Stumptown Comic Fest

Hi. It's the first week of May and I'm depressed. Again. Or still. Or something. But I've been doing some fun stuff lately and I want to capture it, so I'm going to do a little back and forth.

Last weekend I went to Stumptown Comic Fest. It was so interesting. One of the many great things about me* is that I'm genuinely interested in a lot of different things. I really love learning about new things - I'm a very curious person and I love learning, seeing new perspectives, widening my frame of reference. I have a friend at work who is an artist and who talks about his artistic process, and lately I've been hanging out with another friend who is a brilliant illustrator (see comics, buy books here), and I've been thinking about the process of creating. I guess I've been thinking about it for a while because it's why I got into sewing a year or two ago - I wanted to have to make decisions about textures and colors and design. I think of all of that as related to expression, and I think I'm slowly trying to find ways to express myself. No. This is actually what it is: I'm trying to figure out ways that all of these various experiences and emotions inside of me want to be expressed.

So I was turning over these thoughts in my brain and then, bam, Comic Fest.

It was really different for me and really fun. I felt out of place, so that was challenging. But I appreciate being out of my comfort zone; that's where most learning takes place for me. I just basically wandered from table to table, not making eye contact with artist and reps so they wouldn't talk to me, and thinking about the nature of the whole thing - promoting and selling and explaining and relating things you create. A lot of it didn't appeal to me, or I should say I didn't connect with it. I'm not a Sci-fi fan (I just had to google to see if I spelled "Sci-fi" correctly) and after a while it seemed like most of the work was centered on girls with huge boobs or white men. Snore. (Seriously, can we get some people of color up in here, comic people?) But I kept looking around and I found a bunch of stuff that I liked. And I had a few fun conversations (and a couple awkward ones - mostly where the artists asked, "So, what do you do for a living?" Oh, I'm a banker . . . [crickets].) I had one interesting conversation with an artist from Seattle who said, "Why did you come?" and I thought, ok, I'll try it. So I explained how I've been exploring expression and we had a decent conversation from it.

Anyway, I'm really glad I went and I love the two books I bought. Here are some of my favorite artists from the event:

Adult Babysitting - Tales from a real life Portland bartender - I think this is clever as hell

Definitely Far From Korea - this is great stuff, I loved this guy; I bought a book of his called This Will Pass, and I love it - probably my favorite artwork I found

Nico Hitoride - I can't get any of his pages to load, so here's his Twitter account; I really liked his illos

Last Train to Old Town - this is beautiful, beautiful stuff, heavy on concepts; I just loved this guy's vibe

* :)