Hellbound Slant 6 #5 singles are in the mail to backers, trade paperbacks are printing, and almost all of the hardback omnibus copies have gone out in the last few days. I’m coming off a weekend at Kingcon NW ‘23, and getting ready for the Grit City Comic Show in downtown Tacoma on Saturday November 11th. I’ll cover this and also wander into some darker territory at the end. Let’s dive in! 

I will be at the GRIT CITY COMIC SHOW in downtown Tacoma on Saturday November 11th, once again sharing a booth with my homies at the GRIT CITY PODCAST. I’m sure there will be post-con consumption shenanigans as per usual. Come see us at the con, maybe even have a beverage with us after! 

HELLBOUND SLANT 6 UPDATE!!! Single issue print copies of issue #5 arrived last Thursday! Thanks to Blue Sky Printing in Poulsbo, the books look fantastic! Most of them are in the mail, and folks who ordered a single copy of Hellbound Slant 6 #5 should be getting theirs in theirs within the next few days.

Hardback OMNIBUS copies showed up on Monday! Those have been going out over the last couple of days, and I see some folks have already received theirs. THEY ARE GORGEOUS. Seriously, I love them so much. I can’t wait for you to get them in your hands, and I know they’re going to look baller on your bookshelf! After approving the proof of the trade paperback last week, I’m sure those will be arriving shortly. I’m beyond elated that this series has finally reached its conclusion, and in such stellar fashion with all of these beautiful books. Thank you for riding along with Danielle and I on this journey through HELL! 

On to KINGCON NW 23! In 2021 Kingcon was at the Hyatt Regency Lake Washington. If you’ve been there, you know that it’s quite a fancy (to a working class rube like me) modern hotel. I got lost during load-in and ended up on the 12th floor because I hopped a service elevator with a couple of housekeepers. I then found I couldn’t get back to where I needed to be because the elevators were all badge activated. Eventually thanks to the aid of some kind-hearted housekeepers I arrived at the floor where the con was, and got my booth set up. The place is pretty amazing, in all honesty. It’s an immaculate venue, a super cool location, but the biggest drawback was that all of that sophistication came with a commensurate price tag. 

Fast forward to 2023 – I learned that Kingcon was at the Renton Pavilion Events Center in downtown Renton this year. Cool! I’m a big fan of money going to public employees and a local city/municipality instead of a global hotel corporation. The booth was super affordable, so I applied, was approved, and thrilled to host an Artist’s Alley booth at Kingcon 2023. For a sense of scale, there were 10 total Artist Alley booths at Kingcon NW ‘23. You can sort of gauge the size of the space by how frequently the cosplayers that walk the endless loop around the floor pass by your table. I had wonderful neighbors. Our booths were directly across from the con’s actor guests, so I got to watch Dan Southworth the Quantum Power Ranger give sparring lessons to a young man at the con. It reminded me a lot of my youthful time practicing the aggressive Tomiki-style Aikido, but could have just as easily been a Hapkido variant of some sort. Whatever it was – it was cool. After spending 10 or so minutes demonstrating technique with this kid (I call 30 year olds kids now, I’m that old FYI) , the lad turned and walked toward my booth, the biggest shit-eating grin ever on his face. He’d just received impromptu martial arts instruction from the goddamn QUANTUM RANGER. I was way into the martial arts stuff at his age, and I couldn’t help but smile at his expression of pure joy. These are the experiences that keep us coming back as creators and as fans. Kudos to Dan Southworth, and kudos to Kingcon NW. It was a great con.

I’ve never taken commissions at cons, but at Kingcon I decided to dabble. One patron in a chair asked if I had any He-Man art he could purchase as a gift for an 8 year old boy with special needs . I decided to whip up a sketch. Upon completion, the He-Man sketch wasn’t too embarrassing to share (a genuine possibility), so I gave it to him. He would have paid me had I asked, but it felt good to gift it. Since the first commission didn’t take more than 15 minutes, I decided to revisit a request I’d had the previous day for a She-Hulk drawing. I sketched my She-Hulk concept, cleaned it up, and called the patron over. I told him he was under no obligation to buy, but he bought it anyway. It was great! I came home and digitally inked and colored it. In the future I think I will offer quick commissions while at cons. It was a fun way to give folks what they want while also making a couple bucks. 

The con was great fun all around. Smaller scale meant more time to engage with patrons that like to chat about the craft, or about things they’re passionate about. Anyone that’s chatted with me at an event knows I’m a student of comics, storytelling, filmmaking, music, life, love, and I love to discuss any and all at-length with anyone willing to engage. Comic cons have always been a place where geeks, freaks, and weirdos can gather together to indulge in the free expression of who we are without the judgment of those that would keep people in strictly walled-off archaic definitions, then penalize those that fall into categories they deem less worthy. Fuck that. Come read comic books and let your freak flag fly. We welcome weirdos because we are weirdos.

If you came for fun con-stuff, it’s the end of that road. Kingcon NW was great, and I will happily return again. Now I’m going to segue into musings on societal concerns I observed while there.  

Driving through downtown Renton I passed a property where the six or so feet between the sidewalk and the building was covered with jagged rocks and boulders. The hardscaping was obviously a recent installation, the rocks were clean, free of moss, lichen, or weathering. The clear intent is to discourage people from sleeping, loitering, or relieving themselves there. I take it a step further, and many will disagree, but I perceive the intent is to cause human suffering. Or at the very least a desire to take away a place of refuge for the downtrodden by the elimination of a modicum of cover under the eaves of a structure. There be no shelter here. A church squats across the street with a mural painted on the side, quoting Jesus, “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your father in heaven.”

Something strikes me about the contrast. A property displaying the directed intentionality of denying respite to those most in need, adjacent a church whose central tenets instruct adherents to help the very same. I pass another church. This one doesn’t have a message from Jesus that I can see, so I substitute my own from memory. I paraphrase “Whatsoever you do unto the least of my brothers, you do unto me.” It reminds me that I can be judged by how I treat those who can do nothing for me. The lowest of the low. If no one else is judging me by that metric – I judge myself by it. 

The actor guests at the con were assigned “handlers” to sit at their booths with them, fetch them stuff, cover the booths while they went for bathroom breaks, meals, panels, etc. The actors are fed as a part of their pay for attending these cons. One of the actors gave their meal voucher to their handler. Their handler in turn gave it to me. Super cool! A free meal? At lunch time? And I was hungry? Hell to the yes! 

I walked out of the convention center. There’s something magical about the crisp late October air on a rainless day in Western WA. Maybe it’s the thinness of the veil between worlds as we approach Samhain. Spooky! There were other fall festivals happening. People walked the sidewalks, children with families, folks with dogs. It was pretty great. Several food trucks on the street provided a steady supply of sustenance to con-goers and the general public. My free steak sandwich with fries in hand, I left the food truck area. I passed a man walking three dogs with vests labeling them “nervous rescues.” They were cute. I grabbed a couple of pics to send to Allison. Approaching the entrance of the convention center, I see a con-goer in an elaborately constructed Pikachu costume on my left, the still form of a man under a blanket asleep on the concrete at my right. More costume-clad geeks make their way back into the con as a gray bearded man in ratty clothes argues with himself nearby. I never felt unsafe, but I’m once again struck by the contrast.  

I don’t think about giving the meal away until reflecting on this later. Probably because I was hungry. But what a charmed life I live. I’m far from starving, and someone gifted me a 1200 calorie meal because they themselves had plenty. Thoughts coalesced in my head. I discussed it with Allison Monday morning as we walked Darla through our quiet, comfortable neighborhood. I regret that I was far more articulate at expressing my thoughts then than I feel now. In theory, I should draft this, reflect, revise, and edit until it’s a piece worthy of sharing. But it’s just a blog post, and I don’t know what my point is. I guess I think of civilization as a complex machine. And machines only work well when we maintain them. And we’ve got pieces that are falling through the cracks, whether it’s due to mental illness, substance abuse, PTSD, inflation, a bad economy, high rent, low wages, whatever – the machine is breaking down, and we need to fix it. If you don’t keep the gears lubricated, metal starts to grind against metal, and you’ll eventually see sheared chunks falling out of the machine. Keeping with that metaphor, where people are part of this machine, we’ve got some serious work to do if we want the machine to keep working. 

And I do. Because I still believe, despite all of the downfalls of civilization, despite climate change, and colonization, and systemic racism, and other kinds of oppression, I still believe that we can tune this machine to do the most good for the greatest number of people. In fact, that needs to be the purpose of the machine, or otherwise return to the roots of my radical youth and smash the machine to pieces. I still believe that education improves the standard of living for everyone. I still believe that we can work together to improve conditions for our communities, our country, and our world. I don’t believe the church is going to do it. We have to do it. 

But I don’t know how. I wish I did. I could have given my free sandwich to the man I saw punching himself in the face. But then what? He’d still be hungry tomorrow. What I know is comic books and comedy. That’s all I’ve got for now. Stay well. See you at the Grit City Comic Show.

• Ken

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