David Malki !

A BUSY WEEKEND on BOTH COASTS

This weekend I’ll be in Bethesda, MD for the annual Small Press Expo! I gotta say, I love SPX. It’s run by volunteers, features work by a truly amazing lineup of independent and creative artists and entrepreneurs, and last year I missed my flight home and got to spend a long, delightful day looking up weird old newspaper articles in the Library of Congress.

I’ll be in the TopatoCo Nation along the right-hand wall, joined by luminaries and friends such as Kate Beaton, Scott C, Anthony Clark, and many more people whose work you should also already be familiar with. Hope to see you there!

If you’re not going to be at SPX because you’re stuck in dumb ol’ Los Angeles under an extradition treaty, on Saturday the 11th check out the ShadowMachine Art Show in Hollywood! ShadowMachine is the animation company that produces the TV show Robot Chicken, among others, and this art show is all Robot Chicken artists and animators showing off their own personal work. My wife Nikki, a Robot Chicken puppet fabricator, will have several pieces in the show, including sculptures she’s made of characters from the comics Goats, Hark! A Vagrant, Diesel Sweeties and xkcd.

The pony figurine at the art show may well be the last one in the world still available for sale (they were a limited-edition run that sold out very quickly, earlier this year) so come check out the show!

The Intergalactic Nemesis: a live-action graphic novel

If I were in Austin this weekend, I’d check out the live premiere of The Intergalactic Nemesis, which might be described as a mashup of theater, radio drama, silent film and animation. This video will give you an idea:

The stage version of The Intergalactic Nemesis projects the comic book artwork panel-by-panel while three actors perform the voices, one foley artist creates the sound effects, and one keyboardist plays the score, all live.

This looks like a really neat thing to sit in a theater and enjoy! I’m a big fan of taking the trouble to seek out unique experiences like this. I saw something similar once here in L.A.: a touring, contemporary silent film called Brand Upon the Brain!, which had been shot as a pastiche of 1920s silent films and which was shown in the theater with a live orchestra, sound-effects crew, and narrator (in my show, Daniel Handler). It was a terminally weird movie — about sucking people’s brains out, and so on; sort of bizarre-for-the-sake-of-bizarre which is a very hard thing to make enjoyable for a paying audience — but the spectacle and the craft of the music and the sound-effects and the whole bit was enthralling in itself. I didn’t even like the movie and I didn’t regret seeing it.

So I definitely recommend checking out The Intergalactic Nemesis if you’re in Austin this weekend! The show comes highly recommended by some of my Austinite friends who’ve seen these folks perform before. Performances are this Friday and Saturday, Sept. 3 & 4, at the Long Center. Tickets are here!

If you can’t make it to the live show, the full-length radio drama is also available as free downloadable MP3s!

Webcomics Weekend tickets now on sale!

Tickets have just gone on sale for the second annual New England Webcomics Weekend comics festival in Easthampton, Massachusetts! Organized by my friend and colleague Meredith Gran and her army of trusty flying monkeys, NEWW is a one-of-a-kind gathering of people who make online comics and other people who would like to hang out with those first people. And vice versa! This year it’s being held November 6-7, taking advantage of the lovely New England autumn.

Tickets are limited and are expected to sell out before the show, so if you’re in the New England area (or within teleportation distance) and a fan of webcomics, this is a great event — it’s social, friendly, a great space for conversation without the high stress of a massive convention, and Kris Straub and I will be doing a live Tweet Me Harder comedy show. What could be better?

Earlier this year, it was a bit weird mentioning my trips to ROFLCon and San Diego, because tickets for those events were long sold out by the time I brought them up. I’m attempting to rectify that this time!

Oh yeah and here is the amazing old factory building where NEWW is held — there is a stained brick room deep in its bowels called the Quarantine Area. What could be better, I maintain?

Attention all ENGINEERS, BEARS, and GRUMPY FUTURISTS!

Have I got some fun new things for you:

Engineering: it’s like math, BUT LOUDER. Based on “Accomplishment Measured in Decibels.” I got a lot of emails about this one, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it, but then I really enjoyed playing around with the design so now here it is!

Are you a member of the secret order of the International Fraternal Corps of Bears in Ill-Fitting Hats? If you are, perfect! Here is a shirt for you. And, well, you don’t have to be a member of a professional sports team to wear the jersey, you know what I mean?

Unlike most of my other shirts, which are printed on the American Apparel brand, the guys’ shirts here are Gildan — they’re a bit thicker and more roomy than AA. I made that choice because some folks have asked me for a workout shirt, and this provides an option!

I also made a new bumper sticker! It’s not really based on anything except real life. In fact, I am personally very interested in flying cars, and can discuss the question of “where’s the flying cars???” in a fair amount of detail. Interested parties can check out my two favorite contemporary answers to the question: the Terrafugia Transition, basically an airplane that’s also street legal (marketed quite cleverly to pilots and the existing aeronautical community, who are used to both the challenges and the price tag of general aviation) and the Parajet SkyCar, a dune buggy that operates on a parasailing principle which quite handily avoids all the tricky questions of fixed-wing aerodynamics. In other words, one’s a plane that drives, and the other’s a car that flies. Two interesting principles, and I hope we soon live in a world with room for both!

The sticker is available as a 3-pack, or in a combo pack along with 1 each of my other two bumper stickers:

Here is where you click for these things and many more!