MEETING COMICS

ZINE MACHINE

Hey, folks! When last we spoke, I was getting ready to exhibit at Zine Machine in Durham, one of my favorite shows.

Tables at Zine Machine are eight feet wide, and this year I decided to take full advantage of the space. I tried a new way of displaying original art - in trays rather than in portfolios - and more people flipped through the art since it was more visible. I sold a few pieces as well. Hopefully I’ll be able to work out how to do the same thing on standard 6 foot tables!

Sales were OK. I’ve had better years in the past at Zine Machine. Shows tend to go up and down for me. Plus a lot of people are broke right now! Also, I had issues accepting credit cards. At shows, I take cash, venmo, and credit cards as payment. After trying to log into my paypal point of sale app on my phone for 15 minutes, I finally thought to check and see if paypal was down, and what do you know?

Even though paypal insisted it was operational, lots of people were reporting it was down, both at sites like downdetector (see screenshot above) and in comments on a reddit post. I lost $80 or so in sales because I couldn’t take a card, and the people in those cases didn’t have venmo or cash on hand. Que sera sera, shit happens, and so on!

Still, I had a good time and talked to a lot of people who I was very happy to see. Bill puts on a great show every year with Zine Machine and I’m always happy to participate.

NEW RAZORCAKE REVIEW

There’s a new review in Razorcake #149 for NO RACCOONS IN HELL, and I’m pretty happy with it:

Thanks, Rick V!

That’s it for right now. I’m still pretty confident I’ll be back on the comic-making horse this month, though it might be another week or two. I’m almost there!

Thanks for reading!
Andrew Neal