92615_RAA_LooseCannon_Text_R1_PROOF

I have to make my own. I’m fortunate enough to have clawed out a posi tion to be able to get a bunch of my talented pals together and get them to make comics, too. I just get out of their way and let them do the work they want to do. No editorial interference, no toeing of the corporate line. Just good, old fashioned comics, straight from their minds to yours. Nearly a direct interface of funny-book goodness. Now, one of the necessary evils of this sort of thing is that a whole bunch of pins have to fall into place in-between Brian Wood thinking, "Y’know, I wouldn’t mind doing a comic book about a girl named Olive and a bunch of young Turks on scooters and the Mediterranean fast-food turf-war that results" and having a printed copy of CousCous Express (AUG011709 in your Diamond Previews) in your snug little paws.

And one of those things is getting the word out. And the best place to get the word out is at San Diego.

I’ll admit, I don’t really like comic book conventions all that much. I sit in my office most of the year and write comic book scripts and wrangle artists and do pre-press on graphic novels and co-ordinate shipping and talk on the phone and if I’m lucky I might see two or three people a day besides the missus and the FedEx guy.

So I’m more constitutionally set up to interact with a few folks at a time, really.

But there’s a monkey in the wrench one of my old girlfriends used to call the "Dichotomy of Lar," in that I’m most comfortable interacting with peo ple on a one-to-one basis…

…but I’m really very good at mass-marketing and promotions.

That’s what the college boys call "ironic."

So we had the corner booth set up at San Diego, with a whole bunch of folks helping us out. Steven Grant wrote a few pages of Whisper: Day X there, for artist Aman Chaudhary, who was signing copies of Double Image #5, as was Joe Casey, and Charlie Adlard, whom I only see once a year, was there as well, and we talked about our shared, secret love for Commander Straker’s secretary, Miss Ealand, in an obscure English TV show from the Sixties… John Francis Moore, with whom we are in negotiations to release an origi nal graphic novel, came by and showed us pictures of his young son, Josh. John was impressed with editor Mimi Rosenheim’s marketing savvy; so much so, in fact, he said: "Mimi must have been a medicine show barker

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