As I mentioned earlier this week, navigating the tables at the Short Run Festival can be a little challenging. There's lots of colorful comics shouting for your attention. One of the ways you can make life easier for yourself is by walking into the Fisher Pavillon with a shopping list.
Below is a list of tables/exhibitors/artists/publishers I plan to pay special attention to on my first go-round. When I do a second loop, I'll follow my bliss and pick up stuff I didn't see on this list.
• ZAPP—America's, and maybe the world’s, largest 'zine archive—is based right here in Seattle. Go check it out.
• Yeti Press publishes a couple gems. Check out SuperCakes by Kat Leyh.
• Michelle Peñaloza produced landscape/heartbreak, a chapbook of poems that literally map points of personal trauma onto Seattle. She'll be selling her chapbook at Short Run.
• Mita Mahato cuts up paper with a scalpel and creates dark, contemplative, but still kinda funny books. Check out her newest effort, "Sea."
• Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg is coming up from Portland. She does a lot of stuff, but I like her poignant, narrative comics.
• Levi Hastings does striking watercolor illustrations, comics, and art. Full disclosure: He's done freelance illustrations for the Stranger, but he also works with people clients like HBO and Hello Mr.
• kuš! is a comics publisher from Latvia, and, frankly, that's all I need to know. I have no idea what the artists in Latvia are up to, but their stuff looks wild.
• Krish Raghav won The Dash Grant this year, which put $250 in his pocket. With that money, he produced his new book, Estilo Hindu: A Mexico City Travelogue, which will debut at Short Run on Saturday.
• Jen Tong does all kinds of 'zines and intricate silkscreen work. Her drawings are colorful, psychedelic, and haunting. Look at this guy and tell me his lemon head does not haunt you.
• JT Wilkins publishes Black Dayz and The Afrofuturist. He also does pretty compelling erotic comics.
• I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I'm eager to see the latest from Short Run organizer Eroyn Franklin.
• Cold Cube Press is a new interdisciplinary magazine out of Seattle. They publish art, illustrations, and literature. (Full disclosure: Some of my poems were printed in the first issue, along with poems by Jane Wong and Leena Joshi.) But I'll be buying the latest non-me issue the second I see it. All of the magazines are made using a risograph, but they all look completely different, so I'm excited to see the new design.
• Bruce Bickford is a legendary figure in animation, and I hear he's pretty fun to talk to. Hopefully I'll be able to fight through the crowd and say hi.
• Ben Horak does those gross, gloopy, hairy comics. He publishes a lot of work, but I like the stuff he contributes to Intruder, a great quarterly comic newspaper run by Mark Palm.
This is a long shopping list, and I could add a few more, but I'm going to go broke if I keep going.
