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!