Say It Ain't So (Update)
Consistent? Us? What are we NETFLIX?!?!?
It’s us. It’s me, I mean. A week ago, Mason and I went to the fabled DreamCon’25. We hopped in a plane heading for dreams, riches, and friendships with nothing but comics on our backs and money on our minds. We landed at our Airbnb and planned it all out! We separated two clear bags, put all our books in them, put our sign in them, and then went to bed, waiting for the first day of Dream Convention!
The sun rose. Say it ain’t so, it’s the first day of Dream Con! As I dressed, Mason was in the kitchen, packing to ensure we were ready. We said a quick prayer for good luck and stepped out the door into the rain. Like tons of rain. We didn’t care, though, we trudged through the rain, catching the train to the George R Brown Convention Center with the idea that once we touched the floor, we’ll sell books off the handle…Then we hit a line. No worries though, we were shooting the shit with people in the line letting them know about the comics and stuff. We learned about people’s favorite characters, anime, and things of that nature until we finally hit the doors. It was time for us to make a million dollars. We stepped into the automatic doors and ended up selling… nothing. Well, we sold a little bit. But not nearly enough for the overall cost of getting there. Just enough for the tickets. It would be highly ungrateful to say it was a complete disaster, but to say we hit ANY goal we went out there to hit would be a complete lie.
The entire weekend was a mixed bag. So much so, I don’t wanna talk too much about it. But I will talk about something interesting: I sold two books to some cool guys, got some conversations in, and Mason did laps around the convention, peeping all the events. But really, nothing happened. That’s until we met up with Carl Jones. If you don’t know, he’s pretty popular for working on The Boondocks. You wouldn’t know his face, but you’d know his voice. After hours of selling nothing, we decided to hit up his panel, advertising Martian Blueberry, his and his wife’s animation studio. It was cool. But that’s when we decided afterwards, we were gonna double back and meet them. I can safely say that talking to them puts a battery in our backs. They were great. But I really appreciated that he listened to me pitch Just A Reaper. After years of selling comics to different industry folks in person or otherwise, it was nice for someone to listen to us and not wave us off like we were some bum ass niggas. He even took a comic. Even after selling nothing all day and having to run into multiple people genuinely be disinterested in your art, or hit you with the “Nah I’ll support” and never hit you back. Do we want to get the chance to get published, or a TV deal, or something? Of course, most of all, in an industry like this one, where folks don’t give a fuck about you for one reason or another, we appreciated the fact dude was respectful. It’s scarce, I can say that from experience. Shout out to those boys at Martian Blueberry!
Anyway, despite the weekend being a bust, except for something cool like meeting the people behind Martian Blueberry, I did want to say that DreamCon was a great event. No matter what someone says about it, I can say it has so much growth potential after physically being there. I appreciate that something like this exists so Mason and I can show our stuff off even if we don’t get what we want. It was a blessing!
With all that being said let’s get into the shit: VOLUME 1 IS OUT AND ABOUT! BUY IT ON AMAZON!!!! We have a second volume written, I’m doing some rewrites on it, but we’re gonna give a little while before we start on it officially, because we want some other stuff to fester and grow first (gotta water the seeds before they grow type shit). But I did want y’all to know there is more Just A Reaper stuff coming. Here’s a screenshot of the script title page.
Look at that? Fun right?! We’re also working on book 2 of Let’s Go Metal Hero, which is going to be amazing as well. Mason is working on Purgatory Academy book three and a chimera island novella, which you can see all of those on HIS Substack. I want to thank YOU, the reader. We don’t have a lot of views or anything, and we don’t make money off this, but every time someone reads our book, they say, “Cool.” It makes me very happy, and I want to continue creating. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! I’ll try to update this as often as possible, but obviously I’m not good at that. So I guess I’ll see you guys when I see you guys. As I repeatedly said, writing the script for Just A Reaper volume 1 was a win. The rest of this? Meeting influential people, people taking pictures of the book to call their friends and family? Dapping up other creators and people just as hungry as us? Inspiring people who feel like they can’t even pick up a pen TO pick up the pen? It’s all a victory lap. I’d be ungrateful to say it was anything less.