More APE Action

Now this is more like it. After the visit to Emeralc City Comic Con in Seattle last month, APE was a breath of fresh air. I felt like I was back with my people. Cons full of dealers, overpriced old piles of newsprint, TV stars, movie memorabilia, and costume contests really aren’t my cup of tea, and that’s essentially what Emerald City is all about. The dealers’ area takes up a good 3/5 of the convention floor, leaving publishers and artist the remaining silces. For some people, wheeling and dealing to improve their collection is what these shows are all about, and I’m not criticizing that, but it’s just not for me.

APE, on the other hand, is all about the things I like about comics, creativity and discovery. The convention regularly features the companies willing to put out books that will only appeal to a tiny core audience, but push the boundaries of the medium in ways that larger companies aren’t willing to. Buenaventura, Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Young American, Oni, AIT/PlanetLar, and others large and small are the heart of the event. Artists like Art Spiegelman, Kazu Kibuishi, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Hope Larson, Kevin Huizenga, and others are the stars here, and there’s always an atmosphere of comraderie. Plus, there’s a treaure trove of talent you’ve probably never heard of just waiting to be discovered. This year, some of our favorites in this category were the incredible books produced by Icelcreamandia, Robin Enrico’s clever Controller minicomic, Sarah Oleksyk’s work in the criminally under-hyped Papercutter anthology, and Liz Baillie’s My Brain Hurts books.

This year’s event was a little less crowded, or at least it felt like it. It was definitely a large, successful event again, but it felt like there was a little more breathing room in the crowds, and that led to a more intimate feeling as well. Running into cartoonists, bloggers, and fans that we knew (or were just meeting) made this year one of our best experiences for sure.

There’s a reason we’ve made APE an annual pilgrimage, even after moving away from the San Francisco area, and this year’s event helped remind us of that. Even though we couldn’t make it to any of the panels we really wanted to attend, due to travel logistics, it was well worth the trip. And of course, being able to meet up with old friends was icing on an already sweet cake.

APE aftermath

After a few days of recovery after APE, I’m still unable to do a proper round-up. Why? Because it’s as awesome as it always is. Not much else to report beyond that. So rather than take my lack of enthusiasm as any negative reaction to the con, I’ll just do a link dump:

The Daily Crosshatch pt.1 and pt.2
Ian Brill’s PW coverage
Bryan Lee O’Malley’s food journal
Fart Party’s pt.1 and pt.2
Brent Warnock’s wrap-up

To ensure this isn’t total waste of data space, I can say that for the first time we felt popular. Bryan Lee O’Malley and Hope Larson both recognized us. The Hot Mexican Love Comics guys both thanked me for the review last year and criticized my dismissal of the low rider story as “standard fare.” I’ve never been asked to justify my opinion, particularly to the artist, so that was an awkward moment for me. We ran into Sophie from Gumpop, which was as pleasant this year as it was last year, despite some overt fangirling over a sketch that Hope did for her.

APE Approach

For the past two years, Dylan and I have attended APE together. As anyone in a relationship can testify, attending a con with a boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/etc can be as difficult to do together as airline travel or buying a house or trying to rent a video together. The fact that we can do APE without getting annoyed with each other and both find things to amuse ourselves speaks volumes to the variety of this con.

This year is no different. In fact, it might even be better, with the attendance of a certain Canadian couple that we love so dearly. So, with bags packed and selected books pulled for artist signing, I’d like to offer some last minute advice for attending APE:

1. Do walk the entire floor. There are many, many artists that you may not be on your radar that put the “awe” in awesome.
2. Talk to the awesome people mulling around the Comic Relief spot. You will hear good recommendations and probably bump elbows with some of the special guests. This is fun, but for the love of Gob don’t squeal (though to be fair, I haven’t encountered this reaction from anyone but Jhonen Vasquez fans).
3. Don’t try to fit in with the hipster crowd. They might try to convince you skinny pants look good. They do not.
4. Bring a large bag. There are many treasures to be found, from crafty goods to wallets to photocopied minis.
5. If you see us, say hi. I command it. We are nice people, I swear.

Okay, that’s all my undercaffinated mind can muster at this moment. Here’s to an awesome weekend!

Viva la B.D.!

Our previously mentioned trip to France became MY trip to France due to insurmountable challenges from the Canadian passport agency. So armed with a less than elementary command of the language and a devalued dollar, I went prepared to take Paris by storm as an empowered female tourist. Or something like that.

Apprehensive and nervous, but rested after a six hour nap, I ventured out of the hotel in the Latin Quarter my first night. I had no agenda, no idea how the neighborhood was laid out, and was in desperate need of food. So began my trek down an unmarked side street. I saw a neat painted door and swooped in for a closer look. Much to my delight and surprise it was a comic book shop! Around the corner from my hotel! Filled with cute old men pouring over Golden and Silver age books. This encounter was a signpost for adventure that soon followed.

The comic book shop and the book shop selling comics is very much alive in Paris. I really wasn’t sure what to expect, but my suspicion that the French, being a cultured society, would have at least some discernible amount of love for the “B.D.” In my naivety, I thought that if nothing else, at least L’Association brought cool indie books to the French and English speaking world (think about David B. and what the world would be like without Epileptic - depressing, right?).

Boy was I wrong. They don’t love the B.D. They LOVE the B.D. Like shouting from the rooftops love. Like taking it behind the middle school and…well, you get where I am going.

Maybe it was just because I was staying in the student-centric Latin Quarter, but in the ten minute walk from the Notre Dame to my hotel, I encountered FIVE comic book shops. And not just little shops. Big multi-level shops. Big multi-level shops crammed full of young and old, male and female, nerdy and not. It would’ve brought a overwhelmed with joy tear to my eye had I not suspected everyone laughing at my wretched French.

So I am back in Seattle with a nice array of back issues and a Jim Woodring book in French that is thankfully text free, an even higher opinion of the French, and a sad feeling that the frenzy I witnessed on that Saturday afternoon at Album on Blvd St Germain would never EVER happen here.

Lazy or just busy?

As usual, we have gone through a bit of a lull in posting. But this time, it’s not due to lack of enthusiasm. This time we almost have a valid excuse. We are preparing for our first trip to Europe. To Paris, specifically.

We’ve been busy with brushing up on the language - which has Dylan reading Locas in French - and researching which comic shops and galleries to go to (of which there seems to be many delightful choices). We’ve also suspended our comic spending, which is the primary cause of this interruption in regular broadcasting. This has made us terribly sad, knowing that the end of Nextwave and the newest installment of Castle Waiting are waiting for us just down the road at Zanadu.

So while we wait with anticipation of the comic goodness coming our way shortly, we’ll continue to speak in choppy French, save our pennies, and annoy everyone with our mounting enthusiasm.

By the way, if you would like to be added to our postcard list just drop us a line. Or if you have some genuine insight on cool things to do in Paris, that would be appreciated. Because otherwise we are going to sit on the Seine with a bottle of wine and a baguette and drink ourselves stupid enough to ensure that American tourists are continually hated on a global level.

Stumptown Highlights

Portland, OR’s Stumptown Comics Festival took place last weekend, and Serene and I decided to breeze through, in between meeting up with my recently-hitched sister and her friends from out of state. It was a quick trip indeed, with us arriving in Portland after 10pm on Friday to check in at the Jupiter Hotel, and hitting the road back to Seattle at 1:30pm on Saturday. Somewhere in there, we found time to snag a few hours of sleep and buy some comics.

The nice thing about Stumpton is that it’s a comfortable size, much smaller than APE and therefore less overwhelming, yet it still manage to attract the same caliber of talent. Larger independent publishers like Oni, Top Shelf, and Fantagraphics were present, with groups of their artists signing and sketching away, and the attendance was rounded out with lots of smaller companies and self-publishers in a variety of genres. Webcomics, minicomics, pamphlets, and graphic novels were all heavily represented, with prints, t-shirts, toys, original art, and assorted other media available as well. There’s enough there that you can spend a few hours taking it all in, but not so much that you feel like you missed something when you leave.

Some highlights:
-Flipping through some new Fantagraphics books, like the upcoming installment of Mome, and having Ben Catmull sign a copy of the gorgeous debut issue of his book Monster Parade.
-Making paper stars with the incredibly friendly Erika Moen.
-Standing mere inches from living legend Scott McCloud at Erika Moen’s table. Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to say hi, and thank him for putting a blurb for my horrible 24-hour comic on his list.
-Getting the new Liz Prince mini, and making small talk about Seattle hipster bars.
-Finally getting Kaz Strzepek’s completed, partially redrawn book, the Mourning Star, which I’d been reading as minicomics. He’s practically our neighbor, here in Capitol Hill! Get this book if you can.
-Serene’s watchful eye was responsible for me scoring a copy of Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions #3, the only issue of the minicomics incarnation I was missing (and where the story really starts, anyways).
-Serene getting a lovely, detailed sketch from Brandon Graham, another Seattle artist we love. We picked up some of his minis (and a naughty comic he made!), as well as Meathaus 8, which he’s a contributor to.
-Speaking of Meathuas, Farel Dalrymple had a new mini called Spigot, and some beautiful original art.
-Seeing comics workhorse Kazu Kibuishi, on a panel about the process of creating comics, describe his process. He mentioned that he can ink a page in an hour and colour it in 5, but that he hopes to increase his pace to 6 pages a day. The other panelists just listened in utter disbelief.
-A new issue of Papercutter, the anthology title from Tugboat Press.

I’m sure there’s plenty I’m forgetting, but with amount of stuff we crammed into such a short trip, that’s inevitable. But check out Serene’s photos of the event too!

Add it up

Paid day off!

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Jupiter Hotel

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Awesome!

APE 2K6: In Text

Wow, what a whirlwind weekend.

(quick note: make sure you check the previous post for APE photos and celebrity comics blogger cameos!)

Our trip began shortly after we both got off work on Friday, as we scrambled to grab dinner and dash to the airport for our 8:45 flight to Oakland, CA. We used a park-n-fly service in Seatac, and the shuttle driver who took us to the airport shared the following joke with us after noticing my “Defoliate Bush” bumper sticker:

So there’s this little girl, and her cat just had a litter of kittens. She has a bunch of her friends over to show them the kittens, and after all the oohing and aahing, the little girl proudly proclaims “..and they’re all Republicans!”

Now her father, overhearing this, thinks it rather odd. But knowing children pick up odd little bits and pieces, he doesn’t think to much of it.

A few weeks later, the little girl has another batch of friends over to show off the kittens, and her father is confused to hear her announce that “..they’re all Democrats!” So this time, he asks his daughter, “But honey, didn’t you tell your friends a few weeks ago that the kittens were all Republicans?”

and the little girl replies “Yes, Daddy, but now their eyes are OPEN!”

Anyhow. A small tangent. But the flight was uneventful, and we arrived in Petaluma late Friday night, then headed down to the Concourse in San Francisco just in time for the doors to open at the Convention.

Our first stop was Coldcut distribution’s table. They have an indie comics ding-and-dent box every year at APE, where they sell slightly damaged books and pamphlets for $8 a pound. It’s usually a good place to get good deals, and this year was no exception. They had some old self-publish Paul Pope books, a copy of Locas, Paul Hornschmeier’s Collected Sequential, and almost complete runs of Demo and Rare Bit Fiends, among plenty of other goodies.

From there we wandered around the convention center for a while, taking in the sights and taking note of places we would want to stop at some point during the day.

How to even recap this? There were so many highlights during the day. The Top Shelf table was a great place to start, with Jennifer Daydreamer, Aaron Renier, Liz Prince, Jeffrey Brown, and Renee French all in one long line. I noticed the Papercutter #2 postcard on Liz Prince’s table, and she told us that she didn’t have copies, but that Tugboat Press had them, around the corner. So we headed off to Tugboat’s table to get copies for Liz to sign, and had a nice little conversation with Greg Beans from Tugboat. We talked about Emerald City Comicon, Seattle, Confounded Books, Stumptown, the state of comics retail, and future plans for his quarterly anthology title Papercutter. Greg may be one of the nicest, genuinely enthusiastic people we met there that day.

Not that enthusiasm was in short supply. The convention hall seemed a little less crowded than previous years, and there was certainly a little less bumping into people and squeezing through crowds. Not that attendance was sparse, just a little more comfortable for the size of the venue. There was a pretty outgoing atmosphere, and it was hard not to get caught up in the enthusiastic spirit that most of the artist brought to the event. I picked up quite a few minis and books by artists I’d never heard of before, like Joseph Bergin’s clever Death FAQ and Fistman minis, from Say Uncle Comics. Or Vasilis Lolo’s Hats mini and his Nebuli collaboration with Becky Cloonan. Or Tomasz Kaczynski’s Transalaska and Transsiberia books (beautifully screenprinted and wrapped with a vellum band) Or Robert Ullman’s Atom Bomb Bikini series of salaciously cute sketch pamphlets.

And of course, there were plenty of people there whose work I was very familiar with. I was happy to see that Anders Nilsen and Drawn & Quarterly both had copies of the Big Questions books I had missed, and Anders also had a book called Sisyphus, which I hadn’t heard of before. He’s one of my favorite artists these days, but I didn’t work up the nerve to ask him for a sketch until later on…

Kaz Strzepek, who I recently blogged about, had a book called Spaz, collecting two years worth of gut-wrenchingly hilarious comics about problem roommates and the ultimate in nerdy sexual fantasies. Like his previous Mourning Star minis, this book has a two color screened cover, and is bound with a matching, hand tied thread. Pure quality.

And then there was James Jean, signing copies of his amazing artbook, Process Recess, over at the Adhouse Books table. He whipped up a simple and evocative sketch on the inside cover in a matter of seconds it seemed. That man just oozes talent, and perusing his book only confirms that.

Derek Kirk Kim showed up later in the afternoon, with a stack of Lowbright minis so new, he hadn’t even finished binding them. He just whipped out an exacto, some patterned packing tape, and a cutting mat and went to work right there. He was so on the ball, he even caught someone accidentally giving him a twenty and two ones for a three dollar poster, much to that customer’s gratitude.

We were there for hours, and probably circled the convention floor a dozen times or more, but eventually, we took a break for dinner with some old friends, before heading over to the Mome book signing/after party at the Giant Robot store off of Haight Street. It was a pretty popular destination, but it was funny to walk in and see Jeffrey Brown, Gabrielle Bell, and Anders Nilsen trapped behind a table piled with copies of Mome, while everybody circled the piles of regular Giant Robot merchandise. I almost got the impression that they were there as a window display. At this point, I finally had Anders sign and sketch in my copy of Dogs & Water (which I’d picked up at the ding and dent box earlier). He put a lot time into a meticulously detailed drawing of abandoned socks, a boot, and a glass of water, while we talked briefly about Seattle and Big Questions. The after party was pretty well attended by other artists too. I spotted Aaron Renier, Kaz Strzepek, and Robyn Chapman, among others.

Bah! It’s all such a blur now, two days later, and mixed in with reunions with California friends. That’s probably the best re-cap I can put together now, even though there’s a ton of things left out. I ended up with a stack of books, comics, and minis over a foot high, many of them customized with sketches. Maybe I can get around to posting a few of the cooler ones…but then again I feel stretched thing these days as it is, what with another trip this weekend and several music/design projects in the works. All I can say for sure is, I can’t wait for next year…

APE: The Photo Post

SUCCESSLESS GOES APE!

Partially because I am lazy and partially because I am responsible for most of these photos, I’m responsible for the photos from APE. A word of warning: a large majority of these are blurry because we are sorta shy and didn’t want people to know we were taking photographs. Either way, we hope you enjoy!

From the radtacular Top Shelf Table from left to right: Jennifer Daydreamer, Aaron Reiner, Liz Prince (who seems to be checking Dylan out), and a shy Jeffrey Brown.

Becky Cloonan and Vasilis Lolos have got to be the most hardcore comic couple out there. They had a joint project on their table Nebuli, which looks awesome and he also helped her out on East Coast Rising

Next, we ran into Sophie of Gumpop and her friend. Too bad the guy we asked to take our picture is a bad with this camera as I am.

While waiting with Dylan for James Jean, I recognized Ian from
Brill Building and I awkwardly initiated an introduction. He is as intimidatingly smart and funny in person as I thought he would be. He also later introduced us to Graeme from Fanboy Rampage. Awesome comic blogger fun!

If you can make it out, which I doubt you can, here we have a lovely Derek Kirk Kim handbinding a delightful mini appropriately named Lowbright. He’s so rad. Enough said.

After a couple double-takes, I got so fangirly from seeing two of my absolute favorite cartoonists together that I made Dylan take this. Not too shortly after this was taken Dan Clowes pushed his son in his stroller. I think I got a little chocked up.

The floor starts to clear as the day winds down.

And Dylan tries unsuccessfully to mate with his Tomasz Kaczynski minis. I throw a fit and shread them to pieces.

I’m totally kidding.

Then we head over to the Giant Robot/MOME After Party Signing thing….

Dylan plays it cool while I try not using the flash some more. Why didn’t I learn my lesson? Why God, why?

An indie comic lovers dream team courtesy of MOME: Jeffrey Brown, Gabrielle Bell, and Anders Nilsen.

The crowd vies for the trio’s attention in the laid-back way the hipster set of the West Coast can offer.

Anders smiles pretty for me while Dylan tries his hardest to stifle his excitement for the amazing sketch Anders did for him.