Reader Spotlight: Delta-v

This week’s Spotlight Interview is with our awesome reader and community mod, Delta-v.  Delta-v was the one who really helped us get our act in gear and start promoting and advertising, and had been such a good influence in the comment section we granted him mod status 😀

Anyways, without further ado, interview time 🙂

D: First off, while I know your secret identity, everyone else knows you as Delta-v.  What’s the story behind the name?

D-v: I’d often seen the term “delta v” or “delta vee” In space travel oriented SF novels where the authors understood the principle of conservation of angular and linear momentum. That’s not a given, by any means, since quite a few authors treat spacecraft like aircraft (a la Star Wars). Since delta vee concerns the mechanism of moving a (usually) large, ungainly body from one point to another, I found it amusing to apply this concept to myself. I chose the shorter form and added a hyphen so people would see it as “delta vee” instead of “DEL tav” or “del TAV” and to give it a sort of distinguished look.

D: Delta-v, tell us a bit about yourself, the man behind the comments.

D-v: I grew up on a farm. When I was small my parents would park my brother and I in the shade near where they were working, with a stack of comics, and let us entertain ourselves. By the time I was five I was reading. Thank you Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. When I was seven, I discovered science fiction, and I’ve loved comics and SF ever since. I went to college to be a teacher, got my Bachelor’s, and discovered that I couldn’t stand all the junk that teachers have to put up with, so I went back to the farm. I settled in, got married, and figured that was that.

In the late Seventies, the economy took a nasty dip, and I lost the farm. I got a job as an appliance repairman (I still have the tools), and an artist friend let me sell his artwork at weekend art shows for some extra cash. Then my boss retired, and my wife left me. I did the only rational thing I could think of. I ran away from home. I hit the road full time selling my friend’s artwork, joined an art tour which traveled around the Western U.S., and left all the pain and disappointment behind. I did this for fifteen years. Then my artist friend’s sister decided that she wanted to sell his artwork, so I lost that, I started working for the people that ran the tour–and I’m still working for them. They eventually opened a gallery/frame shop, and I learned to frame art. It turns out that I really like framing art, which is good, because I’ve been doing it for another eleven years. And, yes, I’m somewhat artistic myself. I don’t draw much, but I sculpt in miniature–or I did until my eyesight stopped me. Reading webcomics and commenting pretty much defines what I do for recreation now.

D: What kind of farm? What was it like? I always used to imagine that living on a farm would be awesome (too many books with farmer characters?), but I’d bet it’s not as glorious as I imagined.

D-v: We had cows, horses, goats once (>P), and chickens. We had a lot of fresh air but it smelled of animal poop. We did a lot of hard work. In the summer, we’d work for a couple of hours, eat breakfast, work until noon, eat lunch, work until six, eat dinner, then work until full dark. Winter was quieter, but you had to feed the livestock no matter what the weather was doing, and the cows had usually broken a fence somewhere…. One fun chore was chopping holes in the ice of the stock pond so the cows could drink. Frozen hands in wet gloves gripping a slippery ax handle… One day my brother walked up behind me as I swung the ax back for another chop. It was a double edged ax. He still has the scar.

It wasn’t all bad. In the spring we’d go fishing sometimes, and in the fall, we’d fish and hunt, and in the winter we’d go ice fishing. Of course, we were looking for something to put in the freezer, but it was still fun.

D: What’s your favorite SF author/book/series?

D-v: Favorite author? Issac Asimov. I’ve read nearly everything he wrote. Favorite book? Gah! I figure that I’ve read over 5000 SF novels (also counting novelettes, novellas, and Ace Doubles) in my life. I guess Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel did more to open my eyes to the possibilities of “speculative fiction” than any other. Apart from that, it’s whatever I’m reading currently. Favorite series? David Weber’s Safehold series. Runner up? David Weber’s Honor Harrington series and offshoots. I’m seeing a pattern here…..

D: Any good stories from your appliance repairman days?

D-v: Appliance repair is usually pretty high stress. Either the thing broke while they were using it, or it broke and they waited until they needed it again to call us. In any case, they need it now. I did have my share of eye-rolling incidents. I’d drive for 30-45 minutes to their house, walk in with my toolkit, and see the power cord half unplugged. *Plug In* *whirr* “There you go, ma’am. That’ll be $35.00 for the house call” *sulfurous female grumbling*. Or, “Your dishwasher isn’t starting right away because it needs hot water and you’ve hooked it up to cold, so it has to heat the water for itself first”. My most memorable was “The reason your oven won’t heat is that you’ve set it to a seven hour delay”. And, yep, $35.00 each time (also the angry words) Wanna save yourself some money? Read the manual, people!

D: There have to be some good stories in the 15 years of your life on the road as an art vendor.

D-v: The art tour? Now, that’s different. We displayed the art in shopping malls as a promotional for the mall “Come see the funny artists”. And we were a colorful bunch, especially the old hands. One guy came in drunk and passed out on a bench in another artist’s booth. The problem was, the second artist was having a photographer come in for a professional photoshoot. They couldn’t move Sleeping Beauty, so they tarped him with a dropcloth, and shot around him.

Different guy, different mall, but also drunk, got caught urinating in the fountain.

One of our artists (sober, just to change the pace) was painting a picture when a local walked up and started talking to him. The artist didn’t say a word. The local then reached over, pulled the brush out of the artist’s hand, inspected it, and handed it back while still talking. He then walked away while we all stood there stunned.

One of the artists wrapped a roll off flexible corrugated packaging cardboard around his booth to keep people from taking stuff. The cardboard stood up like the curtain wall of a castle, so I got some more of it and made him four corner towers and a drawbridge. Drew arrow slits on the towers and planks on the drawbridge, and everything, and hid them in my booth. When he left after the mall closed I put them up for him and left. The next morning when he came in, artists, mall merchants, and customers were laughing about it and congratulated him on being so clever. He threw the towers and drawbridge in the trash, and was grumpy for the rest of the week.

And then there was the guy who accidentally locked his wife in their travel trailer (the lock was broken and wouldn’t open from the inside) and didn’t come back until the mall closed eleven hours later.

We usually traveled in groups caravan-style so if someone broke down we could help him/her. One day, as eight of us pulled into Roswell,NM, the leader got lost and we wandered all in a line into and out of cul-de-sacs, and up and down back streets until we finally found the mall. I thought afterward that if we’d only had sense enough to put banners on the sides of our rigs announcing the art tour, it would have been great advertising since we’d seen most of the town….

My favorite story: One of the artists had an old beater of a car that he could make backfire and lurch, and when it did, two of the doors would fly open, then slam shut as it lurched ahead. He drove past a group of us with his car backfiring, lurching, doors flapping, and him with a big grin on his face. At this, one of the guys said, “You know, it seems to me that a car that funny should have more than one clown getting out of it.”

D: That’s too bad that you don’t sculpt anymore, I would have begged for a mini-Tenzin or a mini-Deathbot sculpture 🙂 Any pieces you’re particularly proud of and want to include a picture of?

D-v: I’ve lost enough vision in my right eye to affect my depth perception, and I got tired of carving myself instead of the material I was working with. I might be able to do Deathbot because he’s mostly square angles. Curves are harder with only one eye. Shoot me some detailed drawings of him front, side, top, and back with special detail of the leg attachment, and I’ll see what I can do. And I’ll look around and see if I can find something I’ve done.

D: We’ve been really grateful to have you around TDA as a commenter (and now community mod). How did you discover us/decide we were cool? This is your chance to forever immortalize your version of the story, so choose your words carefully 😉

D-v: I’ll just tell the truth–that should do it. I found TDA through Sarah Driffill (Princess Chroma) who I found through Charlie Wise (Groovy, Kinda) so he shares part of the credit. I was impressed with her writing ability, so I asked her if there were any other examples of her writing. She sent me to The Birkenhain Journal (right here on this very website) and mentioned that there was a comic on the site that she thought I’d like. Two tries later, I got it figured out (things were a bit more chaotic, back then), and started to read. Really good writing, really good art, really well developed concept (really snarky AI)–I was hooked. Everything I’ve done since then flows from that, and you’re just getting better and better.

D: Any other awesome webcomics you’re active on that you’d recommend to readers of TDA?

D-v: Princess Chroma and Groovy, Kinda of course–really good writing and really good art, great sense of humor. The Specialists, just as gritty and almost as bloody as TDA–a hard science “what if” WW 2 concept. Vatican Assassins, a truly wild concept–demon hunting teens (mostly)– well developed. TEC: The Echo Chronicles, an alternate world fantasy with generous amounts of snarky humor and pratfalls. Crystal Ball, a fantasy anti-buddy comedy about a young woman and the magician she accidentally controls (sorta). Think Before You Think, slightly eerie concept–what if you knew someone who was a real mind-reader. Tethered, a young woman in a post-disaster landscape has a reluctant, but necessary relationship with a smart-alec robot. DadRockGirlPop–the music scene with an extra ration of geekiness, and adorable characters. Blitz Phoenix, about a teenager with awesome electrical powers–which he doesn’t know how to use, and an attitude–which he does. The Lost Island of the Na-Run-Tok, about the oddball adventures of a young college woman castaway among native people who treat her like a VIP, and who wear a lot of tattoos–and little else. I read other comics, but these are the ones where I’m most active. I think some of them are on your “Links” page, but I’m not good enough at HTML to link up the rest.

D: That’s great! We should have you write some comic promo blog posts 😀  

D-v: I’ll give it a shot, but I’m much better at encouraging than I am at constructive criticism. The “insightful” questions I occasionally ask are as rough as I get.

D: Any advice for creators of webcomics on how to best meet the needs of their readers?

D-v: Tell your story, and tell it well. Tell it the way you’d like to hear it told. Always try to improve your art, but never neglect the story. Develop a good relationship with your Commenting Community, and encourage them to talk. Ask them questions. Listen to the answers. Ignore the “shippers” unless you were already going there. Don’t over-extend. It’s better to start out with one page a week, and add more as your speed and skill improve, than to start with three times a week, and have to cut back to two, and then to one. (Yeah, Dan, I know. But you were racing to get back to where you were before, so that doesn’t count.)

Alright, that was awesome.  Thanks Delta-v! We look forward to working with you on some comic promo/review/spotlights.  Thanks again for sharing so much.

Have any questions for Delta-v?  Ask them in the comment section below 😀