I made some cool “VACCINATED!” buttons! And I’ve been sending them as gifts to folks who donate to their local mutual aid group or community fridge. So far the campaign has raised $3,189 dollars — huge thanks to everyone who’s jumped on board!
So TODAY is the LAST DAY for the campaign — almost out of buttons. Want one of your own?
1. Donate $25 or more to a mutual aid group or community fridge.
2. Email proof of your donation & your US mailing address to helpinghands at gregpak dot com .
3. I’ll mail you a pin! (As long as supplies last! I’ve just got a few left – first come, first served!)
If you’re new to mutual aid groups, just google “mutual aid” or “community fridge” and your town’s name and you’ll probably find some! It’s all about neighbors helping neighbors through the pandemic and beyond. If you see a phrase like “solidarity, not charity,” you’re on the right track!
(And for the avoidance of doubt, donations to political campaigns, PACs, or 501(c)4s do not count for this offer. Can’t give gifts for donations to political campaigns!)
These are acrylic buttons, approximately 1.75″ x 1.33″, single pin with a rubber stopper on the back. I used Stickermule to make ’em. Really happy with the quality!
Thanks so much for donating and for getting vaccinated!
Very excited to join a bunch of my favorite people for the AsAm Creator Happy Hour panel this Thursday to raise money for the AAAJ Chicago’s bystander intervention training. Please sign up for the free event today!
From the official announcement:
Join us on Thursday, April 22 at 8pm ET / 7pm CT / 5pm PT for a fundraiser to support Advancing Justice | Chicago
About this Event
Join us on Thursday, April 22 for AsAm Creator Happy Hour: 60 minutes of hijinks with Asian American writers, artists, and actors talking about how they got started, what they’re working on, and where they’re going in a fundraiser to support Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago‘s bystander intervention training.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Preeti Chhibber is a speaker, freelance writer, and author of A Jedi You Will Be, Avengers Assembly: The Sinister Substitute, and featured in the forthcoming anthology Sword Stone Table.
Amy Chu is a professional writer whose works include the Netflix series DOTA: Dragon’s Blood, graphic novel Sea Sirens, and comics such as Sensational Wonder Woman, DMC, and KISS. Amy is also a former Executive Director of the Asian American Arts Alliance and Board Member of the Asian Women Giving Circle.
Shing Yin Khor is an installation artist and cartoonist exploring the Americana mythos and new human rituals. They are the author of The American Dream? and The Legend of Auntie Po.
Trung Le Nguyen is a Vietnamese American artist and author from Minneapolis. Trung has contributed work for Oni Press, Boom! Studios, and Image Comics, and recently released his first original graphic novel The Magic Fish.
Greg Pak is a Korean American comic book writer and filmmaker best known for his award-winning feature film Robot Stories and his comics Mech Cadet Yu and Planet Hulk.
Randall Park is an actor, comedian, writer, and director known for his role in the TV series Fresh Off the Boat and films including Always Be My Maybe and Ant-Man and the Wasp.
It’s been a while! Sending all the best to everyone during these difficult days. I’m just chiming in to let you know that I’m teaching a one hour online class about running a Kickstarter campaign this Tuesday, April 13 at 8 pm ET, and I’m donating my take from the event to Compassion Oakland, a group of volunteers who have been providing chaperones for seniors in Oakland’s Chinatown.
If you’re interested, please do register today! There are just seven slots left as I write this. I’ll be devoting a good chunk of time to Q&A, so this’ll be a great time to get practical answers to specific questions if you have them.
The folks at the Asian Author Alliance are organizing an auction fundraiser to help two organizations that work against anti-Asian racism — Stop AAPI Hate and Hate is a Virus. I’m donating a bundle of signed #1 comics featuring Asian and Asian American characters, including TOTALLY AWESOME HULK #1, KINGSWAY WEST #1, MECH CADET YU #1, RONIN ISLAND #1, WAR OF THE REALMS: NEW AGENTS OF ATLAS #1 (with the first appearance of Wave), and AGENTS OF ATLAS #1.
If you’re concerned about this ongoing wave of anti-Asian harassment and violence, another thing you can do is sign up for the Bystander Intervention Training sessions this March from Hollaback! and Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Click here to find out more and sign up. I did!
Sending big love to everyone. Please do keep watching out for each other and stay safe out there.
Hey, I’m moderating an incredible panel this Friday for a VoteRiders textbanking event! Help people get the ID they need to vote in Georgia AND hear an all-star AsAm panel talk about comfort food this Friday, 5 pm ET!
With Tamlyn Tomita, Preeti Chhibber, R.O. Kwon, Minh Lê, Andrea Shea, and Alex Shibutani!
It’s gonna be incredibly fun, and it’s for an INCREDIBLY important cause. Sign up today at voteriders.org/text!
I’m thrilled to announce that my online store is now giving customers the chance to designate a local comic shop to receive a commission of half of the price of their purchases!
The COVID-19 crisis has hit comic shops hard. I’m hoping this will help put a few dollars into the hands of shop owners who have done so much for me and for thousands of creators and fans.
Please click here for more details and feel free to poke around the store and buy tons of stuff! I’ve restocked the store with loads of new rare variants and books — and even included a fun Garage Sale section with a few books I DIDN’T write!
Just type the name of a local shop into the “special instructions” field when you check out and we’ll send them half of your purchase price (minus shipping). If we can’t reach the shop you listed or if they can’t accept PayPal, we’ll send the commission to another shop on the list, selected at random, or donate it to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.
I launched my first website to tout my early short films approximately one million years ago in 1999 using the “members” section of aol.com. I can’t find my archive of the original index page, but I did find my splash page image, which I assure you I thought was AWESOME. ENJOY!
Over the years, I’ve upgraded my website multiple times. First, I moved my static pages off aol.com onto to a webhosting service with my own gregpak.com url. Then I added webring code (yes! webrings!) and cgi scripts for message boards and comments and all the other stuff we did back then. I was typing up HTML for updates and indexes in chronological order — essentially hand-coding a blog before we even had the word “blog.” At some point, MoveableType popped up and I converted the site into an actual blog with automated tools for posting and indexing. Years later, I finally accepted the fact that MoveableType was gone and converted the site to WordPress, which is where we are today. For the past eight years or so, it’s been essentially the same creature, but with social media links and embedded media and a better newsletter sign-up process.
But every few years, I find myself fixing some small glitch on the site and I end up rethinking things a bit. Last night was one of those times. I had trouble sending out my latest newsletter through the MailPoet plugin (problems that I still haven’t entirely solved), and as part of the troubleshooting I started upgrading various plugins. And eventually, like a dope, I upgraded the Codium Extended theme that provides the visual backbone of my site. Unfortunately, I’d made a hundred tweaks to the Codium templates to get my site to look the way I wanted, and the upgrade overwrote all those tweaks. Huge disaster! But I was able to find a 2016 backup and was also able to grab the source code of a cached page of one of my posts from one of my browsers, so after a panicky hour and a half, I had the site back in shape.
The bonus of that big goof was that all that poking around in the guts of WordPress got me to finally wrap my head around how WordPress.com works (as opposed to WordPress.org) and try out a few new (to me) things that I hope will help get my posts out to more eyeballs.
WordPress.org is the organization that makes and distributes the WordPress software. That “org” at the end of the URL tells you it’s a nonprofit — it distributes the free software you can install on your own server to run WordPress for your own website. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a business that sells you hosting services for WordPress blogs. I run my site on my own, so I got my software from WordPress.org. But I’m using the Jetpack services for stats and backups that I pay for and manage through WordPress.com. It’s been a while since I set everything up, so I’d kind of forgotten how this all works! But while digging back into everything, I finally educated myself about one of the other big benefits of WordPress.com. You can use your account not just to manage your blog, but to follow and read other people’s WordPress blogs!
Yes, WordPress.com and the WordPress app have very, very nice readers that allow you to follow and easily scroll through and read a bunch of blogs. The interface is great — I like it more than Feedly (a similar blog aggregator). The biggest minus is that the WordPress Reader only works with WordPress blogs, as far as I can tell. But I’ve been looking to spend less time scrolling through Twitter and more time digging into longer articles, so this is very interesting to me as a reader.
But I’m even more intrigued as a creator.
I’ve recently seen various writer colleagues on Twitter musing about blogging, thinking about diving back into it. Folks like John Scalzi never stopped, of course. But for most of us, blogging began to feel too time consuming with not enough payoff — quick posts on Twitter almost always get tons more traction than a longer blog post. But as wonderful as Twitter can be, it’s also a garbage can full of distraction, lies, and harassment. And any social network could become unusable overnight if it’s sold or if its owners decide to monetize it differently. Conversely, we own our own blogs. Until the whole system of assigning URLs and building websites gets ripped out of our hands, folks can always find us there. So anything that encourages readers to visit our independent blogs on a regular basis strikes me as fantastic.
The payoff to this long story? I’m now following blogs using the WordPress.com app and I’m going to look for ways to encourage more people to follow my own site there — and to follow it through other services like Feedly. I’ve also discovered and enabled the widget that allows people to subscribe to my website. They enter their email and WordPress will automatically send them an email whenever a new post goes live. It’s a bit confusing because I also have a newsletter that folks can subscribe to. So folks visiting my site for the first time might get a little confused about the differences. I’ll have to figure out how to explain that succinctly on the site. But for now, it’s at least one more way folks can choose to hear about my stuff — and you can try it out by entering your email right up there on the upper right of this page!
Finally taking advantage of these tools feels important, and I’m pretty darn proud of myself. But I know that nothing matters more than posting good, useful writing. When I look back over my site’s greatest hits, I’ve always gotten the most visitors when I’ve posted something special they can’t find anywhere else. The challenge for working writers is finding the time to post that special stuff when we’re grappling with weekly, daily, and sometimes hourly deadlines. I’m still figuring it out! But digging around on the tech side always makes my website feel like a fun new toy, so I’m hopeful that you’ll see more posts like this in the near future.
A last point: the massive success of of social media comes from those fun little buttons allow you to instantly share what you dig with everyone who follows you. None of the blog aggregators I’ve been looking at quite reproduce that kind of seamless sharing. So I’ll keep looking, and in the meantime I’ll continue to use my social media accounts to push my blog posts, and I’ll do better at reading and sharing blog posts from friends. And I’ll report back if anything seems to be really working!
Comics colorist Pete Pantazis has a hard deadline in about a week to raise enough money to save his home. Please do check out his GoFundMe and contribute if you can. As an added bonus, if you donate $25 or more, I’ll send you a signed copy of ACTION COMICS #23.2, which Pete colored and I wrote! Just send proof of your contribution and your US mailing address to helpinghands at gregpak dot com (apologies — I can’t ship overseas).
I have about 20 copies of the book to give away. This is the second printing, featuring the cool lenticular 3D cover.
I’m guessing most comics freelancers mentally whisper “there but for the grace of God” when they hear about the next emergency and see the next GoFundMe go live for another comics veteran. Because even if you have health insurance, any health crisis can escalate to bankruptcy and disaster, especially if you’re a freelancer without paid sick leave.
So if you have the inclination, please consider donating to these GoFundMes for comics artist Joyce Chin, who recently suffered a brain aneurysm, and Mike Mantlo, who has gone bankrupt while taking care of his brother, comics writer Bill Mantlo.
Bill Mantlo’s MICRONAUTS meant the world to me as a kid and I dedicated my five year HULK run to him in INCREDIBLE HULK #635. Please consider helping his brother out now to help with is care if Bill’s work ever moved you and you have the means.
