Thanks Tim!

A reader named Tim sent the following in:

I saw your comic for the first time the other day, the strip I saw was "how to fake a smile" and it was great. Then it became even better when I checked my mail and got this advertisement:

I refuse to name this with a clever Digg pun.

So, a few days ago I noticed a huge spike in my web traffic. According to my web stats the traffic was coming from Digg, but I was unable to find any reference to my site over at digg.com. Now it’s a few days later and all of the search engines have refreshed, so I’ve been able to piece together what happened. Bare in mind, I only have a sketchy grasp of how digg works. If any of you have a correction for me on any of the following information, I’m anxious to hear it.

Someone read “How to Calm a Friend Down“, and liked it enough to post it on digg (my gratitude to that person, whoever they are). 200 or so diggs later I was on the front page. 8 minutes later, my server crashed under the weight of it. In the next 20 minutes or so at least 2, and possibly 3 digg-mirror sites had also crashed. Within 35 minutes of the initial appearance on the front page, my strip was “burried” and was no longer on the front page. I topped out at 283 diggs.

During it’s moment in the sun, my strip garnered 48 comments. They fell into 3 basic categories.

1: Who does this guy look like? (the final consensus was Edward Norton’s character in American History X)

2: This is taking so long to load, it’d better be the best thing ever. (The final consensus was that it was not.)

3: Why are you wasting my time with this crap (The final consensus was that I’m pathetic.)

Does this bother me? A thousand times no! Here’s why. Enough people liked my strip to get it to the front page to begin with. Many of the commenters posted multiple times, so instead of 43 people thinking I’m a moron, it’s more like 35 people. Foremost, those 35 or so people had a really bad experience with my site. My server wasn’t up to the task and people were waiting up to 10 minutes for a single strip to load. When the strip did load, the strip they got wasn’t one of my favorites. Oh, I’m not ashamed of that one or anything, but it might not be the one I’d have aimed a first time reader to.

So the final lesson is this, word is spreading about this comic I do and that is something of a mixed blessing. Also, I should look at other hosting options.

Unsolicited Music Advice

If you like well crafted music and things that are funny, you owe it to yourself to listen to some Jonathan Coulton. The only description I can come up with is this, imagine Ed Robertson from Barenaked Ladies had John Linnell from They might Be Giants as a writing partner.

I suggest the following songs as a place to start:
Soft Rocked by Me
Re: Your Brains
Skullcrusher Mountain
First of May (Not work appropriate)

A brush with the teeth of greatness

So, as an astute reader over at Live Journal has pointed out, that is indeed Erik Estrada* as the traffic cop. I chose to draw Erik Estrada because,… well … when you think of a traffic cop who do you picture?

It does bring up an interesting story.

Several years ago I was hired by a comedy promoter who I seldom worked with to drive to a town about an hour away from my home at the time and open a comedy show for him. The headliner was a guy I knew and liked, and I needed the money, so I agreed.

When I got to the gig, the sign out front said “Comedy night! Headliner-NAME WITHHELD” ( Okay, it didn’t say name withheld. There’ve been shows I wish the advertising had read that way, but this night they used his name. I’m just keeping him out of it here on my blog) “Featuring-Scott Meyer and hosted by Erik Estrada“.

I stared at it for awhile. I could only think of three explanations.
1. Some young beginner comic had a name similar to Erik Estrada, and this was a misprint. “Erin Estranza” perhaps.
2. Some young comic was named Erik Estrada and was using the name until forced to stop by some lawyer.
3. The club owner was pulling a joke/scam. After being promised Erik Estrada, the audience would be given an obese Hispanic in a state patrol uniform. Everyone would laugh and no refunds would be offered.

One thing was for sure. There was no way the real Erik Estrada was anywhere near this place.

So I go in and there, shaking hands and chatting with the audience is the actual Erik Estrada. Turns out the club owner was doing a special series of shows. Ours was Ponch, another featured Don “Maxwell Smart” Adams, and the last featured Adam West. Whether that was the last due to budgetary reasons, lack of interest or my friend who headlined the Adam West show getting stinking drunk on stage and spending 10 minutes just singing the Batman theme over and over is unclear.

So, Mr. Estrada kicked off the show, introduced me and the other comic, answered some questions and then hung around until everyone who wanted to talk to him had had a chance. He was a really nice guy, and he seemed shocked when I told him that to me he isn’t Ponch. To me he’s Marco.

The closest thing to a negative I can say about him is that his teeth are unnervingly white. It’s eerie. You look at Erik Estrada’s teeth and they seem to look back.



* Mr. Estrada’s image is only intended as an homage, and in no way implies the consent of Mr. Estrada.

Ahem...

I should also point out that thanks to a suggestion from a reader, I now offer an rss feed of this news blog.

Part 4: Everything Happens at Once.

Part 4: Everything Happens at Once.

As I said, I sent a submission package to the Seattle Weekly on the advice of a friend. I didn’t expect the Weekly to bite. I just wanted to be able to say I had given it an honest shot. You can imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail back from the editor of the Weekly saying that he was interested. We played some phone tag and we talked money. I am happy with the deal, and happy that I have a day job, if you catch my drift. We set a day for me to come into the paper’s office to finalize everything. It turned out their office was only a block away from my day job, so the plan was for me to take a break and walk over. My years as a stand-up had taught me that no matter how good a deal looks, there’s always a way for it to fall through at the last minute, and 9 times out of 10 it’ll be my fault. I saw this meeting as my last chance to screw the whole thing up. No pressure.

As I was getting ready for work the morning of my meeting with the editor of the Seattle Weekly, my wife’s phone rang. She picked it up and said several positive but non committal things. Then she hung up and said that she had received a job offer from Disney World. She was offered a full time job at the Comedy Warehouse at Pleasure Island as a member of the house improv troupe. It was better pay than my day job, better benefits than my day job and the job was to do what she was already doing as a hobby in Seattle with Jet City Improv. (If you are in Seattle, you MUST go see Jet City Improv) The down side was that the job was in Orlando, and she had to start in 5 weeks. I knew I wouldn’t be a very good husband if I stood in her way. There were many people in Seattle I would miss tremendously, but my day job had no real future and I knew I could do the strip from anywhere, so it came down to what she wanted. When I left for work she hadn’t decided.

I had the meeting with the editor, and I think it went well. I really don’t remember much about it. In fact, I don’t remember much about that day. I was stressed all the way out. I didn’t mention the possible move to him (a move I still feel morally weird about) because I didn’t know for sure what the decision would be, or if moving would even really be possible, and I knew I could e-mail him strips from Florida as easily as I could from Seattle. Why destroy this deal over something that only had a 50/50 shot of happening. I rode the bus home with a finalized deal to run Basic Instructions in the Weekly. When I got home my wife told me she wanted to take the job. We started researching whether moving in the time allotted was possible. The day I put in two weeks notice at my job I also told the editor at the Weekly that I was moving, convinced that he would call off the deal when he heard. He didn’t, but it didn’t make him happy either, and I can’t say I blame him.

Two weeks later, my wife and I were in a car, headed for Florida. Some day I’ll post the story of the drive across the country. There’s too much of it to shoe-horn in here.

We got here, set up housekeeping and she started her job. I went through the Disney casting process (which I may post about some day, keeping my various confidentiality agreements in mind) and got a job, as a bellhop at the Tower of Terror.

So there it is. That’s how, in a little over 2 months time you can go from being a former comic/office drone in Seattle to being a professional cartoonist/Tower of Terror bellhop in Orlando and all it’ll cost you is some hard work and one day of mind bending stress.

Postscript: My wife just passed the 90 day mark at her job and I will do so in a couple of weeks. We are enjoying Orlando a great deal, but I anticipate much suffering for myself this summer. The bellhop gig doesn’t pay well but is tremendously satisfying, and the Seattle Weekly has been very good to me. My strip is still running and I recently did some comics to illustrate their special dining issue.

My birthday is Friday, and we’re most likely going to one or more Disney World parks to celebrate. We both get in for free.

Part 3: God may not answer your prayers, but he’ll always call your bluff.

Part 3: God may not answer your prayers, but he’ll always call your bluff.

So, when I got back from Disney World, I got to work on my new comic strip “Guy.” The plan was to take one last solid shot at mainstream syndication. After a couple of months, I had enough strips I was happy with to put together a package and send it in to the syndicates. A few examples are at the end of this post.

The syndicates didn’t bite, and that didn’t bother me for two reasons. One, I knew it was a tremendous long shot from the get-go, and two, about halfway through the creation of my 65 guy strips for the submission package I realized that while it was fun, it wasn’t nearly as much fun as doing Basic Instructions. When the no thanks letters started rolling in, I started weekly production on Basic Instructions. One added reason I’m glad I gave daily syndication one last shot is that working on guy forced me to develop some techniques that really streamlined my art production. Basic Instructions looks much better and is much easier to produce because of it.

Around this time my wife attended an Improv festival in Chicago. A couple of weeks before she left she informed me that Disney was conducting an audition at the festival. She auditioned, and she felt it went well, but these people were auditioning hundreds of people, so she knew the odds of something coming of it were slim.

As last fall was beginning to set in, my wife received a phone call from representatives from Disney. They were coming to Seattle and wanted her to attend those auditions. Also, there were some call back auditions in Orlando in about a month and she was welcome to come out at her own expense to attend those if she wished. We looked at our finances and at the cost of airfares at the time, and decided that our Christmas gift to ourselves that year would be a late fall, weekend trip to Disneyworld. We would be there for two days. Day one would be her audition and day two would be a full assault on the parks. It’s a good thing we went, because the Seattle audition was eventually canceled due to weather.

Again, her audition went well, but there were about twenty people auditioning for something like three jobs, and all but two of the people auditioning already lived in Orlando and Worked for Disney, so she was not optimistic. Our one day Disney-Blitzkrieg was a ton of fun and left us exhausted for days afterward. During this trip I took a camera-phone picture of my favorite ride (The Tower of Terror) and set it as the wallpaper on my phone.

Two weeks later or so, I was playing poker with some friends and one of them told me I should send Basic Instructions into the Seattle Weekly. I had been thinking of the strip as being strictly a web comic, but my friend convinced me that I had nothing to lose. I took his advice and sent in my 12 most recent strips and a short letter, expecting to receive another rejection to throw on the pile.

Next time, Part 4: Everything happens at once.