Hey, everyone, I'm back!  Penguicon was great!  My next con is in two weeks in New Jersey, at WildPig with Randy Milholland (Something*Positive), Daniel Corsetto (Girls With Slingshots) and others!  Mark your calendars.

Check me out in my mini-booth, looking like I've just gotten up and eaten 30 bagels.  How do I find the time to both collect toys and eat so much?  Hmm.

The "Relationshipocalypse" storyline is over, and I hope everyone enjoyed it!  Lord, I love writing Amber and Mike like nothing else, and from the things people were telling me at Penguicon, I'm not alone in being enthralled by their twisted little romance.

Here's the way April 9th's comic originally ended.  I thought Amber'd been a little too naked recently at her expense, so I redrew the last panel at a different angle.  Also, I figgered it'd be funnier if we didn't actually see her and Mike in the act.  The mind can come up with way more compromising positions than my PG-13(ish) strip is allowed to portray, so...

Plus I got that extra little punchline!

Two advance copies of Shortpacked! Book 3 (preorder it now!) arrived via FedEx this morning for me.  Like, they were sent from Hong Kong yesterday, and now they're here.  I know we have, y'know, jet planes and what have you, but that still seems magically fast.

The books are beautiful, as always!

I'm told that the rest of the books are going on the boat next week and they'll arrive over here near the first week of June.  ... and if you recall my history, they'll spend the next 2-3 weeks in customs.  It's going to happen.  Let's just resign ourselves to the inevitable.

This morning I'm on the road at 8am to get my ass to Troy, Michigan, by noon.  Penguicon is this weekend, and I'll be at Howard Tayler's table.  Look for the two guys in brightly-colored Hawaiian shirts.  One, a successful breadwinner.  The other, an awkward manchild.  Randy Millholland (Something*Positive) will also be there, and he's written a very informative comic strip about it.

I'm determined to get two books out this year.  Shortpacked! Book 3 is the preorder everyone should be familiar with by now, but Roomies! Book 2 better be out by the end of this year, too!  It's faaarr too soon to solicit it, since SP!B3 is still in production, but not too soon to finish putting it together.  An idea for the cover hit me last night, and no sooner than this afternoon I had it completed to my satisfaction.

Take it in.

Also, I was sorely in need of some freebies to hand out at C2E2, so I designed and ordered some double-sided bookmarks.  There's a strip on each side - my recent Skeletor/Luthor team-up strip for ToyNewsI seemed suitable, and of course you gotta have Batman DDR on there, so I cropped it down into the requisite number of panels to fit.  I'll be handing these out at Penguicon this weekend.  A huge purpose of convention-attending I've been neglecting is the romancing of new readers.  This'll help me fix that.  (If you're already a reader, you're still, of course, allowed to grab one.)

Since the new site went live, one of its most awesome features is the ability to order prints of individual strips simply by clicking the $ icon below each strip.  Ha ha ha, so obviously the first one that got bought was Mike's freaky smile creep show.  This is great, because I had to take this file into the print shop and have them give me strange looks as it comes up on the screen and again out of the printer.  How much is my dignity worth?  Apparently $10 and shipping.

There's been a dearth of toy talk from me recently, but only because I gots no new toys to talk about!  It's a very dead period for me, apparently.  There's gonna be some new Transformers soon, right?  Some G.I. Joes?  Oh, lord, please, yes.

Just because I'm not gabbing about toys doesn't mean I'm not keeping myself busy.  This weekend I'm going up to Troy, Michigan, for Penguicon.  Really, I'm just helping out Howard Tayler (Schlock Mercenary) and his wife at their table.  They're Distinguished Guests at the convention, and so they both have panels they gotta be on, and thus need a dude to hold down the fort.  In exchange for helping them out, I get a corner to do my thing.

It's been a while since Howard and I have tangoed, so I'm looking forward to it.  There's the usual ice-breaking "your mom" joke, followed by the usual "my mother is already passed away" retort, followed by my usual awkward silence...

Why does Howard tolerate me again?

Also, I'll get to see my favorite highway signage in all the land, Big Beaver Road, Exit 69.  Oh, how I've missed you.