ECCC Report

Welcome back to the Weekly Updave! And welcome to the very first time for some new readers we got at Emerald City Comic Con this past weekend. As you can from the title here, this first portion is going to be about my experience at Emerald City Comic Con. Overall? What a fantastic time I had. A great experience.

What was so great about it? To start…the travel. The plane from the Burbank Airport to Seattle was just about a two-hour ride, and our plane was not full, there was an empty seat next to me and it was heavenly. Then I easily got off the plane and got on the wonderful train that runs through Seattle which quickly got me to my destination. I live in LA so riding a city train that’s so nice and vital was a nice change of pace!

As soon as I got to my hotel I could tell most of the people there were there for the convention, and excited about it. Even some of the people who worked at the hotel were going to be attending.

I got to the show on Friday and was greeted by my friend and the guy who was kind enough to offer me a spot at his Artist Alley table, the great Chris Robinson, and we had an awesome weekend. Anytime you can spend three days with someone and you’re having good conversations and laughing, you know you’re having a good time, but then you add on to that that you are helping promote each other’s comics, talking about your plans for the future in comics, and just taking in how great the convention is? It’s on another level. I thanked Chris before, during, and after the show, but I’m thanking him again here. It was easy to be at the table all weekend with a teammate like Chris.

Also our table neighbor was the legendary Darick Robertson. Artist and co-creator of The Boys and Transmetropolitan, amongst a career of other sterling credits. I knew Darick from working with him on an incarnation of Legends of Dark Knight where he wrote and drew the opening story, and he was an absolute delight to work with. He was even more of a delight to be table neighbors with. He greeted Chris and I with so much warmth as soon as he arrived, and he couldn’t have been nicer to us all weekend. And he was BUSY. Signing books, signing Funko pop boxes, doing remarques, doing commissions, drawing on sketch covers, and taking pictures with people. It was a big treat to see every hour a new queue of ten to twenty people come to Darick’s table with so many comics, especially the ones he co-created. It reinforced two of my biggest comic book-making goals: have a prolific career and create some new things that matter to people. It was inspiring.

A lot of folks who I had worked with over the years or met online came up to the table and said hello, that was a treat, too. I saw a lot of people after the show at dinners and hotel bars, a wonderful group of creators. It’s still new for me to be in environments like that where I’m a writer and creator first, and I felt really welcomed by everybody. People I had worked with in the past as their editor were happy to reminisce about war stories with me, but they primarily asked me about how the writing was going, which was cool. Hopefully, I also made connections with people I’m going to collaborate with in the future, that’s always a dream.

The biggest thing, as I alluded to earlier, Chris and I had a very busy table all weekend. We both sold and signed a lot of comics. And we took turns helping each other sell our comics. When he sold something I was happy, when I sold something he was happy, and the occasions where people bought stuff from both of us? A raucous celebration was had. Again…it felt good to have a teammate and to be present for another person. In environments like a convention, it’s easy to get needy and have times where you’re like “Oh…when will someone come up and pay attention to me.” But when you’re being present with somebody, and hoping for their success as well, that neediness fades. That was also a good lesson.

A few people even came up to me with books I had worked on before to sign. I will be vulnerable and say I wish it was more, but that was just a reminder to me that I need to be promoting myself more, and that my career is still growing. As I achieve more credits, do more press, and am on these convention websites, more people will find my work. Also not for nothing, it’s good to have to sell the stuff you have done before. You become an expert about your work and you think of things you could do better next time for future projects. And you think of the projects you would like to have at your table for the next convention.

I think I will do Emerald City Comic Con again next year. I am going to try to do LA Comic Con again in the Fall, registration for that is soon and I am keeping my eyes peeled. And if the opportunity comes up I will do one more show in between. Doing conventions is awesome. It’s good for my career. It’s good for my spirit. And it’s good to get out of the house and meet new people.

Did going to the convention also teach me that conventions definitely impact your schedule for the whole week afterward as a freelancer? Why yes, it did. But more on that later.

Mutant Nation #6 Update

Two weeks ago I mentioned that I wrote the back-up story for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Nation #6 which is out on May 14th, 2025, and FOC’s on April 7th, 2025. The story follows the character of Lita who once upon a time was a mutant albino turtle girl, and towards the end of the previous Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles run she was cruelly turned back into a human. Lita loved being a mutant, and for the past year she’s had to live in Northampton, Massachusetts, on the farm that belongs to April O’Neil’s parents. Lita is frustrated, she wants to know where her mutant family is, specifically her Aunt Jennika who she feels has been ignoring her.

Having grown up with Northampton, Massachusetts being such a significant part of my life and my family’s history? What a huge honor. On top of just getting to play in the TMNT world again. I think you guys are going to love the story. It’s a great story about how hard it is to grow up, the unforeseen changes that come as you get older, and how to love people even when they’re not with you.

The coolest thing about it? Vitor Cafaggi, a brilliant artist, brought the story to life and collaborated with me on it. If you’re unfamiliar with Vitor…that won’t last very long once this story is released. I think Vitor is going to be a star, and someone I already want to work with again. You can see the variant cover they did for the issue above, it’s gorgeous. But this week…AIPT Comics released a page of inks that Vitor did for the story and the design for the mutant we created for the story Otto. Take a look below at both. Or go read this week’s TMNT Tuesday at AIPT.

Isn’t that page of inks something else?

And that design…man…Vitor killed that. Who is Otto? Well, he’s a new mutant we created for the story and someone Lita is going to share her struggles about being in Northampton with. He’s also a goose mutant and he’s into really cool music. I think you will dig him quite a bit. AGAIN. We FOC on April 7th, 2025. So go to your LCS and order a copy. You can get the great Main Cover by Fero Pe OR Vitor’s variant cover, Cover B. I believe there is also an RI cover by Omar Francia. You can also always get all three covers and go over the top showing your support.

A Brief Story About Being Old

Chris and I had several younger people come up to our Artist Alley table and ask us for creative advice. The people knew we were currently comic writers and had both been comic editors, so we must know a little something. And to tell you the truth, I like talking to people about being creative, and I like trying to help people be creative. It’s why I was an editor for so long, and it’s one reason why I do these Newsletter posts. I have a dream that as my career grows and my audience grows, this Newsletter will have A LOT of subscribers, and people will be thrilled with this backlog of material. On with the story…

A young person came up to us and said they wanted to be a comic book artist but they feared it was too late for them. So naturally we asked how old the person was and they said they were seventeen years old.

Hold back any laughter and hold back any eye rolls and go back to any time in your life after you were a pre-teen. You were always feeling anxious, dread was a very regular thing, and it’s always easy to tell yourself that the thing you want to do is out of your reach and too hard to do. Chris and I did tell the young person they had plenty of time to put their head down and do the work if they wanted to be a comic book artist, but I also shared my story.

I left my very good job when I was thirty years old to pursue my dream of writing comics for a living. I prepared to do it for a long time, but it was still a risk and a leap. And now people are laughing and eye-rolling at me because thirty is young too. And that’s true but also…I was watching a lot of my peers succeed and be confident in their careers, get married, start families, all things I want too, and I knew it might be easier to have some of those things if I just kept my steady job…but…I realized I probably wasn’t going to be the person my soulmate wanted to marry, or the dad my imaginary kids needed unless I settled this dream first. Succeed or fail, I needed to give it my all. And that was scary. But I did it, and I’m proud. And there’s a lot of room for me to still fail, but almost three years into doing this…I’m not just okay, I’m good. I’m working a lot more regularly, the jobs I’m doing are getting bigger, and I am becoming a better writer because I am writing more regularly and having my work published. But I had to leap for that to happen.

Seventeen isn’t too old. Thirty isn’t too old. You’re not too old. Do the things you want to do. Be the person you want to be. There are going to be obstacles and complications that are going to come with that. I don’t want to act as if I have not been privileged in my life or my career, but I know how scary it feels to Frogger across the scary highway of life to try to get to where you want to be.

That’s it for this week, team. We will be back next week with a new awesome post.

First, an update! We recovered the few subscribers we lost recently, and we have gained a few more. So, the dream of hitting my goal number of subscribers for this year is still alive! If you like this Newsletter, you like my work, or you just like me (which is awesome), please share this Newsletter with others. Whether that’s sharing the new posts on social media and/or recommending people subscribe. It all helps. This newsletter is free; it will continue to be that way for the foreseeable future, but I would like to get it in front of more eyeballs.

Stay safe!

—Dave Wielgosz