APE CON CON-TINUED!

thought I should say some more about Snan Fransisco.....

after the book launch at floating world in Portland, we got to spend the night with the generous and hospitable Joe Keatinge ( who won an eisner award and a harvey award for his compilation!) he had an awful lot of books in his apartment. The next day we picked up young Farel Dalrymple author of Pop Gun War http://www.popgunwar.com/ to help us drive to San Fransisco. The I5 is always good for fun times like road kill spotting, and punchbuggy religious-propaganda billboard.

Here's Farel driving Friday. I always want to spell his name "Faryl" probably because of the awesome way his last name is spelled.....DALRYMPLE ....also fun to say out loud: "fair-rell dall-rim-pell". The drive down was pretty smooth and uneventful except for the cruel manipulations of a Mazda full of teenage-ish girls up to no goods with my men on the highway. There were three girls in their car plus some large cage containing some kind of animal, which was convenient. Three loose-moraled girls for the lads, and whatever mammal was in the cage for me.
Farel got us into downtown San Fran around 8PM and we went straight to the Last Gasp warehouse party, which was pretty cool....a bunch of cartoonists milling about stacks of books with spilly alchaholic drinks like red wine!! It was really hot and crowded but I felt somehow like I had hit the big time, without even publishing one comic. Did I mention my box of comics never made it? I don't recall. Well, my box of comics never made it so I had nothing to sell/trade for the weekend. Farel Stayed the night at his sisters house, and I felt awesome driving around downtown SF in my own car...I felt like I had gotten some serious XP points on my driving proficiency. If you don't understand that last sentence you shouldn't attend a comic convention.
The city was beutiful but our hotel was ghetto...as was the neighborhood. I got that feeling when I checked it out on google maps street view. My reasoning was that no neighborhood could be worse than our own Downtown East Side, a notorious crack-fueled ground zero of mental illness and poverty for the entire country of Canada...nevertheless, Vancouver crackies don't seem to have the same air of anger and hostility that the american homeless did. Most of the homeless...at home...seem to just want to crack around in their own cracky dance, staring at the ground and such. Our first morning in SF, a fine fellow on the sidewalk outside out hotel greeted us with what we thought was "...THIS IS JOHNSON TOWN!! IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, GET OUT!!" or something like that. Then he told me to "shut up, bitch!" or something like that.
Well after that, the convention was super fun. Despite not having my books I was well entertained with Dan Clowes, and Julia Wertz, and Vannessa Davis, and Erica Moen and Lynda Barry and Hellen Jo and all sorts.

Here's another little ditty I am putting together for a poster....try to guess the theme.

Hello Friends!

I am back from an epic weekend trip to San Fransisco Alternative Press Expo! I drove down with Robin McConnell of Inkstuds Radio http://www.inkstuds.com/, who happens to be an old roomate of my man Colin, from back in the days before me. Robin is a fantastic hillarious fellow, but he doesn't drive. Colin is a fantastic, hillarious fellow, but guess what he doesn't do? We tried to solicit another driver but nothing worked out so I was psycologically prepared to spend about 40 hours behind the wheel of my car.

Now, in order to streamline the journey, Robin and I shipped our books to Portland to be picked up at his first book launch at Floating world Comics. His books were there, but mine were not. My trip changed from buisness to pleasure. I was dissapointed, but there wasn't much I could do about it. The book launch went fine, and Colin and I got a chance to meet up with our old roomie Jen Whechsler, who lives in Portland now. Portland is a great place, it has light rail!!!

Here's Robin at Floating World, selling the very first copy of Inkstuds to his friend and noted comic book guy, Joe Keatinge.