Here are Andy’s screenshots he sent me:

He even took the time to play up to level 18! As the bonus prize for going the extra mile, he’s getting a handful of original art from the Lorian Gendarme Guidebook!

He didn’t stop there! Andy also went the extra mile and recreated this scene from the end of the book! He’s also getting the original page for this scene!

You can read Andy’s full post over on his blog, here. He pretty much nailed Apathea in her stats, weapons, and perks. I also like that it got him to play Skyrim in a different way. It’s inspired me to try to give it a go. Maybe I’ll make a liskot character and run around in my underwear and a giant battle axe!

Yay! for playing video games, comics, and books from the library!

Photoshoppery courtesy of Jason Rainey

MK and I are having a nerd-of-all-nerds contest!

Like every other nerd with a PC, Xbox or PS3, I’ve been playing a lot more Skyrim the last couple weeks than I’d like to admit. About 15 hours into the game, I thought about how I should’ve tried to make my character Apathea Ravenchilde. [Instead, I defaulted to great and honorable Turd the Conqueror] Anyhow it’s wayyyy too late to go back, make an Apathea character and start over. I know, I know – I could just make a character to see how close I could get it, but I’m so OCD with the character creation that at that point, I would’ve spent so much time making her character, I would feel compelled to start playing through again from the beginning.

Anyhow, here’s where the contest comes in: We want you to make the best Apathea Ravenchilde you can in Skyrim! The winner will get a hardcover copy of Americus, a copy of the Lorian Gendarme Guidebook for Adventuring Standards, and a page of original art from an Apathea scene from Americus!

Here’s the specifics:

• Go ahead and start a game up of Skyrim and in the character creation, make your character as close as you can to resemble Apathea Ravenchilde. [If it helps to know: Although you can't really tell at all, the original inspiration for Apathea's character design was Neko Case.]

• Take some screen shots and e-mail them to myself or MK.

• I don’t expect anyone to actually play through the game as Apathea, but go ahead and mention which skills you would have her gain proficiency in and what types of weapons/apparel you would deck her out in. SERIOUS bonus prizes if anyone actually plays through as Apathea to like level 20 and sends screenshots of actually decked out with the weapons, gear, and skill stats.

Deadline is Friday, December 16th. This gives us time to look them over during the weekend and then announce the winner and mail stuff out the following Monday to maybe get to the winner before Christmas.

What are you waiting for?! Get to it! Go play some video games to win some comics and art!

And now that things have died down, I’ve had the chance to sit down and work on little things here and there. The biggest of which is MK and I have decided to make a special downloadable version of the Lorian Gendarme Guidebook available here at Save Apathea! If you didn’t get a chance to make it to SPX, but were interested in what we were up to, you can download  a low-res copy of it here.

EDIT: For some reason the back ‘cover’ page didn’t turn out when I exported the PDF. I will try to have a corrected file uploaded later tonight.

EDIT: The correct file is up now! Thanks for your patience.

That’s it for now. Hope you’re enjoying the fall!

You can download the file here. Put it up in your school and in your library and champion banned books!

MK and I are also doing a joint reading for the Banned Book Week Virtual Readout. We read one of our favorite scenes from the Hunger Games.

And if you’re in Portland, I’m participating in a Banned Book Reading hosted by the ACLU at Powell’s this Sunday at 7:30. You can find more information on the calendar page of Powell’s website.I’ll be reading a little excerpt from Americus, complete with different voices for all the characters! [I can't wait to read Nancy's dialogue]

If you’re in New York, MK’s participating in WORD’s Banned Book Literary Karaoke on Thursday the 29th. More details here.

And even though we didn’t have time to do anything super fancy this year for Banned Book Week, if you weren’t reading Americus on Save Apathea last year during Banned Book Week, you might have missed out some of the interviews and essays we had on the website. You can check them out at the Archives section of the webpage!

And check in towards the end of the week when we’ll have some contests and a chance to win a copy of Americus and maybe some other Banned Book Week goodies!

The only bummer is that I think they were under the impression that you could still read Americus online here. So if you got sent to Save Apathea from there, I apologize – you just missed the party. The plus side is that the book is out and you can pick up an actual, real copy!

Okay, so most of the pieces are in place for the new version of the website. There are a lot of little details that I’m going to be ironing out, and a lot of the pages don’t have much content in them yet, but I’ll be resolving that over the next week or so. I mainly just wanted to get the website in working order so that if we can scramble anything together for Banned Book Week, it will look nice.

And yes, SPX was over a week ago, and MK and I had a great time. We’ll be writing a quick recap soon – cross my heart and kiss my elbow.

Oh, and if you see anything that looks weird on the website, please let me know so I can fix it!

EDIT: The ARCHIVES and PRESS sections are updated with content!

• Here’s what I had originally drawn for the last panel to try to give it a bit more of a ‘cinematic’ feel, but it got vetoed due to the sort of forceful perspective of the drawing. It drew away a little too much from what was important.

• The reading last week at Powell’s went pretty well. The crowd was a little smaller than I had thought it would be, but I realized I had stiff competition with other First Thursday events like Reading Frenzy’s 17th anniversary and the Floating World event with Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon.

This was my favorite picture taken, courtesy of my friend Courtney. I was describing how if you have more words in a panel, I have less room to draw and was illustrating it with hand gestures.

And if you are interested in purchasing and of the original pages, they’re all for sale! You can download a price list here. Most of the pages are $100, though ones that have missing panels due to digital altering or what not are $65, and some of the pages I’m more attached to are a little higher.

Note: The pages are just numbered according to their order chronologically. This means that because of the two pages that were added, it will be different from the order that we serialized it in, and should match the order the story was published in. Though the page numbers won’t match up because there are the chapter breaks. If you have any questions and just want to ask me ‘How much is the page where Neil does X?’, I can do that too.

And if you do want to purchase a page, you can e-mail Marci, the curator of the gallery to arrange payment.

• There was a really great review of Americus by The Comics Journal published last week. You can read it here.

• If you’re going to be at SPX, please stop by and say hi. MK and I will be at table H-16, next to Tugboat Press and Alec Longstreth! We’ll have copies of Americus for sale, some of our old books, and the secret SPX project that we’ve been working on for sale. And to tease, here’s a mockup of the cover image:

• Thanks everyone for reading and commenting! We really, really appreciate it. And I would also like to thank a couple of people who you have probably already heard us mention lots and lots:

Greg Means – Americus wouldn’t have happened without him. From putting MK and I together, to publishing the first chapter in Papercutter, to editing. Three cheers for Greg Means!

Galen Longstreth – for her insight and editorial help before First Second picked it up.

Jason Rainey – he helped tone half the Apathea pages in the book, and was there to help me when I was stuck on layouts or composition. He also made some really, really, really great animated .gifs that need to get passed around the internet somehow.

and of course, Calista, Colleen, Gina, and Mark over at First Second. I am so honored to be in the roster of such an amazing publisher.

Go pick up a copy of Americus if you haven’t yet. And don’t stop coming to Save Apathea now that the book is done being serialized online. We still have lots of stuff planned, and we’ll be posting all the Americus related news here, so make sure to check back in. Just give it a couple of weeks for us to get Save Apthea v. 2.0 up and running.

Robin McConnell put up an interview we did a few weeks back on Inkstuds.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon hanging all 200 pages up at the Basil Hallward Gallery on the 3rd floor of Powell’s.

It was pretty awesome to see the pages up on a wall instead of in a stack in my flat drawers. Also kind of weird to see them all up and think ‘This was three years of my life.’

Here are some pictures:

All of the original pages are for sale, except for this one and this one. Most of them will be priced at a low $100, though ones that have had a significant amount of digital alteration will be cheaper at $65, and some of the cooler Apathea sequences that I’m kind of attached to will be priced at $200. I still need to go through and make the price list, but I will post that stuff here when I do, as well as the contact information for the gallery in case anyone is interested in buying pieces.

If you’re in Portland, don’t forget to swing by Thursday for the opening reception and reading. I’ll post some pictures of the event afterwards.

And Kathy Moon reminded me that our guest book review of Teenagers from Mars was featured on Unshelved last Friday. You can check it out here.