patokon blog

[Note: Check This $#!% Out was originally a seperate blog but is now a feature of patokon blog ] Since my kindergarten class where we had a guest teacher with a monkey puppet that spoke only French, I've been interested in the French language. My interest never went as deep as my interest in Asian languages, but deep enough that I have several dozens of books in or about French. My first French movie exposure was the stylish thriller DIVA . The opening opera scene still gives me goosebumps just due to the amazing singing of Wilhelminia Wiggins Fernandez . It would be another few years before I got to see Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita . A few years after that I saw the fantastic comedic horror (or horrific comedy)  Delicatessen , and the classic slapstick spy comedy, The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe .   I really enjoyed these two genres of French film, the comedy and the action thriller and always looked forward to finding new works by these actors and direct...

 I'm home from Tokyo Big Sight and my feet are set on "hurt like hell", but I had an amazing time. I got to meet some greats, sold a good number of books, promoted the Hexenringe webcomic (http://hexenringe.blogspot.com, still promoting :c) ), made some contacts, and picked up some great books! This was the chaos that was the "patokon" booth.  Jim R. really helped out with the boothing and stuff.  Tomoko Hirabayashi, the artist of Hexenringe, and I gave out sketches to people who purchased the Preview Book    Her sketches are the really tight ones. I sold out of the American Comic Sound Effect Dictionary again (woohoo!) and the preview book did really well, but the Zombie Alphabet book didn't do great. It could have been the price and the fact that there's no Japanese (or maybe the art, but I don't wanna go there).  After the event, there was an After-Party and I got to talk to two of my favorite Euro comic artists - Guarnido (Blacksad) and dePins ( ...