Back when I lived in Fukuoka, Japan, a girlfriend showed me a flier for a waxing place that used the  above logo. The concept and execution are so wonderfully bizarre; the ugliness of the monkey, the little red bow, its proud display of its freshly waxed, hairless armpits…

I saved the flier for a while, but somehow it got lost in the shuffle. Years later when I started this blog, I wanted to share the logo with my readership, but I couldn’t remember the name of the waxing place, and a google search of “Japanese monkey hair removal logo” unsurprisingly failed to bring up anything meaningful.

Just yesterday I randomly ran into it again as a part of this collection of Japanese trademarked characters. That entry also links to an extensive database of Japanese trademarks; it’s incredibly user-unfriendly, but still pretty interesting. It can be found here.

Minneapolis Indie Xpo will be held in a little less than two weeks, on Saturday, August 21, 2010. 

They have tons of great-looking programming, and I’ll have a table there. Admission is free, so if you’re in the Twin Cities area, check it out!

Minneapolis Indie Xpo 2010 Details
Place:  The Soap Factory, 518 Southeast 2nd Street, Minneapolis, MN 55458
Date/Time: Saturday August 21, 2010 9AM to 5PM
Admission: FREE!

Further information can be found here:
http://mplsindiexpo.com/

This week’s City Pages, the free weekly newspaper here in the Twin Cities, has in a comic by me in it, as a part of their annual comics issue. In addition to my humble contribution, here’s a lot of great comics by a bunch of other Minnesota cartoonists, so if you live in the area, pick a copy up!

For those who don’t live in the cities (or those who just can’t wait to see it), it’s also available online at the City Pages website:

City Pages Comics Homepage
Direct Link to My Comic

Just one last reminder to Twin Cities residents that I’ll be at the Minneapolis Indie Xpo this Saturday, August 21, 2010.

At my table I’ll be signing brand-new, first edition copies of my graphic novel Tonoharu: Part One for a special convention price of $15; that’s 25% off the cover price (cheaper than Amazon.com)! Also available will be Young Men of a Certain Mind, a comic I did just prior to Tonoharu which is not available in stores.

I’ll also have some original art to look at, and a preview of Tonoharu: Part Two. So stop on by!

Admission to the event is free, and they have tons of great-looking programming, so if you’re in the Twin Cities area, check it out!

Minneapolis Indie Xpo 2010 Details
Place:  The Soap Factory, 518 Southeast 2nd Street, Minneapolis, MN 55458
Date/Time: Saturday August 21, 2010 9AM to 5PM
Admission: FREE!

Further information can be found here:
http://mplsindiexpo.com/

(Note: I’ll blog a recap of MIX, so my usual Friday entry will be a couple days late.)

POST-EVENT UPDATE: The show was really great! I was planning on writing a full update on Sunday or yesterday, but the show just wiped me out, so I think I’ll wait until this coming Friday after all… Thanks to all who attended!

Pictured: My sparse, ratty little table

Last Saturday I had a table at the inaugural Minneapolis Indie Xpo.

MIX is only the second convention I’ve ever sold my work at, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But I wasn’t expecting much. My first convention (SpringCon 2010) was an interesting experience, but also quite humbling. Attendees showed little interest in my work, and my sales were in the low single digits.

Since I was lugging books to MIX in my backpack, I didn’t want to bring more than I needed. So I brought eight copies of Tonoharu: Part One and about a dozen copies of Young Men of a Certain Mind. That was 2-3 times as many as I sold at SpringCon, so I figured that’d be enough.

I’m delighted to say that sales were much better than at SpringCon; I sold out of Tonoharu a couple hours before MIX ended, and only had a couple copies of YMCM at the end of the night.

Granted, I was selling Tonoharu at a discount; 25% off the cover price. But I also think that the venue was a much better fit for my work. SpringCon is more about mainstream comics, and sort of has a flea market feel to it. Not the best place to try to sell artsy, hardcover graphic novels.

This is why I’ve decided my next convention appearance will be the Twin Cities Book Festival, instead of FallCon (they fall on the same day, so I can’t go to both). Guess we’ll see how it goes!

Oh, one more note: MIX was just awesome. If you didn’t go this year, I strongly recommend you check it out next year. I was damned impressed with the whole thing. Thanks to organizers Andy Krueger and Sarah Morean for putting together such a great show!

Tonoharu: Part One was just written up on Boing Boing, one of the world’s most popular blogs! Oh boy!

The post can be found here. (A word of warning though; the writeup has a fairly big spoiler about Tonoharu: Part Two.)

Many thanks to Boing Boing editor Mark Frauenfelder for the coverage!

***

Oh, and if you’re a new reader who came to this site because of the Boing Boing coverage, here’s a few things you might enjoy:

Posts about Tonoharu
Posts about the making of the book, etc.

Miscellaneous amusing posts
Most of which are Japan-related

Web comics by me
Not many of them, but do check them out.

Thanks!

Thanks to Mark Frauenfelder’s writeup about Tonoharu: Part One on Boing Boing, the book has made it into Amazon.com’s Top Ten Bestselling Graphic Novels today! Cool!

Amazon updates their top ten lists every hour, so if you’re reading this much later than 4:39pm Central on Friday August 27th, it might have slipped off the list (or gone up higher, who knows).

But for one shining moment, my book was selling better than Watchmen and three of the six Scott Pilgrim graphic novels. They can never take that away from me. ;-)

Buy Tonoharu: Part One from Amazon.com or
Buy Tonoharu: Part One directly from me