Feel free to share with students or other talented individuals you think may have an interest.
For this year's Comic Fest in October, award-winning toy designer, Wendy All is creating The Draco Tavern, based on a series of short stories about Earth’s only multispecies bar that were written by Comic Fest's 2013 Guest of Honor, Larry Niven. To our knowledge, this will be the first time anyone has ever physically created The Draco Tavern, which will be a real coffee bar at Comic Fest. The Le Chanticleer room at the Town and Country Resort and Convention Center in Mission Valley will be transformed into The Draco Tavern. The Draco Tavern is an intergalactic space port in Siberia and the decade is the 2030s.
See the fictional backstory below.
Wendy is accepting art submissions for the Tavern. She's looking for:
1. Travel posters for any place in the galaxy
2. Unusual restaurant ads (see Roswell McDonalds, for example)
3. Beautiful magazine style ads for unusual beverages or mixed drinks (look at perfume and alcohol ads for ideas),
4. Alien girl “pin ups"
5. Sports teams or alien sporting events
6. Aliens offering their “services” (all in good taste of course) will help with the ambiance and humor.
7. Any other ideas that are approved by the committee.
Since this is a space port, we may include a kind of bulletin board that has:
-
Ride sharing ads (e. g. “need a ride to planet XXX in the Albireo twin star system, will share fuel costs”)
- “Wanted” posters
- Arrival/Departure schedules for different star systems, etc.
For the bulletin board, think funky, cluttered college campus style.
ALL SUBMISSIONS MUST BE IN GOOD TASTE, possibly exist in Larry Niven’s world, and pass our review.
Wendy will assist in any art direction. Any art that is selected will be credited in The Draco Tavern Chapbook, published in conjunction with the cafe creation and available at Comic Fest. Unfortunately, the non-profit nature of our work means this would be an unpaid, but potentially super stellar, opportunity. Comic Fest will handle poster printing and there is no set size. There's also no official deadline for this, but the sooner the better. I have more detailed information and a packet of inspirational images from Wendy that helps define her vision for this project. Anyone interested in this or getting involved in Comic Fest in general should contact me.
Once again, everyone is welcome to participate in creating posters or other ephemera for The Draco Tavern, however, PLEASE READ THE BOOK, otherwise you won’t understand the Niven universe or sense of humor.
Fictional background story:
The Draco tavern is located in Siberia, near the Mount Forel spaceport. The tavern was created after a race of sentient aliens called Chirpsithra landed on Earth. They stand 11 feet tall with salmon pink exoskeletons. All of them appear to be female. Their equivalent of alcohol's effect on humans is a mild electrical current. They originated on tidally locked planets around red dwarf suns. Eventually, they had control over every single red dwarf sun in the galaxy, or so they claim. They enjoy the company of other sentient beings, and are extremely intelligent. Units of currency used for Chirp-Human commerce are the 'svith' and trade markers, mentioned in the story Cruel and Unusual. When they first put their mile-wide bubbleships into orbit around the Moon and landed in Siberia, they brought a host of aliens with a desire to eat, drink and socialize, thus the Draco Tavern was designed to cater to their individual, very diverse, and often conflicting interests. The Draco Tavern, as described by Larry Niven, is “Earth’s only multi-species bar”, that is, a gathering place for many different aliens around the galaxy, and as such, has unusual menu items and environments to support alien life forms that cannot exist in our atmosphere. In The Draco Tavern, tables can be “enclosed” in environments with artificial atmospheres for aliens who are unable to breathe
oxygen.
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Thanks,
Pam
Pamela A. Jackson
Information Literacy Librarian
TV/Film/Theatre/New Media/Comic Arts Librarian
Library and Information Access
San Diego State University, LA-1101C
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA 92182-8050
Tel:
619 594-3809Fax:
619 594-3270E-Mail:
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http://rohan.sdsu.edu/~pjackson/