An Indie Fest Grows in Portland
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on October 31, 2006 Sign up now!
by Douglas Wolk, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 10/31/2006
 Ken Stiedle and Randall Kirby from Flop Productions. |
The publishers with their own tables at Stumptown are mostly Pacific Northwest natives—Top Shelf and Oni Press co-sponsored a party Saturday night, and Dark Horse and Fantagraphics Books both had small displays. Fantagraphics also debuted a handful of titles, most notably the new hardcover reprint of E.C. Segar's early Popeye strips, and Oni had Jamie S. Rich signing the first copies of his book 12 Reasons Why I Love Her.
But the real stars of Stumptown are self-publishers, individual artists and collectives like Pants Press, whose table was doing a bangup business in minicomics, prints and T-shirts. Kazu Kibuishi, whose Flight anthologies many Pants Press members have contributed to, was one of the show's featured guests and had a booth of his own; the other special guests, Paul Chadwick, Colleen Coover, Keith Knight and Steve Rolston, also spent most of the weekend holding court at their tables.
Portland is well served by indie-friendly comics stores, several of which had booths of their own, including Guapo Comics, which hosted a reading by a handful of cartoonists on Saturday night, and Bridge City Comics. So the most successful booths offered stuff that's usually only available by mail order, like Chris Baldwin's book collections of his online comic strips Little Dee and Bruno. And one of the most-trafficked tables wasn't selling anything at all: it was where the Multnomah County Library was promoting its graphic novel program. This year's Stumptown had a handful of panels and presentations, notably the return of Ezra Claytan Daniels's "Comix Apocalypse"—a drawing battle featuring the likes of Colleen Coover (Banana Sunday), Aaron Renier (Spiral-Bound) and Sarah Oleksyk (Ivy)—and a performance of several pieces from Shannon Wheeler's Too Much Coffee Man opera.
