Got up early Friday morning because the girls wanted it to be their dress up day, they did their hair and built outfits centered around tank tops that Adam had painted with pictures of them in science fiction gear. It took long enough that the same videos started to replay on VH1 but this is really more of a criticism of VH1′s programming. We handed them the majority of our business cards because they do a much better job promoting us than we do and called a cab.

Cab driver decided to let us off in the middle of the street and let us deal with the subsequent traffic. Inside the convention hall we split, Adam and I had the majority of our meetings on Friday, so we went off to do that, and Hillary and Olivia disappeared into the crowds.

Adam and I shamelessly abused a few connections to get our feet in new doors, and managed to lighten our bags by a few pounds handing out our leave behind pitches with several companies we hadn’t spoken to before.

When we caught back up with Olivia and Hillary later in the day they had somehow given out our cards to Gene Simmons, and by then Adam and I were toying with the notion of letting them pitch our books instead of us.

Most of the day burned by, we grabbed some dinner, and a couple more cab’s rides with drivers who preferred to travel and unreasonably high rates of speed and then made our way to 4th and B for the Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job tour. In line we met a guy who seemed pretty decent, however once he got inside and got some drinks in him he turned into the worst guy- screaming random insults at the stage, trying to start a circle pit during DJ Doug pound, and just all around doing his best to ruin the evening for everyone in the venue

After the show we grabbed some Mexican food and found that we were far too tired for the second show at 4th and B that night- The Mighty Boosh. We tried our hands at ticket scalping, and found that we were no damn good at it and then flagged down the single angriest cab driver in the world. He screamed at pedicabs, honked his horn constantly and got physically upset when we attempted to pay with a 20 dollar bill.

We managed not to get beaten to death by a cab driver and retired to our room at Hotel Hellmouth for the night. After a brief squabble with a very large and colorful variety of local insect the room was secured and we drifted off to sleep.

The flight out of Boise to L.A. was delayed ten minutes, we probably should have just turned around and gone home. Of course we didn’t, what follows are the results.

The plane flights, while on the tiniest planes -one of them with actual prop engines- were fine, the problems started when we landed in San Diego. For the last three years Adam and I have attended Comic Con international, we pitch as many different books to as many companies as we can and try to land some work for the rest of the year.

Last year we booked a hotel quite a distance from the convention center, it was decorated like your worst grandmother’s house and very expensive. The distance from the convention center meant that if we missed the last train we were completely out of luck, the last train left at just before midnight which kind of limited our convention night life options. Limited them to basic cable in the hotel room that looked and smelled like a rest home.

So this year, Olivia was quite proactive, in January she got online and started looking into hotels and in very little time located us one half a mile from the center for a too good to be true price of 65 dollars a night. She called and made reservations, she double checked the price. She then explained that the dates were during Comic- Con and asked if the rates would stay the same, the hotel people said there would be no change to the rates. They, of course, were lying,

But Liv didn’t stop there, we knew it was too good to be true so she called -several times, over a period of several months- to confirm the reservation and the price.

By the time we made it to downtown San Diego and called for direction it was too late to turn back but the warning signs were starting to scream, starting with the hotel staff’s total inability to give basic direction on how to locate their establishment. Now from the address and a brief look at an online map Adam and I had a pretty good idea how to find the place despite the staff’s best attempts to hide their location from us (hint: if, during the course of your directions, you tell someone to turn left four times in a row in a downtown grid you have just told them to walk around in a big stupid circle).

So despite the worst possible set of directions we forged a path toward the hotel, on foot. San Diego near the convention center goes from touristy destination to homeless shanty tent town in one block and most of our path was spent weaving in between derelict shopping carts and sleep tarps, all while Hillary did her best to convince us that the hotel we were looking for did not exist.

It turns out it does exist, but I almost wish it didn’t. Because once we found the place things only got worse. Olivia and I entered the hotel lobby and approached the front desk where we were promptly informed that reservation that we had made and confirmed at lest three times was now for only one day at 4 times the price we had been quoted.

Tempers were lost, potential hotel patrons were scared off, tiny hotel management staff was intimidated, and in the end we ended up paying twice the price we had been quoted. You see, we were trapped. No hotel in the area had any vacancies and if they did they were at insane prices. But the fun didn’t stop there, no -no no no- it did not stop.

First they booked us in a single bed smoking room, then switched it to a double bed non-smoking but told us the wrong room number. When we got to the correct room the door was wide open and it could not ,by smell, be distinguished from a smoking room, or an ashtray even. There were several grams of sand on a shelf 6 feet off the ground and the mini-fridge hadn’t been cleaned. I don’t mean it hadn’t been wiped down, I mean that the previous resident’s food was still in it. The hotel also advertised free Wi-Fi but a note told me to ask the front desk about it, I did and I was told to just connect to whatever network in the area worked the best. None of these networks, I discovered, were supplied by the hotel. This means that the service they advertised was not a service at all, but rather internet stolen from the surrounding businesses.

Some of us felt like crying, others went ahead and did, and then we straightened ourselves up and went out to get our convention badges and some dinner. The restaurant managed to screw up all of our orders but we just didn’t have the energy to fight any more.

Here’s hoping I don’t catch swine flue from the unwashed masses tomorrow, and maybe score some work. That is, of course, if I don’t get murdered by either a transient or vengeful hotel staff in the night.

Well, we’re here.  Site is live.  This ship is shambling toward toward your internet boxes.  We bring a few kinks in tow, but the most important thing is that we’ve finally got our home on the internet after years of shanking transients for storage space with a melted and sharpened toothbrush in the slums of your deviantarts, bloggers, myspaces, and facebooks.  Long-winded metaphors aside, Floodworks will be the place to go to find out just what the hell is going on with me (Adam Rosenlund), Ethan Ede, Adam Bennett, and Dillon Woods.  We’ll be giving you loads of  content, whether it be here on the blog with frequent updates, weekly on our web comics section, or in multimedia projects that lie outside of our usual comic fare.

In addition to what the others contribute to this section, I’ll be using this blog to show process work, share my experiences in getting the various projects up and running, as well as just talking about comic art in general.  I haven’t really been open about my process before, so it should be a new thing for all involved.

Stick around, y’all.  Things are gonna get interesting.