I'll be at WonderCon this weekend in San Francisco, flyering for The Farallon Egg War.
March was a very exciting month - there was strong interest in the book from a major West Coast publisher. In the final decision, the very nice editors, who will remain unnamed, expressed concern that the book was too "mature" for a crossover audience.
(They obviously never saw the bookshelves that belonged to my sister and me as children - stuffed to the gills with Edward Gorey and Philip Roth. No wonder we're so screwed up!)
The reaction of the editors essentially liberated me to take the book in a far more ambitious, adult direction.
All the research on early Risorgimento activism in San Francisco, the newspaper battles, the opera wars, the internecine fighting within the Italian community in San Francisco between Royalists and Garibaldi's supporters, the down-and-dirty details of Limantour's property scams, Copperheads (the political movement, not the snake), Mormons, minstrelsy, burlesque, banking scams, technological advances, and scientists, scientists, and more scientists...
...in short, a far more panoramic view of 19th-century San Francisco, coming to a boiling point in the 1863 Egg War. This is a far more cinematic, action-oriented comic in black ink on white paper.
