My brother and I are going to PAX this weekend. This is my first year ever to attend so I’m incredibly excited. What makes me more excited is that I’m not exhibiting. I have nothing to sell. I’m just going to have fun. I think this is the first time since I was in my early twenties that I went to a convention just as a patron.

My brother has made one of his amazing 3D cakes to commemorate PAX 2008. I’m told it will be on display in the skyway for everyone to see. If you haven’t seen his cakes before, you have to check out his Flickr feed. We’re hoping that some of you video game companies out there will see these cakes and want to hire Brian to make something for your next launch party or corporate event.

The PAX cake he made is insane. We shipped part of it, and we’re bringing some of the gum-paste sculptures that make up this edible diorama with us as carry on luggage. Brian even called ahead to make sure we were allowed to bring sugar sculptures with us on a commercial flight. He called the TSA, that’s how serious he is about making sure everything on his cakes are edible.

I’ll be posting pictures and video blogs from the show, so stay tuned. If you’re attending and you’re a PvP fan look for us. Brian is 6′7″ and I’m 6′4″ so we shouldn’t be too hard to pick out from the crowd.

Welcoming our new sponsor Endicia.comleads to a discussion of the best ways to streamline your online store shipments. Then we hit the mailbag to answer questions about handing out flyers at events, and working on 2nd strips.

Endicia.com has been kind enough to sponsor our show this month. They’re offering a great deal for new customers looking to set up an online store for their webcomic. Endicia.com is easy for us to recommend because it’s what we use for our stores on a daily basis.

Be sure to check out www.endicia.com/webcomics for a special offer.

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I am a total nerd when it comes to discussions about how to write something funny. It’s such an intriguing puzzle, trying to come up with the best ways to write really awesome humor. I really feel like I’m horrible at it. I kind of fumble my way through. That’s why it was so great to have Kris Straub grace my studio for even a brief amount of time. He floors me in his ability to pull humor from the ether. When you stumble across someone who can really just brilliantly do something profoundly funny, and it knocks you off guard, it’s this wonderful moment of “man, why didn’t I think of that?”

Which is why I found the Norm MacDonald roast of Bob Saget so brilliant. You gotta watch this, and pay close attention to how the other comedians react. It takes a while for the audience to catch on, but the comedians get what he’s doing right away.

I get so excited about listening to people talk about how to write something funny. I wish there was more of it out there. I highly recommend the Patton Oswalt comedy-tour documentary “The Comedians of Comedy”, as well as “Comedian” with Jerry Seinfeld (just for the segment with Colin Quinn). The Aristocrats is also really great. My favorite is probably an episode of “This American Life” that lets us listen in on the writing staff of “The Onion.”

Anybody else know any good books or sources of this kind of behind the scenes stuff?

Full disclosure: Robert Kirkman is my friend. I consider him to be a close friend. So anything I say in his defense will and should be taken in this context.

Last week Robert posted a video editorial; a call to arms if you will. He offered his thoughts on how to bring more life into the comic book industry and possibly save it from a even downward spinning market. His idea was twofold:

1) Top creators at Marvel and DC should think seriously about their future after the market no longer considers them popular. They should start investing their creative energies into creator owned properties now before Marvel, DC and the market decide their time in the spotlight has passed. Graduate from a successful freelance career at the big two into creator owned work WHILE you’re hot.

2) Marvel and DC start making their comics more accessible with less continuity and event-oriented gimmicks in order to remain competitive with this new crop of creator-owned comics. New creators can step up and seize the opportunity to transform Spider-Man, Batman and Superman into books that are more viable for younger generations to get invested in.

This could lead to a reinvigorated comic book industry with new comics, new ideas, and more importantly…new readers. A lot of people are responding to this on comic book news sites and they’re taking Robert to task. Brian Michael Bendis had this to say:

“I understand that I am one of the very few people that can do creator owned work and do mainstream work and find some success creatively in both fields…but having experienced what I have through comics, and being a little older than Robert, I can look back and can say at this level of play that I’m at and Robert is at, to ignore the fact that part of your audience came from Marvel is a mistake I hope he doesn’t learn the bad way.”

I see lines being drawn here between freelancers and independent creators and it really frustrates me because I personally don’t see that as the issue at hand. The issue at hand is this: for the industry to survive, its creators have to be able to survive. The heart of this industry is making it a viable career choice for the creative men and women who fuel it. Personally, I’m not 100% sure that Marvel or DC are the best choices of a retirement plan.

When Mike Wieringo died, he was working for Marvel. He had one creator owned project under his belt and wished to return to that world. But he didn’t know how to make that transition without dipping into savings that he wanted to keep for a rainy day. But every time we talked, he would tell me how he wished he was doing what I was doing, and I would tell him that was crazy. He was drawing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. Who cares about my stupid cartoon. But Mike got it and he taught me that the real value of my work was that I owned it and steered my own ship.

For god’s sake, we start charitable organizations to provide for creators, giants in our industry, who have been abandoned by the market. Think about how it ended for Dave Cockrum. Bringing Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler to life did not provide for him in the end. Once you as a creator, have used up all of your draw and panache with the market at large, once you stop being the hot thing, Marvel and DC will cut you loose and forget about you forever. They will move on to the next hot creator and they won’t give two shits about how you make your next house payment.

Right now, the only real retirement plan that creators have are their own properties. In 20 or 30 years let’s compare how Mike Mignola and an equally popular company man without an established creator owned title are doing. I promise you the company man will be struggling and Mignola will be sitting pretty on Hellboy residuals.

Certainly, life as a freelancer for Marvel or DC can be a good and rewarding one. Obviously it’s possible to freelance and pay for your own insurance and plan for the future with savings. But how can advising creators to establish their own creator-owned properties NOW while they’re popular be consider bad or petty advice? How can anyone shit on that?

I think it’s a pretty solid sentiment.

Remember that whole “kerfuffle” that went down last week over my post about critics? You know, the one that ended with Johanna Draper Carlson describing blogging as “her craft” which sent me spinning around my studio like a whirling dervish? Yeah. We talk that whole thing to death on the latest episode of Webcomics Weekly.

Also on this show: Mister Rogers, the terror of Guy Smiley, which comes first: story-lines or gags, and marketing new strips to your existing audience.

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