Appearances

Hey, you kids like comics, right? And the people who make them? And you like to support causes that make life better here in Southern Nevada, yeah? Well, then, I expect to see you at Alternate Reality Comics (4110 S. Maryland Parkway #8) this Saturday, Feb. 25, from noon to 3 p.m., because I’m assembling the crew behind Tales from Fremont Street for a special signing and art exhibition kick-off, and to boot, we’re going to ask for donations to one of our favorite charities, the SafeNest shelter for abused women and children.

Joining me at the signing table will be cover artist Jska Priebe, interior contributors Deryl Skelton, Ed Hawkins and F Andrew Taylor, and my collaborator in the book, Warren Wucinich. We’ll have copies of both Tales from Fremont Street and Tales from the Boneyard, whose proceeds benefit the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival. As well, we’re kicking off the month-long exhibition of selected original art from Fremont Street, which will be showing inside Alternate Reality’s “Artist Spotlight” space (following its debut at the Barrick Museum last fall).

In addition, we’re asking guests to bring donations for SafeNest, based on their current Wish List. Alternate Reality owner Ralph Mathieu will also be donating a portion of the day’s back issue sales and proceeds from raffle tickets sold to the shelter.

Need more incentive beyond great comics, awesome people, raffle prizes, amazing art and worthy causes? How about free refreshments? OK, done! Now you have no excuses. Hope to see you there with donations in hand when you walk in, and comics when you walk out.

Sorry for the radio silence. Been busy launching new projects for Pop! Goes the Icon, working on articles for my usual round of editors and, oh yeah, I went on holiday. I didn’t bring you back vacation photos, but I did bring you back this video of my bumbling presentation at last month’s Design Drip meeting. Despite bringing note cards, I went totally off script, but hey, life is off script, right?

PJ Perez – Design Drip Las Vegas from Design Drip on Vimeo.

Pj Perez presenting at Design Drip Las Vegas on January 14th, 2012

This Saturday morning, I’m scheduled to give a presentation at Design Drip, a monthly gathering of creative types at The Beat inside Emergency Arts in downtown Las Vegas. While I appreciate being invited to speak at events — or classrooms, or conventions, or whatever — I’m actually terribly uncomfortable doing so, or at least in my own head.

I know that’s kind of surprising, given how much I put myself out there in public, how chatty my friends know I can get, and how long I’ve been doing live performance. And I’m sure I do fine once I’m up there, because I seem to have maintained a career requiring leading meetings and appearing competent. But at least in the preparation for such things, I get really worked up over the details and probably over-think things.

Take, for example, my “DJ set” a few nights ago at Artifice Bar’s weekly “So You Think You Can DJ” competition. Despite the fact that I’d be in one of my favorite places, “competing” against friends, and surrounded by people who I knew and mostly loved, I was terribly anxious about putting my musical selection (defined by the evening’s theme, “songs to get down and dirty to”) out there for public consideration/ridicule. Of course, those hours and days spent agonizing over and re-working my half hour of shagging music really didn’t matter by the time I plugged in my laptop at the DJ booth — everything went swimmingly, I did not get booed off, and people even danced/made out to my set. But in my head, up until that moment (and a drink or two), I was surely destined to fail.

The combination of being a little obsessive about excelling at everything I do, dwelling too much on public perception of me, and always having a “little kid” complex about my own self-perception (seriously, I am 35 years old and always feel like the teenage runt in the room) would be a potent danger to my entire success as a functioning adult, except that all of it is underpinned by an inflated sense of self that ultimately trumps everything and brings to you the overconfident buffoon you normally see dropping his pants at local bars for everyone’s enjoyment and amusement.

Hmm. All that said, you should probably come to this Design Drip thing Saturday morning. I mean, not only will you get to see me either succeed or fail in talking about whatever nonsense to which I finally boil down my presentation (right now, it’s a long ramble about how awesome I am, of course), but you can also network with, learn from, and bounce ideas off some really cool, innovative people.

Guys! Gals! Robots! It’s the first week of November. You know what that means, right? Right?!

Yep, I finally switched the A/C at home from “cool’” to “heat.”

Ha, no, but really, you know what time it is?

VEGAS VALLEY COMIC BOOK FESTIVAL TIME!

It feels redundant for me to blow a lot of pixels here going over the details of what awesomeness awaits you this Saturday, Nov. 5, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Clark County Library, because a full website already exists dedicated to that mission, so I suggest you go there, read all about it, then come back here so I can share my personal take.

Done? OK, so … I’ve been involved with the planning of the VVCBF since 2009, which is incidentally the first year I officially launched Pop! Goes the Icon, at the very same event. Each year, my involvement has increased, to the point that I now basically handle all of the marketing, promotion and tangential events related to the festival, while the Superduper Events Specialist (or whatever her title is) at the library, Suzanne Scott, handles all the logistics/contracts/money/political stuff. That means from September to November every year for me has become kind of like a marathon (though it really starts in the spring with the conception of the commemorative comic book I edit and publish for the festival, which is a whole different topic). And the finish line is just about two days away, beyond which sleep and, well, catching up on deadlines awaits.

But I would love to see your smiling faces before then, at the VVCBF on Saturday. I’ll be running the Pop! Goes the Icon tables, at which we’ll be launching the aforementioned commemorative, benefit comic, Tales from Fremont Street (which actually soft-launched last night). Most of the contributors to that fine volume will be at our tables signing and sketching and chatting. We’ll also have, of course, the full line of PGTI goodies, including our most recent trade paperbacks. So grab your kids and loved ones, throw on something geeky, and spend Saturday morning/afternoon with me at the Comic Book Festival. It’s FREE, y’all.

I’ve been a bad blogger/web admin. I know this. And I know I tend to only post when I have something to promote. I’m SORRY. But just ask my long-suffering lifemate Sara: She doesn’t see much more of me than you do, because the unfortunate side effect of being so busy making stuff is that there is little time to do anything not directly related to said stuff. This week’s “stuff” is actually a lot of different stuff all at once, mostly revolving around the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival and the release of my band‘s new album, Unknown.

But we’re here today to talk specifically about the new exhibit I’m curating at the Marjorie Barrick Museum at UNLV, “Spinning Tales from Fremont Street.” Like the last show I assembled there, “Seduction of the Innocent,” it’s an awareness-builder for the Comic Book Festival. However, this show actually is all about the art, specifically the original art from the stories featured in the new anthology I edited and published to benefit the festival this year, Tales from Fremont Street. Beyond just comic pages, sketches, notes and scripts, the gallery space has also been transformed into a reasonable facsimile of a run-down Fremont Street motel. Most of the credit for artificially decaying the space goes to my co-conspirator, F. Andrew Taylor. Here’s some of his handiwork on the wall behind this lovely art:

Mighty convincing, no?

If you’re so inclined and available, you should attend the opening reception for this exhibit tomorrow, Nov. 2, from 6 to 8 p.m. It’s free, most of the contributors to Tales from Fremont Street will be there, and it’s also your first opportunity in-person to buy the comic (only $5!), from which all proceeds benefit the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District‘s support of the Comic Book Festival. (And if you don’t live near Vegas and want a copy, you can order one here.) And we can hug! You know you love Pj hugs!

I’ll be back with a post about other stuff you can do and/or buy soon. So keep your eyes peeled, and hope to see you tomorrow night!

Anyone who’s dealt with me over the last few weeks knows I’ve probably been more stressed than usual (and usually I’m not stressed at all, really). As we’re in the two-month ramp-up for the annual Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival, that’s basically status quo for me until Nov. 5, but in particular, a good amount of my time has been spent curating and co-organizing the opening reception for a new exhibit opening this Friday, Sept. 30 at UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum called “Seduction of the Innocent.”

The exhibit is a visual exploration of comic book censorship throughout the medium’s 80 or so years, timed to launch during Banned Books Week. I’ve effectively created a shorthand timeline of major events and issues in the history of banned and censored comics (and it’s a rich history — we’re barely scraping the surface here) using reproductions of classic comic strips, covers, photos and other visual cues. And this is the first gallery show I’m curating all by myself, so … hopefully it doesn’t suck. I don’t think it does.

“Seduction of the Innocent” will be up through Oct. 29, so you can visit the Barrick basically anytime in October to see the show, but the opening reception this Friday from 6 to 9 p.m. is kind of a big production. In addition to being a satellite event for the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival, it’s also the final event of September’s Yelp Geeks Out promotion, so in addition to comic book retailers, a caricature artist and tours of the exhibit, there will also be live entertainment and free food and drink sampling. And a 100 percent chance of seeing me. So make sure you RSVP now to get on the guest list!

Hope to see you there. I’ll probably look tired, but your support will make it worth it.

Remember “Sugarhook,” the short film I co-wrote/co-directed/co-produced with my team Mechanical Cow Productions for this year’s 48 Hour Film Festival? Want to see it on the (relatively larger than in your living room) screen again? For the first time? At a (admittedly small) film festival? Hell, son, your wish is my command. Or, more accurately, Theatre7′s command.

This Wednesday, Sept. 7, at downtown’s favorite (and only) cinema dedicated to 100 percent independent filmmaking, Theatre7 (1406 S. Third St.) will host the first of two nights of the Neon Reverb Film Festival, itself just a slice of the larger Neon Reverb Festival, which used to be just a weekend of rad live music, but is now a week-long celebration of theater, comedy, art, poetry and, yeah, music too. Starting at 7 p.m., the evening of film will include a series of music-themed shorts (including the aforementioned “Sugarhook”) leading up to the feature documentary, “Unauthorized: The Story of Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics.”

This is doubly exciting for me. First, it’s the first non-48 Hour festival in which “Sugarhook” is being screened, even if it is a small, local one. And secondly, I grew up reading “Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics.” The series, published by Revolutionary Comics, published unauthorized biographies of musicians and groups, and drew particular ire (and lawsuits) from such diverse acts as New Kids on the Block and Guns ‘N Roses. I still have (I believe) my copies of the Guns ‘N Roses issue (seventh printing, maybe?) and the Rolling Stones issue. The information I learned from reading the GNR bio helped me win a radio trivia contest once, so yeah, watching a doc about the publisher (and its owner’s murder!) is cool enough, but having my film open for it? Doubly rad.

Anyway, I know it’s kind-of short notice (long weekend and I just confirmed the date today), but if you have $7 and nothing better to do Wednesday night, join me at Theatre7 for some popcorn and rock ‘n’ roll (on DVD). It’ll be a blast.