The Question always changes, but it seems it always changes at once, and what was a perfectly good Question before is now of course yesterday's news and has been supplanted by a new Question. The First Question was a version of "Who Do You Think You Are?/Where Did You COME FROM?" which morphed easily into the same category of Questions which necessitated me writing True Facts in self-defense.
At WizardWorld LA, no less than four persons of esteem asked me Another Question: "Can I have your Contact List/Give me the name of the guy you know at Variety/Publisher's Weekly/USA Today/Entertainment Weekly/How do you get such awesome Real World press?"
I uncharacteristically smile and demur politely.
The answer, of course, is that I never sleep. I never rest. I'm relentless. Comics don't make themselves better, you know?
And I rarely admit this in public, but...
...there is only one of me, and only twenty-four hours in the day. Can't be everywhere at once, although it may seem like it, to you and me.
So if you're one of our creators and you want your book to sell, sure, you can leave it to me, and I'll take care of you. I got some skillz. But if you talk with me first about your plan, it does nothing but help matters if you're out thrashing your work, too.
Take Tom Deady.
You don't know Tom yet, and even if you have heard about his project, you might not care. Tom's the co-writer of our April book, Surviving Grady, about the glorious Red Sox season of 2004. It's a prose book, it's about baseball, it's about the Red Sox. A very small interested audience slice in comics, an industry in which we are notorious. But a very large audience in The Real World, an audience who is statistically unaware of us.
So to make a big splash, ya gotta make an extra effort. Ol' Tom hit the sweet spot. Let's let Red on the Surviving Grady blog give it to us straight:
So on Saturday, March 12, Denton heads down to Spring Training, and he's all, "Dude, I'll send back some photos and interesting news throughout the week," which sounds cool, because then we could show off some Grapefruit pix that aren't "borrowed" from the AP or, y'know, actually talk about baseball instead of imagined conversations with headwarmers.
But then a few days go by. And then a few more. Then a week. And no word from Denton.
So I write him off as drunk or jailed and go about my biz. Then on Saturday I get a couple calls telling me that the Remdawg mentioned Surviving Grady during that afternoon's telecast of the game against the Orioles. My first thought is that NESN has added a new "Blogs that Taste Like Ass" segment, but it turns out the plug was the work of Denton. And it was captured by the NESN cameras thusly:
In the eighth inning, Remdawg and Orsillo begin to dialogue about how accessible they are to the fans during Spring Training telecasts. As if on cue, Orsillo notes: "Here comes somebody now." Cut to shot of Denton approaching the broadcast booth. Rooftop snipers stand at the ready.
Oblivious to the fact that they're in the middle of a broadcast, Denton greets Remdawg and Orsillo. The two greet him back.
Remdawg engages Denton, with the brief but poignant exchange caught on tape. Denton somehow tricks him into thinking he's not a sociopath, and, before departing, hands Remdawg one of the publisher's postcards for "Surviving Grady: The Book."
Remdawg kindly plugs the book. Meanwhile, Denton, who has no idea any of this is even transpiring on camera, stumbles back to his seat, and is later thrown out of the park for making disparaging comments toward a priest sitting behind him.
So, nice work, Tom. The Surviving Grady postcard on the telly.
Lehman and Higgins are getting a stack; any other retailers who could use a few please drop me a line.
