Sunday, January 15, 2012

The Cubs Convention!

I asked Brad of The Heckler if he needed an extra hand at his booth at the Cub Convention this weekend, and he said sure. So that was cool.

If you're not familiar, The Heckler is a satirical site and occasional publication that originally was aimed at Cubs fans. It spread to cover other Chicago sport teams and then in the last year or so started to make fun of teams in other markets as well. I remember seeing it for the first time and laughing my ass off. People take their teams a little too seriously, myself included.

Anyway, I had done the Heckler booth dance a few times before. Hand out copies of our print edition, try to sell shirts. It's usually non-eventful from my point of view. A good number of people from Iowa telling us how much they love the Cubs, that sort of thing.

What I never get is why people DON'T want a free paper. Well, I guess I can see that.
Someone has I'm sure handed me plenty of free things, but usually flyers and ads are tossed out. If someone is handing me a free humor magazine, sure I'll take it. I need a laugh. I love 'zines. I pick up any of them when I'm travelling, be it the alt-weekly or someone's photocopied zine at a record store. Why not? Even if they aren't discussing something local, it's always a bit of local flavor, and always an added bonus when there's a comic strip I've never seen.

So why not take a free magazine so you can read something while waiting in line to meet former Cubs Frank DiPino & Vance Law? (note: I don't think they were actually there. Or that you know who they were.) A lot of "no thank yous" which is polite for "get that outta my face!" and, okay, you don't want to be hassled. But sheesh, it's free! And sports needs more humor. When I'm at a game with friends or my wife, we never stop with the dumb jokes. Everything deserves even a bit of a snicker, even the guy on your team throwing that no-hitter. Even sports I don't care for have a rich history and much of it unintentionally funny in contexts years later. If I had a Mad Magazine/Onion style sports mag in the 90's, I wouldn't have stopped paying attention to all of them during that bleak period (except for the Bulls, of course). So this sort of thing should be cherished.

The stories of the weirdos and drama are best left to Brad because he's the face of The Heckler and the local sports everybody seems to know him and respect him. If they don't, they're jags, and then they're his stories, not mine. I'm in the booth handing out papers and I didn't see much of nuthin', other than that Harry Caray impersonator who gave us his card and then left without doing his impersonation. I did walk around a bit. Not a lot of great stuff on super cheap discount and I didn't have much to spend on anything there, but I was happy to get a t-shirt in the style of '84 Cub jerseys with "Sandberg" on the back, so I never have to get another sports related clothing item again. There, the only thing I bought at the convention.

Be sure to subscribe to the Heckler for various silly sports stories throughout the year. I'll be doing more strips for them this year, they won't appear on this blog, but I'll let you know when they appear on that site.

In the meantime, the other cool thing was that Jody Davis signed this strip for me. It's based on something that happened when I was 8, when I met him on the field. Forgive Chug's enlarging head. I'd like to claim license to exaggerate, but we all know that I can't draw.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

New-ish Paul Show strip / The Heckler @ The Cubs Convention



I drew this over the summer when we had a sale at the store I work at. I set up a drawing table and printed out some of my panels and let people draw their own strips. This was mine, done at the store in one sitting.

IN OTHER NEWS: I'll be at the Cubs Convention this Saturday, January 14th. Stop by The Heckler's booth if you're going and buy my comic book, Chug-Chug: Inaction from me, please.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012