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#1582; Limit Your Scream Time

  — February 12th, 2026

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2010 Appearance Schedule (I need your help!)


(Flickr image from oceanyamaha)

It’s somehow February already, and it’s high time to figure out where I’ll be hauling my miserable carcass to over the coming months. I really love traveling to comic conventions and other events, and it’s an essential part of my business as well — so besides looking forward to the regular shows every year, I’ve always got my eyes peeled for new and fun venues to exhibit at.

Below is my tentative list of 2010 appearances: the titles in green are confirmed, while the titles in red are under consideration. Each trip is a pretty serious undertaking, involving travel and lodging and so on, so I try to get a pretty good idea in advance (as much as possible) of whether it’ll be a decent show before I commit.

Which is why I’d love your help! The shows in red are ones I either don’t know that much about, or am not sure if it’s right for my stuff, or don’t know if it’d be worth the trip business-wise. Really, I’d just love to get an idea of whether anybody would come.

You guys are collectively much smarter than me.  If you have any thoughts about the shows listed in red (positive or negative), would like to pipe up to represent a local perspective, or would like to suggest a show I may have missed, please do so in the comments!

February 12-13: Bazaar Bizarre, Cleveland OH nope

February 20: Long Beach One Day Comic Expo, Long Beach CA

March 13-14: Emerald City Comicon, Seattle

March 26-28: Comicpalooza, Houston TX (tentative)

April 2-4: WonderCon, San Francisco

April 10-11: MoCCA Art Festival, New York City

April 16-18: Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo

April 24-25: Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

April 30-May 1: ROFLCon, Cambridge MA (tentative)

May 8-9: Toronto Comic Arts Festival

May 15-16: Renegade Craft Fair, Austin TX

May 22-23: Bazaar Bizarre at Maker Faire, San Mateo CA

May 28-31: World Steam Expo, Dearborn MI

June 4-6: Heroes Con, Charlotte NC

June 18-20: SupaNova, Sydney Australia

July 21-25: San Diego Comic-Con

July 31-August 1: Pan-Kinetic Expo, Vallejo CA

September 11-12: Small Press Expo, Bethesda MD

October 16-17: Alternative Press Expo, San Francisco

November 6-7: New England Webcomics Weekend, Easthampton MA

November 19-21: SteamCon, Seattle

Read more

Two Wondermark-esque videos

Here’s a neat Wondermark-style video made to dramatize a  radio sketch from the BBC comedy show That Mitchell & Webb Sound:

(direct YouTube link)

And rarely has my email lit up like it did upon the release of this video for the Ramona Falls song “I Say Fever”:

(direct YouTube link)

Quite striking, and quite worth a watch!

BONUS THIRD VIDEO: TEA RAP

(direct YouTube link)

SFO this weekend / Valentine cards!

Just a reminder that I’ll be in San Francisco today and tomorrow for the Edwardian Ball Weekend (great shows both evenings; free browsing on Saturday afternoon). Please come by and say hello! I’ll have some shirts, posters, books, and Valentine cards…

VALENTINE CARDS???

Valentine cards are on sale now! There are five different designs currently available, and I’ll be shipping orders all next week.

THIS WEEKEND: The Edwardian Ball in San Francisco!

This coming weekend, I’ll be in San Francisco at the Edwardian Ball Weekend, a “magical outdoors-indoor symphony of music, theatre, dance, art, storytelling, circus arts, fashion, technology, and, of course, the art & stories of Edward Gorey.” Also: the perfect environment for me to test out my brand-new bowler cap!

The event will feature super-fancy stage-show extravaganzae on both Friday & Saturday nights (tickets & information available at their site), but in addition, the Vendor Bazaar & Croquet Gardens (where I will be) will be open all Saturday afternoon for free browsing, gawking, and lollygagging.

Plus, if you’re a San Francisco local with nothing better to do, and would like to hang out in your finery and help me vend for the weekend (in exchange for free tickets, meals & merch), drop me a line (dave at wondermark dot com) ASAP! I’d like to have one person there to help out, if possible. It could be you. Also, it should be said, it might not be. We shall see!

Introducing: Junk Me Harder

Over at Tweet Me Harder, my co-host Kris Straub and I have launched a new blog feature we’re calling Junk Me Harder. Inspired by a bit of conversation from TMH Episode 31, Junk Me Harder aims to examine, dissect, and review junk mail in a manner that’ll be familiar to readers of my (now-concluded) series The Comic Strip Doctor. Here’s a taste of Junk Me Harder:

We’ve all experienced the thrill of receiving mail followed by the crushing sadness of realizing it’s junk mail. Marketers are no dummies, however; they want to prolong the former reaction and forestall the latter for as long as possible — preferably until after you have returned the enclosed paperwork and applied for credit from their company. Thus they go to great lengths to make their missives appear “official”, as if dispatched from some Agency of Import or Bureau of Relevance sequestered deep in the bowels of the International Government Totally A Real Thing. […]

“UPDATE BASED ON CURRENT ANALYSIS” — an overreliance on thesauri and subsets of a previous phrase’s definition seem to be the hallmarks of junk mail copy. Has anyone provided an update based on outdated information? Hearsay? Is this intended to put the recipient at ease, knowing that Discover® did not fill an envelope with raw data on reams of copier paper for the customer to interpret? That, hopefully, it has been analyzed for the purposes of a fully-current update?

NONSENSE CLAIM TO SIGNIFICANCE: 14 points

Fake rubber stamp reading “IMPORTANT”: imagine a Discover® financial adviser, having carefully considered and personally chosen You, the Preferred Customer, as a candidate for this special offer, stuffing and sealing this envelope with satisfaction. “I hope this offer comes at a good time for this Preferred Customer,” he sighs, inclining a wrist to check a fancy watch below a rolled-up sleeve. “I hope they understand the importance of this information.” Then, taking another long, hard look at the envelope, already emblazoned by stripe and slogan, he rummages through a desk drawer, fingering through a collection of rubber stamps. “Aha!” he crows. Casually but firmly, he presses the stamp onto the kraft-paper surface, leaving the outlined word IMPORTANT shining in red ink in the dim, after-hours light. “That,” he thinks, “should do the trick.”

Can you plausibly imagine this scenario? No? That’s ‘cause it didn’t happen.

FAUX APPEARANCE OF MANUAL HANDLING: 12 points

Read the full entry here!

And we are also soliciting your hilarious junk mail. Really! Send it to us for review! Mailing instructions are at the link. You can also feel free to subscribe to the TMH blog or follow TMH on Twitter to be sure of never missing an update.

BONUS LINK: If you’re jonesin’ for more of my ramblings, you should also know that I write most of the missives on the TopatoCo house blog! In between the talk about all the cool stuff we’re doing at TopatoCo, I try to be kind of entertaining as well. It’s a good thing to keep an eye on ’cause I’ve got some pretty cool plans for it soon!


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