Up In The Air, June 21

Typing this on the iPad, something I’ve not done in over a year, thanks to the Macbook Air I finally bought after months of trying to live the dream of tablet-oriented future. I’m too old, too set in my ways to give up banging on a proper physical keyboard, and toting and iPad and a bluetooth keyboard to recreate an actual laptop seems a bit silly, especially as it’s only about a tenth as good for porn.

I’m in the air, heading towards Heroescon in Charlotte, NC, an event generally considered to be the most creator-friendly comics show going. I first attended last year and was immediately smitten; the crowd makes you feel welcome and the hotel bar is old home week, a place where you get to rub the proverbial elbows and chat up your fellow funnybook types. I’m a bit out of my depth, frankly, but comics folks recognize one another’s collective insecurity and you have to work fairly hard at assholery to not feel welcomed.

Ming Doyle – she of The Loneliest Astronauts and Boldly Gone – and her partner Neil Cicierega are a few rows behind me. Next to them is Erica Henderson, an artist whose smooth line and quality of character on the page makes me wonder why she’s not drawing a top-tier title for Marvel or DC. Neil’s going to have a few products related to his insanely-popular Potter Puppet Pals project as well as some flash drives filled with his music.

Ming’s busy in a way very few seem to appreciate, wrapping up her second YA graphic novel for Candlewick, getting ready to launch Mara with Brian Wood and working on other forthcoming projects that I’m not sure have or haven’t been announced yet, so I’m keeping relatively schtumm on those matters. She amazes me and I’m very lucky to have such a dynamo in my presence. She keeps me on my toes.

(For the record, this is nothing I’ll ever tell her directly. I trust she has a Google alert set up. And yes, we’re going to do a The Loneliest Astronauts collection. We just need to arrange things.)

Of course, I’ll be manning a table at Heroes with The Rack‘s Benjamin Birdie and recently-anointed Agreeable Comics associate editor Robin Kimball. I figured if I was going to pay for my friend to sit at our table, I should at least give her the courtesy of a proper title.

This is nice. I rarely get to write for the sake of writing anymore. On top of the nonstop Agreeable Comics I’ve a secret creator-owned project that you’ll find out more about in early July, working with a fantastic artist by the name of Grace Allison and old associate Josh Krach doing the lettering. It’s part of the first wave from a venture that I think is going to change a lot of things about comics and I am excited in a way that is difficult to quantify for someone as cynical by the comics “scene” as they come.

Did you guys know that they now have powdered lemon on airplanes? I’d never seen the stuff before and it’s managed to turn this seltzer into some weird Crystal Light Lemonade kind of thing, sans sweetness. It’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t seem out of place in A Clockwork Orange.

We’re on the descent now, so I’ve been told to knock it off with the typing. So knock it off, I shall. Let’s see if I can upload this in a timely fashion.