saturday

trade

I manned the Kestrel IMC/JKF-DDC booth over at the F3 Filipino Franchise Show along with my brother Ricky. It's good show, and it was kind of neat to be near a number of our clients so that when interested parties ask what we've done, we can just point to clients left and right.

The big hit was our design for a food client's cart, which we jazzed up to look like a Filipino jeepney, complete with wheel, colorful stickers and headlights. It's funny, but my eye has become so critical that I shudder when I look at the designs of everyone else. A brand plus its expressions and peripherals needs to be attractive to the eye as well as functional.

I also made friends with a family of architects a couple of booths down from Kestrel. It turns out that the three brothers (an architect, an interior designer and a landscaper) are into comics. When I got there to say "hello", they whipped out a copy of Siglo:Freedom and asked me to sign it. And so we chatted for a while about their own plans to enter the heartbreaking realm of self-publishing.

Franchising looks very attractive to me. I just wish I had idle cash to invest in one of the brands there. Imagine revenue streams from three sources: the franchise fee, the royalties and the supply side. Someday.

It's a three-day show (and I'll be on my way right after I post this) and I've already run out of business cards.

I just hope that we drum up new business.

free comics!

Thanks to my best bud Vin, we were able to get tons of free comics in celebration of Free Comics Day. This is the 2nd year this has occured, and the point is to encourage people to try out different comics and increase sales.

It certainly works for me and Nikki because we want to order some of the stuff we sampled.

One of the highlights is Elbert's anthology, which was, on the whole, an enjoyable read (though I felt my story was out of place). It was great seeing Arnold's work again (we missed him at Siglo:Passion) and Cynthia's first comic pages. Tobie's one pager and Andrew's Supersona were well-executed as well. What didn't work were the various self-aware bits of claptrap that try too hard to emulate the indie work of various creators.

More on the others after I digest all the stuff. It's more than I can gnaw on in a couple of hours.

food, glorious food

We went off to Dampa Sa Libis for another seafood feast - lobsters, prawns, tilapia and inihaw na baboy (not seafood but a culinary necessity). I wondered how ten stuffed people could possible fit into the vehicle but somehow we managed (Charles, despite being light as feather, still has mass).

Then off to listen to Split Point (a friend's band) at Double Deck, home of the cheapest beer in existence. Andrew and Carl got up to jam with the band and we all had fun watching Ralph turn analytically tipsy (asking about series vs. parallel connections).

It was too loud for one of our usual talk-until-morning gabfests, but once in a while it's good to just shut up and unwind, without having to do anything particularly clever.

lost story

I woke up in the wee hours of the morning with the beginning of a great story - except that I was too sleepy to write so I put it off until I really woke up. Except that by the time I did wake up, I'd forgetten everything about it. Nothing remained, not even a single word or a glimpse of what the hell made it so enticing for me.

There is hope though. The last time this happened, the story came back to me in another dream a few days later. When that happened, I bolted out of bed and started writing, eventually finishing the first draft of what would be "Spark: The Sad & Strange Tale of Sister Maria Dolores, The Nun Who Exploded". It later won 1st prize in a contest.