Before I dig into my review of the Emerald City Comicon I want to give you a little history. I grew up in San Diego. That won’t mean much to anyone who isn’t familiar with comic conventions, but if you are familiar with them you know that in the last 10 years the San Diego Comicon (or SDCC) has become the premiere US con for comic fans. Say what you will about the infiltration of Hollywood into what was previously the domain of hardcore geekery, it’s impossible to deny that SDCC has become a glittering spectacle of pop art, and despite many of its drawbacks is still a really great and huge con.

For a long time San Diego was the only convention I ever went to. Eventually I visited APE and Wondercon and they seemed lackluster and tiny. I see the entire APE in under 20 minutes if I didn’t linger too long. It wasn’t what I was expecting, and I didn’t know how to handle the awkward interaction with people who seemed hungry for me to buy things, so I mostly avoided it, sensing even as I did that I was missing out on something, but I wasn’t sure how to get at what I thought I was missing.

As I went to more cons I learned more about what I liked. A good friend of mine in Oakland introduced me to Artist Alley. For those who might not know, Artist Alley is a staple of all cons where the artists themselves can set up tables, sell their wares, take commissions and chat directly with the fans without any industry people hanging on them. Artist Alley has no restrictions but space and price. If you are willing to shell out for a table then you’re likely to get a space, which means that many up-and-coming artists are there as well as old hands. Like APE there is a certain awkwardness there when someone is sitting at a table, dying to make eye contact and hoping that you’ll stop and talk with them and, hope beyond hope, buy something. It’s something that I’ve learned how to deal with the more cons that I’ve been to.

So, last weekend was my first time to The Emeral CIty Comicon, a mid-size con on par with Wondercon in LA. I went Friday and Saturday and I had a good time. The first biggest takeaway for me was that ECCC is focused almost exclusively on western Comics. There’s very little anime or manga the way there is at SDCC and there are almost no toys whatsoever. There are multiple comic book booths with racks and racks of back issues (which is always a novelty to me, since, ironically, almost no one sells actual comic books at SDCC). The artists are generally focused on western style art and the influence of anime, manga and video games was particularly limited. My theory on that is that ECCC and Sakura Con, Seattle’s huge anime convention (which I’ll also be attending), happen on consecutive weekends. I suspect, but cannot confirm, that Sakura con draws away a lot of the things I expected to see when at ECCC. Still, despite that I did manage to pick up a couple of decent pieces (see the images).

In all, ECCC was a very good show. There were certainly some familiar faces from other cons. David Peterson of Mouse Guard was there, and I chatted with him a bit. I chatted with Daniel and the fine folks at Steam Crow. There were also plenty of new folks to talk to. I met Kristy Kuechenmiester (KOO-chen-MY-ster) who came out from South Carolina to promote her webcomic Wake the Sleepers. And after the really great panel on Guerrilla Toy Making put on by Working Class Villains and Spy Monkey Creations, I checked out their booth and we talked for a bit about toys and cartoons.

In all, I think I did more talking than I did promoting. Since I was scoping out the con as a possible vendor for next year, I talked to a lot of folks, most of whom were attending for their first or second year. I think that rookies are much more friendly than veterans in this arena. Rookies also have a bit of neediness to them, a ‘please come talk to me’ energy, as they’re figuring out the line between selling their shit and shooting the shit. It’s not an easy line to draw, and I often feel bad that I’m often there to talk rather than to buy, but I’ve also worked really hard not to pity buy, since it’s expensive for me and really does nothing for the folks I’m buying from.

I think what I was most surprised by was the lack of preparation on the parts of the first and second year rookie vendors. Very few of them had banners of any kind, either in front or behind, and most of them I felt didn’t really know how to talk about their art. None of them had their elevator pitch ready. I was acutely aware of that since I felt, the few times I was asked about the Chibi Tarot, that I fumbled my line. “It’s a tarot deck that I’m designing through the lens of chibi,” was my usual reply, but that doesn’t tell anyone anything that’s not already on the sticker. I’ve been experimenting with new options, and my current favorite is, “The Chibi Tarot is a tarot deck whose art is influenced by anime, manga and video games.”

What the weekend really highlighted for me was that tho I’m doing a decent job of promoting my work, I have a long way to go before I’m comfortable doing it. I’m VERY shy about talking about my work, and I really don’t know what to say to people who might ask me about it. I need more practice talking about who I am, what I do and why I do it. Luckily, Sakura con is coming up next weekend and I’ll have plenty of practice there, honing my elevator pitch and encouraging myself to talk about what I’m doing and why.

I’ll be at Sakura con at the Washington State Convention Center on Saturday, April 7th from about 9 til I’m exhausted, handing out Chibi Tarot stickers. If you can’t make it, the stickers are $.50 each in our shop!

Here are some peeks at the Hierophant. I posted two so that you can see a little more clearly my working process. The most drastic change between the first and the second is in the girl in the bottom right-hand site. Let me know what you think in the comments!

The Hierophant card represents the traditional, orthodox teachings of religion considered suitable for the masses. She is the ruling power of organized religion.
jasonbeamstudios.com/site/g_thehierophant.asp (NSFW)

I don’t think there’s an unhappier card in the Tarot deck than the Hierophant. There are more frightening and probably saddening cards to receive in a reading, the Tower and Death both come immediately to mind, but these card themselves aren’t sad in the way that the Hierophant is. No, the Hierophant is sad because he’s probably the most neglected and maligned card in the deck. It’s not his fault, but he bears the brunt of the misunderstanding that surrounds him.

The quotation above, which I ran across while looking for images of the Hierophant for my previous post (Honestly, I don’t know what tarot designers did before the internet!). It was the perfect quote for the Hierophant because it quickly and efficiently summed up everything I think is wrong with the popular interpretation of the Tarot’s fifth card. This traditional interpretation, that the Hierophant (who we all know is just the Pope in disguise!) stands for organized religion (which we all know means the Christian church, and mostly the horrible Catholic church!) misses the point of both the Hierophant and the Pope entirely, and I think that’s a huge part of the reason that most people using the tarot cards find the Hierophant so distasteful and unappealing.

The Hierophant isn’t about the Church, he’s about all churches, temples, mosques, and cults. He’s about any type of organized religion, including, I would argue, paganism. He’s the external, public face of any group of believers that can, at least, agree they’re believers and come to some basic agreement about what they believe. Oftentimes these groups have a leader, a first among equals, who leads the rituals and helps to reinforce the system of belief that the group has agreed upon. This, then, is the Hierophant. Not (just) a dowdy, rule-enforcing Pope, but any leader of belief who brings his or her believers together.

Waite understood this, though he expressed it as obscurely as he does almost everything, and said as much: “He is the ruling power of external religion, as the High Priestess is the prevailing genius of the esoteric, withdrawn power….the Hierophant is the power of the keys, exoteric orthodox doctrine, and the outer side of the life which leads to the doctrine…” The Hierophant is about creating communion with his family, with the body of believers. Whatever path you choose, whatever flavor of the divine you prefer, whether it’s vanilla Christianity or some spicy obscure esotericism, the hierophant is about helping to bring you into the circle of that which is holy.

All spiritual groups need someone to do that for them, this is who and what the Hierophant represents, the exterior public performance of the rites, whether that’s taking communion or worshipping the Star Goddess. Which leads me to the most important part of the Hierophant, and the part I’m trying to revive, is that the Hierophant is about celebration! The public embracing of what we believe, the power of communal celebration with God and each other. The joy of being with people we love and sharing the things we believe, of indulging ourselves in the ecstatic communion with the divine. Look, most Methodists aren’t going to go that far with their pastor (even if most of them could use a good dose of the ecstatic), but those aren’t the things they’re looking for from their Hierophant. Judge them for that if you will, but don’t take down card number five with them! If you do, you’re losing out on a powerful figure whose expertise at channeling the power of God into the power of the group is one that we can all benefit from.

Hey look! We’ve got stickers! They arrived today from PSPrint! They look REALLY good, so you should buy one! That’s right, our first merch is up and online in our new shop! It’s not much yet, but I’ll be continuing to add merchandise throughout the year and hopefully before too long we’ll have a deck to sell!

And don’t forget, I’ll be wandering around the Emerald City Comicon this Friday and Saturday handing out stickers to whoever finds me. I’ll be the guy in the Chibi Tarot shirt!

I’ve always had a very superficial understanding of cards 2, 3, 4 and 5, in the tarot, otherwise known as the temporal rulers compised of the High Priestess (aka Papess), the Empress, the Emperor and the Hierophan (or Pope). Part of this confusion is that much of my early reading grouped cards one and two together as a pair, comparing and contrasting the outward physical power of the Magus to the inward spiritual power of the High Priestess. After a lot of reading I find this comparison less and less fruitful, not only because I don’t buy into the Magician as a powerful card (in the triumphal tradition he’s actually the most powerless card in the deck), but also because the High Priestess so clearly belongs to the quartet on her other side.

The first time I envisioned cards 2 through 5 as a quartet it was as a chess analogy. I saw the Empress and Emperor as Queen and King and the Pope and Papess as bishops on either side of them, whispering into their ears as advisors. This vision came with such clarity it was very difficult to ignore. Since then I’ve been grappling with how to make sense of them, both on an individual level, but also as a group. The emperor I understand fairly well. The card I’ve drawn gives symbolic understanding of him, even if I haven’t taken the time to write about him yet. He’s a square, and he has to be. He needs to be dependable, because there are people depending on him. He can’t take the kinds of risks that the Magician can because if the Emperor fails, the whole kingdom fails. But my understanding of his 3 companions, and more specifically how they function as a unit was lacking.

As I was beginning my sketches of the Hierophant, a card that I’m looking forward to writing about later this week, I needed to understand his character and what he represented. I don’t want to go into too much detail here or I’ll spoil my post for Friday, but I needed something beyond the idea that the Pope was the pope, symbolic of St. Peter, the crossed keys and our gateway to the divine. The High Priestess is already our tunnel to the divine. The pope holds the key that fits the High Priestess keyhole. What makes him different from the High Priestess? Why do we need a Pope and a Papess?

My own personal key in unlocking an integral facet of the Pope was his visual structure. The Pope and Hierophant, like the Devil, the Chariot, the Lovers and so many other cards in the Waite Smith tradition, features the triangular structure of a central powerful figure and two attending figures below them. In the case of the Devil these figures are trapped by their own misunderstanding of power. In the Chariot the grumpy sphinxes (I can not WAIT to draw grumpy sphinxes! So cute!) are harnessed to pull the chariot along. In the Lovers, Adam and Eve wait beneath a flaming angel. In the Hierophant these two figures are parishioners, they’re his audience, they’re his adoring public, the choir that he preaches to. In the same way that the Emperor can’t take chances because people are depending on him, so too is the Pope depended on, in a way that the High Priestess is not. The Pope and Hierophant, in other words, are the public face of the church, the public master of a spiritual community. Realizing this, comparing it immediately to the Emperor, who is the public master of a physical community, then reflecting those values in the feminine or interior powers, suddenly the four cards as a quartet became very clear to me.

Each of the cards in the Temporal Rulers quartet symbolizes a binary variance of two values: Private-public and spiritual-physical. That’s a complicated way of saying they represent one of four possible options. The High Priestess or Papess is the first, representing our Private Spiritual world. The Empress is next representing our Private Physical world. The Emperor follows standing for our Public Physical world, and the Pope or Hierophant ends the quartet as the face of our Public Spiritual world.

One of the things that this illuminated for me was the Empress’s pregnancy. I’d never really understood what the Empress signified beyond the generic “She’s in touch with the earth, she likes to be outdoors, and she’s fertile,” which, as you might imagine, rang incredibly hollow. Nor did it explain why she was pregnant. Being pregnant, in and of itself, has no real direct link to the earth. It forces us to fall back on the idea of fertility, which I don’t think is necessarily incorrect, but never really felt like it got to the heart of the Empress for me. Now, though this lens, the Empress comes into crystal clear focus: she is about the shaping of our own physical world. The garden that she keeps is the one that she has complete control over, one whose shape and direction are a direct reflection of her desire, her will, her inner vision. Thus, her pregnancy is not a literal pregnancy, but the symbol of her ability to bring forth into the physical world the shape of her desires based simply on her will. It is not itself a symbol of fertility, but like the High Priestess, a symbol of passage: what begins as an idea germinates magically inside of her, gestates and then is made into a physical reality.

This isn’t the only way to interpret these cards, it’s not their only valence; each of them stands on their own with their own meanings, but I think their function as a group can be incredibly insightful to an otherwise neglected aspect of their meaning.

The structure of Temperance comes about from a quirk of the formatting: it was going to be very difficult to make a chibi angel stand near the bottom of the card with one foot in the water and one foot out. Also, I dislike drawing feet. Really dislike drawing feet. So that’s the first major reason that I went with the BOTA version rather than the Waite Smith version. Secondly, I love drawing cute things, and getting the chance to draw a cute lion and a cute eagle was a lot better than trying to figure out a way to manoeuvre (sorry, British spell check) the angel around and fill in the space with more mountains.

But I didn’t leave the WS design out of it entirely. Upon studying the card I learned that if you look closely at Pixie’s original Temperance you’ll notice that the name of god, YHVH, is worked into the fabric of her robes. Being the cheeky pagan that I am, I couldn’t let that ride. So instead of YHVH I went with the name of Ashera (אשרה), YHVH’s early consort before she was killed off by monotheistic dicks. You can see it worked in twice around the gold of her collar.

Secondly, the cup that the angel is pouring water out of has a small history. It’s inspired by Jerrod Maruyama’s 6 of Cups from the Super Punch Tarot. I was a bit dismayed by this card when I originally saw it, both because I was afraid people would think I ripped off the idea and because I thought I’d never be able to produce anything quite as fantastic as his powerfully happy image. I ended up buying the print that they used in the show and it hangs now over my monitor as a daily inspiration for how beautiful and energetic the Chibi Tarot can be. Temperance is, I think, the first card that really begins to approach the exuberance that Jerrod infuses into all of his work.

Temperance also represents my growth as a digital artists. As I was studying Maruyama’s work I had an epiphany about the visual construction of the cup about how creating a cup in that style could be done quickly and easily using a cunning combination of gradients. I won’t go into detail here, as I’m not sure most of my readers are interested in the Byzantine application of gradients in vector art, but the moment of seeing how something can be done more easily was a powerful one for me, symbolizing my unconscious integration of the tools I’m using for the deck. So the cup that the angel holds is an homage to Jerrod’s 6 of Cups, and the mysteries that it helped me to unravel.

There’s also one interesting mistake in this card that I forgot to remove before I went live with it (and will leave in for now). If you look closely at the pool of water in the foreground of the card you may notice some circular ripples moving outward, apparently from nothing. (You can see it better in the deviantART version ). Those ripples were originally moving out from the stick that the eagle is sitting on. This is another example of my laziness. Not the ripples, that’s an example of my sloppiness. The stick really has no right to be coming out of the ground there, but having the eagle sitting on a rock didn’t make that much more sense, and was a LOT harder to draw than having the eagle on a stick. When I stuck the fronds in at the edge of the pool it made the eagle stand out much more than the lion, so I just moved the eagle and his perch behind them…completely forgetting the ripples were still in the water.

Good news! On Monday I ordered the first set of Chibi Tarot stickers from PSPrint. Now, some of you may remember that I held a small poll on Facebook to decide which sticker should be the first Chibi Tarot sticker and that Death won in that poll by one vote. There were two reasons that I chose not to go with Death on this first sticker.

First, in order to use Death as a sticker I had to pay an extra $100 to produce a custom die. Well, I didn’t have to, but in order to have the kind of sticker that I wanted I did. So there was an initial financial reluctance. The second reason is that I was magically uncomfortable starting out with Death as our first sticker. I totally understand that death is as symbolic of new beginnings as it is of endings, but I really wanted something with no real sense of ending for something that was starting us out and something that’s unequivocally positive, reliable and enduring. So, the first promo sticker for the Chibi Tarot is the Sun, the same one that shines over the website and watches over our Facebook page.

As soon as I receive the stickers they’ll go on sale on the site for $1 including shipping, so you can your very own, first piece of the Chibi Tarot!

So, what do you think of the sticker?

I had a fan (I have a fan!) email me this morning enquiring about possible release dates for the Chibi Tarot, based on this thread from TarotForum.net: http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=173408. I didn’t have a lot of good news, but at least I did have news, and I realized that perhaps a lot of you migh have similar questions about Chibi Tarot, possible release dates and my vision for the future of the deck in general. I’ll be cross-posting this to the About page so folks will have easy access to it in the future.

First, the bad news: there’s no solid release date for the whole Chibi Tarot deck. Each card takes roughly 20 hours to put together and I’ve completed 10 of the 78 since I started almost a year and a half ago. That’s roughly two months per card, and at that rate it’ll take me just over 11 years to finish the deck! Don’t worry, I have a plan! You’ll read about it in a few paragraphs. Part of the reason for this long, slow process is that I have a business and a family that come first. Chibi Tarot is, unfortunately, third on my list of priorities, which makes it hard to devote the attention to it that I would like to.

My goal now is to finish the trumps by January of 2013 and have a majors only promo deck self-published by the time Chibi Chibi Con rolls around in March. That’s a VERY ambitious goal, and it’s doable, but I might be completely exhausted. I’m currently putting together a project on my Basecamp account to hold myself accountable and be able to track my own progress and give the deck its own bit of real estate in my life and hopefully continue the momentum.

Once the trumps are done, my hope is that the moneyball will start rolling. As I finish off the trumps I’ll be starting a Kickstarter campaign to fund the deck printing. My initial goal will be $5,000 dollars for printing, packaging and promoting a majors only deck. Anything above and beyond that will help me to finish the deck more quickly, as well as go to purchasing a variety of merchandise to sell on the website and at the cons that I’ll be vending at in 2013 (the aforementioned Chibi Chibi Con, The Emerald City Comicon and the Sakura Con are all at the top of the list because they’re closest to my secret headquarters). The more money I raise, the more cons I’ll be able to attend and the more merch I’ll be able to bring. The merch I’m planning for now is limited to cards, stickers and prints, but as the budget grows I’m hoping to expand to things like plush, apparel and toys.

Yep, that’s right, toys! One of my hobbies is designing, creating and collecting vinyl toys. I have a modest collection at my secret HQ here in Oly, and I’m currently in the process of creating a hand made Devil dunny, but my hope is that once I’ve started selling the basic merchandise I’ll be able to reinvest those profits into creating mid-size collectible figures based on my favorite characters from the Chibi Tarot. Top on the list right now are the Devil and the Hermit, but since half the majors are still to be done, who knows? The other hope is to be able to do a full set of smaller figurines for the entire major arcana (roughly the size of dunnys, for those of you who are familiar with the vinyl toy world). In short, my hope is to make the Chibi Tarot a fusion of all the things I love in my life: art, toys and the occult! And with your help and your involvement I know we can make that a reality!

So, for now most of the onus of the deck is on me, but there are still plenty of things you can do to help out. In fact, I’ve put together a handy list of things that you can do if you’re interested in furthering the cause:

4 Things you can do to help support the Chibi Tarot (even tho it’s not for sale yet)

1. Give me feedback!
   Hands down the easiest and most important piece of the puzzle. If you love the deck, tell me! If you hate the deck, tell me! Comment on deviantART, Facebook, tweet me on Twitter or send me a good old fashioned email and let me know you’re out there. There are plenty of days it feels like I’m working in a vacuum (a very comfy vacuum, but still), so it’s ALWAYS good to hear from fans. And it’s sometimes good to hear from critics. But, like the Winston Churchill Facebook meme says, if I’ve got enemies I must be doing something right!
2. Liks Us!
   Like the Chibi Tarot on Facebook, follow us on Twitter.
3. Tell other people about it (and have them give me feedback, like us and follow us!)
4. Work with me!
   I build websites for a living: PixelsmithDesign.com. The more money I make doing that, the more time I have to spend on the deck later on. If you know someone who needs a website or are part of an organization that needs a revamp, contact me and let’s chat!

The Temperate angel is not one who shies away from passions or power, but who embraces it and who, most importantly, responds to every situation with the appropriate level of strength.