The Ottawa Come-on-buddy Con

Gaining public attention and interest, aka effective promotion, is an area in publishing that I’m a little more familiar with than this collaboration thing that graphic novels entail. While I cannot tell you what will get your book flying off the shelf I can tell you about expensive mistakes. Just not at this moment and on this blog. This blog is strictly dedicated the expensive mistakes that I make solely with respect to graphic novels. So far there hasn’t been any. What can go wrong on journey when you’re still on your doorstep?

I mention promotion because Comic Cons would seem like a dandy place to get a comic before the general public and distributors. One might be tempted to think of it as a natural fit. When the promoters of the Montreal Comic Con brought the road show to Ottawa for the first time this May this would have seemed like a golden opportunity for local talent (I’m alluding to myself here) and those in the industry, like Ucreate. It was not.

Here’s a fun fact, while Ottawa and Montreal are on the same continent and even in the same country they are, actually, two distinctly separate places.  I have travelled internationally and at no time have I ever come across anyone confusing the two. (Admittedly this is because most people, internationally, couldn’t find Canada on a map of the world and have never even heard of Ottawa. And by internationally I mean that this phenomenon starts in upper state New York and goes from there.) Well, the folks running the Ottawa Comic Con did just that. They must’ve had it in their heads that Montreal and Ottawa were the same place.

This would explain, at least to me, why they didn’t make much of an effort to contact industry locals. After all, why contact everyone when you already did in Montreal? Or, conspiracy alert, maybe they didn’t even do that. Maybe they just blew into town in Montreal too. Maybe it’s not a friendly Comic Con at all, maybe it’s invasive. Just strutting in and rolling over the indigenous comic industry and pillaging our comic peoples of their comic buying loot and then skedaddling out of town before the dust has settled from their blitzkrieg. Or maybe, just maybe, they're aliens using the Comic Con to find converts and sympathizers to their master plan of total domination.

Whatever the reason my point is, as I mentioned above, when they came to Ottawa they didn’t feel a need to make much of an effort to contact anyone locally who might have wanted to participate. I only found out through a friend that it was happening at all and Ucreate found out through me.

As it stands I’m only pissed-off in principle but had we had something to promote (ie had we had the forethought to lock a graphic artist in the basement until they produced) I would have been fully vested in my pissed-offed-ness (that’s a real term… starting now)