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...
