Open Letter to Tony Harris: Why you fail at things.

Dear Mr. Harris,

Let's get silly.
You are in this mindset so let me join you.

You have a problem with your marketing campaign.  You have caught a bad case of Pedes Terminus, or shooting yourself in the foot.  Your recent rant on what ranks a true comic geek has hit the intertubes and the response has not been positive.

What were you thinking?  You called working Cons your office.  That's what it is, your work place.  Why are you trying to throw people out of your office who want to buy your goods?  The artists you share your office with at the cons shared a beginning like you.  Getting your stuff out there is hard to do.  It is a life time achievement to land a job at the big publishers, where millions upon millions of people will see your work.  Every person who walks into a con is a potential customer to you and everyone else.  Why would you dismiss anyone who walks through those doors?

Why is it that you think only women are the ones who make costumes to go to cons and get attention, but you don't mention anything about men doing that?  Maybe it's because we're all too busy fapping our virgin selves at the women showing some skin.  This is the bigger issue.  Yes there are women who come to cons in cosplay and some of them don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the characters they are portrayed as.  There are men and women who do know every detail and minutia of the characters they are playing.

There is nothing wrong with either.

The idea of "Faux Geek" is false.  Do you like something?  Do you think about it?  Does it get you up to do things about it?  You are a geek.  This is true for someone who doesn't know anything about Emma Frost, but sees an image of her and wants to wear the costume; the same as it is true for someone who details and logs every date and time The Doctor travels to. They took the time to look at images and create a costume.  They got involved with an artists work.  That's amazing.  They may not know origin stories or birth dates of characters, but they know your work.  Why isn't that amazing to you?

There's an appropriate saying: "Every comic is someone's first."  Apply that to the cons.  Every con is someones first con.  So what if they "DON'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT COMICS!"  Everyone starts somewhere.  Everyone has that first hit of inspiration from a comic that gets them going.

Mine was Retro Girl.

Not actual cos play I saw.

At FanExpo in Toronto, many moons ago, I saw someone cosplaying as Retro Girl.  It was fantastic.  She had the goggles, the cape, the hair in a pony tail.  This girl had done her homework.  Did she know who she was playing and the story behind her?  I have no idea.  It doesn't matter.  What matters is this:  I went out and I bought the first issue of Powers.  This triggered off a chain reaction.  My friend saw me reading it and said: "If you like that, you'd really like Rising Stars."

Sold!

Picking up an issue of Rising Stars led me to see a comic named: "The Adventures of Barry Ween: Boy Genius."

All that, because of a woman in cos play.  What didn't come to my mind when I saw her was: "Oh man, I hope she knows the whole story behind her, or that's an insult to Powers fans everywhere.  How dare she promise me the moon and stars as Retro Girl."

Why you think that they shouldn't come to cons or even be considered a geek is Greek to me.

We know you're above drawing women in a sexualized way in comics.  Lar DeSouza said in a U-Stream broadcast: "Unfortunately, the only question asked about breasts in comics is: How big do you want them?"  It's good to see that you agree with that ideal.

Until I found this set of tig ol' bitties you drew as a cover.

I hope you got fat on your earnings, because if the geek community speaks (all of us,) you may end up feeling hungry for the next little bit,