Dressed For Success

So yesterday I got a note from Pete DeCourcy of Comic Book Daily, the blog that has been carrying Dressed For Success and is associated with Chris’ new comic book pusher Big B Comics. He’s adding a new column that asks a question a week. This weeks question? Who’s your favourite female comic book character? The first one was kinda short notice and I panicked a bit, but in the end I’m pleased with my choice.

Wanna know who I chose?

Just a quick note to let you know that the Who’s Wha?! guide to Dressed For Success has been updated with entries for Jay and Celeste.

It’s a little early to put up entries for some of the other figures seen in MJATLSOTO, (whoa, is that an acronym!) but would there be interest in entries for characters from the older small press print stories?

Just a quick reminder that we’ll be attending the Toronto comic con Fan Appreciation event June 5&6. We just learned we’ll be at table 55. (thanks Tara) We”l have books, magnets, sketches and a new poster we’ve done up special like. It’s free to attend on Sunday, so that might entice you further. We’re bound to be pretty silly as usual, and we’ll have the puppets with us. I think maybe some Mamet plays this weekend, or some Kubrick.

Full details can be found by clicking on the Fan Appreciation image to the right.

While at the Wizard Comic Con, we met some folks at TDOTComics, an online community for Toronto centric comic lovers. We fit into that heading and they fired us over 10 questions so their readers could get to know a little about us.

Visit TDOT Comics and find out the super not so secret origins of Alex and Walter.

In our ongoing endeavour to take over the world, Dressed For Success is now running on the highly informative website ComicBookDaily.com.

Okay, in actual fact, I asked if I could leave some promotional postcards at Big B Comics in Hamilton, (winner of the prestigious Harry Kremer Award For Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Retailer and a great store) and later that day they wrote us to ask if we would like to have DFS added to their Comic Book Daily website. As we always do, we thought hard, did lots of research and then made a snap decision. They will be running pages Tuesdays and Thursdays starting today until they catch up to our current page, and then Thursday thereafter.

One of the tings that makes us really happy about being part of Comic Book Daily is the company we will be keeping. One of the biggest influences on Jeff and I early on, showing us how you could make and share comics with the help of a simple photocopier, was Lethargic Comics. The driving force behind LC and it’s signature character Lethargic Lad is Greg Hyland. Greg’s history is a bit like ours, moving from mini-comics to eventually setting up shop on the web. In fact, LethargicLad.com is celebrating 10 years online this April. Knowing we’d be listed alongside Greg helped seal the deal for us.

So do yourself a favour, hop on over to Comic Book Daily, add it to your bookmarks/RSS or like me, just leave it open in a tab in your browser, (that’ll be 47 for me I think…) and not only will you get weekly comics, but some great insight and info about comics in general.

- Chris

Jeff and I weren’t really sure what to expect from the show. It had been a dozen years or more since we’d done a show, and this was a newish sort of show Wizard having taken over an existing show. Check-in was a breeze and then we went to find our table. (We had found our table number online, but the map was illegible. We could have tried consulting the map in the program once we were there, but it was pretty hard to read even when I did check.) First surprise was we had an entire table to ourselves, I had thought we were getting a half table. Maybe they took pity on us and decided two artists might need two chairs. We didn’t ask.

Next surprise was the name on the table beside ours. Leonard Kirk! We had done a lot of shows over the years and it always seemed we were sitting next to or across from Leonard. So 12 years later and once again, he’s right beside us. Not that that’s bad. It was great. He, and many others as the weekend went on, made it feel like no time had passed at all. Plus he was good company, put up with our shenanigans, was great to chat with and ended up doing an awesome sketch for me. Thanks Leonard. Should we be asking to be next to you at every con from now on, just to safe?

So we set up our table. And man, I’m glad we had the whole thing. Once we try and cram 12 issues of the mini run, the trades, postcards, magnets and a folder with the first dozen pages of the new web based story, there was little space left for us to draw on. Poor Jeff was trying to crank out a bunch of little giveaway sketches and had very little room to work. Having that much material is both a blessing and a curse. We’re looking forward to having all the old stories collected so we only have the two trades to display.

Another item on the table was the analogue Guargum updater. (A ceramic tile version of the random sillyness of our Twitter feed.) As the day went on, we would update both online and right there at our table. Fun when we’d post a random comment someone said and then they’d wander over and see it. We’ll likely continue to bring this to cons. And we might even do custom ones if people are interested.

So then we settled in to our quite comfy chairs and waited for the hoards. Okay, a Friday, of a newish show, in the afternoon, admittedly, there were no hoards. But as the day went on, more people arrived and we began to chat with folks, make jokes, explain what DFS was all about and generally have a good time.

I should give a shout out here to the Volunteers at the show. If there’s one thing they did very well, it was the volunteers. They were easy to spot, if a bit blinding in their neon shirts. The circled regularly and checked in to see if you need anything like water, a pee break, a pizza retrieved from a delivery person, someone killed, it was really nice. (Never did get my ribs…) Special mention to our favourite Volunteer Alex. I was also impressed when the con organizer made a point of stopping to check in with every person. It’s a small thing, but again, a nice touch. Hello to assistant Heather (Droopy).

The other noteable person of Friday was Alice of TDot Comics. She was very friendly and chatted with us for quite a while. She even ended up capturing us on film, but that was on Saturday and is a whole crazy thing of it’s own.

Eventually eight o’clock rolled around and we packed it up for the night. It hadn’t been a busy day, but fun at least. And the next day was the longest and likely to be the busiest, so we headed out and only stayed up to watch half of the New Moon Rifftrax.

Everything old is new again.

There’s a full look back at the past three days to come, but first we need a day to recover. Simply stated, we had a fun time and it was both all new and like we’d never left. Thanks to everybody who stopped by to visit with us.

So over the holidays I suffered a catastrophic sudden death of my flash drive that took all the original colour files for the first 20 pages as well as a bunch of supporting files, the teaser pictures and assorted random images. The dead key has gone off to a Data Recovery house in the hopes of saving the files, but in the event that it is either impossible or cost prohibitive, that work will have to be re-done.

To re-do all that work, I’ve been looking into getting some help. The first applicant is my son. His try out sample is above. While he does work faster than I do, his focus is off and I’m not sure DFS is ready for such an avant garde approach. Maybe if we get Ralph Steadman to draw a few pages…

So while I wait for news, and my kid works on his technique, you can begin making donations to the data recovery fund at dummyoughtaknowbetter@egestacomics.com.

The good news is the web files were saved separately and we’ll have the next page for you on Wednesday as normal.

-Chris

The end of 2009 saw us begin the first new DFS story in over 15 years. Wow. We’re back telling the crazy tales of Alex and Walter and the odd people and places they encounter. And it’s already been great. We’re starting to re-connect with people we haven’t seen or heard from in years. And we no longer have to think of ourselves as those guys who used to do this comic way back when.

And we’ve been at it less than a month.

2010 is full of potential. A return to doing conventions, meeting old and all new fans. Becoming a part of the new comic wave, we were there for the black and white, self publishing movement in the 90’s and now the webcomic world, where anybody can find and read your work without leaving their toilet chair. And we haven’t even started on some of the fun and silly stuff we’ve talked about doing.

Oh yeah, and did I mention the new DFS story?

-Chris

So here we are at the end of another year, one that saw us finally get back to telling comic book stories with our characters Alex and Walter.  We’ve attempted on numerous occasions to pick up our series Dressed for Success but 2009 was the year that the ball started rolling again.

It has been fun getting to flex those familiar creative muscles once more and set our characters on a new path of silly adventures.  It has also been enlightening to be presenting it in an entirely new format, that of the online webcomic.

While 2009 was a time for us to get our feet wet with publishing a weekly online comic series, 2010 will be a full year of possibilities and I look forward to seeing where it leads us as well as Alex and Walter.

-Jeff

On the internet, colour is free. So when it came time to start the new DFS online, we of course decided it would be in colour. And Jeff was already doing the art, so it fell to me to do the colouring. I’d done a few things way back when for posters, swag and such, but we’d never actually done pages in colour. And I worked with traditional stuff like markers, pencil crayon or watercolours. The only digital colouring we’d done was for the previous website, and that was mostly just figures.

What I’ve learned so far is that there’s a lot of decisions to be made when colouring, and I had no basis for them, except what seemed okay to me.

One of the most difficult decisions was how to handle the eyes of Mississauga Jay’s sister Celeste. Jeff had drawn her with empty ovals for eyes with an indication of eyelashes. Eyes were kind of a new thing, Alex and Walter are always wearing glasses, and most of our other characters had done so also, kind of a little oddity of the DFS’verse.

My initial inclination was to just fill them with white. I did up a page or two that way, but Jeff wasn’t so sure that worked, so I tried some other options.

What’s funny is that in the end, the all white still seemed best. But I saved the others, to share. Okay I saved the others cause I thought the Lynn Johnston eyes were funny, sue me.

- Chris