San Diego Comic-Con

I arrived in San Diego this year with a clear mission: get the word out about CHEATIN'.  I also wanted to spread the word about my new DVD "Dogs and Cows", and of course make a few bucks to pay the bills, but the big goal now is to get some buzz going for my new feature.

The film is going to start its festival run soon, where we hope to pick up foreign sales and distribution, so we decided to premiere the trailer for the film at Comic-Con.  There's no better stage than the annual San Diego event, where I have a lot of fans.  My crack team was there: Alexia Anastasio, Kevin, John Holderried and producer James Hancock, they were there to run my booth and help crank up the buzz.

                                      Bill screening the CHEATIN' trailer at his SDCC panel.

My kick-off event on Thurdsay was the CHEATIN' panel.  My plan was to show the Kickstarter documentary, two clips from the feature, and then cap it off with the world premiere of the trailer.  Unfortunately, we had some technical glitches with the trailer that had to be resolved.  We had a very frustrated audience after this exciting buildup of anticipation - so we showed the first 30 seconds of the three-minute trailer - then the monitors turned off the DVD automatically because our time was up.

The disappointed audience was about to riot, but I told them "It's OK, you can see the whole trailer online in an hour."  I then raced back to my booth to give everyone a free sketch and hopefully sell a few DVDs.  Then later on Thursday afternoon, my short film "Summer Bummer" screened in the Comic-Con Indepedent Film Festival, so I attended the screening at the Marriott Hotel and took some questions from the audience there.

One of the new features for me this Comic-Con was to offer prints of images from CHEATIN'.  They look very cool and sell like proverbial hotcakes.  We did a lot better this year than any previous year, so it looks like the recession is over in Geek world - yeah!

The best part of "the Con" is meeting all the great talents that stop by my booth - here are a few of the celebs that came to say hello: "Simpsons" director David Silverman, artist George Perez, Sergio Aragones, Tony Millionaire, Ruth Clampett, actor Irwin Keyes and artist Robert Williams.

                                                     Bill with "Simpsons' director David Silverman.

with comic-book artist George Perez

with MAD Magazine's Sergio Aragones

with "Maakies" cartoonist Tony Millionaire

  with Ruth Clampett, daughter of legendary animator Bob Clampett

                                          with "House of 1000 Corpses" actor Irwin Keyes

                                       with artist and JUXTAPOZ founder Robert Williams

                       with noisy neighbor Spike Decker of Spike & Mike's Animation festival

And then, to top it all off, I received the prestigious "Best Animation" award at the Comic-Con International Independent Film Festival for my short "Summer Bummer".  For about 15 years, I've been trying to win this damn award, and every year I've gone to the awards ceremony and walked away empty-handed.  This year, I said "To hell with it, I'm not going to be disappointed again!"  Negativity does mean things to an artist's soul.

But, lo and behold, as I was sitting in my booth on Sunday, Gary Sassaman, the director of the festival, came by with a very sour face.  I thought, "Uh oh, he's angry that I refused to attend the ceremony..."  He gave me a dirty look, then thrust the beautiful trophy into my face - I won!  Whoopee, life is good!

                                                Bill with Gary Sassaman, director of the CCIIFF.

                         Bill with the "Best Animation" trophy from the Comic-Con Film Festival.

So, my next stop will be the New York Comic Con in October - see you there!

--Bill

                                         Bill being interviewed by HBO Latino camera crew.

                          Bill with animator Emily Eslinger, who designed the "Tiffany" stuffed toys.