhere I couldn't see because it was absolutely mobbed.

"I'm in line for Rob," he said.

(CW)TB out.