I spent Saturday and Sunday tabling at the 7th Annual Minnesota Book Arts Fest at the Minnesota Center for the Book Art. The event is scheduled just in time for the great month-long consumer frenzy known as Holiday Shopping. Most people come looking for handmade gifts, cards, envelopes, prints and calendars. They found plenty to choose from. I shared the table with cartoonist Will Dinski. We valiantly attempted to flog paeans to smoking and voodoo economics fantasies onto the unsuspecting public. Together with Lacey Prpic Hedtke, Sarah Morean, and The Good Minnesotan we formed a Zine-to-Comics-multi-table-continuous-almost-commerce-free-semi-autonomous Zone. At some point Matt Peiken came by and video taped some of the proceedings. He posted some of the footage online. I made the cut despite being nearly incoherent.
Minneapolis Zine Fest 2008
The Minneapolis Zine Fest happened a couple of weekends ago and it was pretty fun. The modest space of the SSCA was populated with zinesters, mini-comics artists, small press publishers and various denizens of the book arts. The walls were crammed full of historical zine artifacts. Most were generously loaned too the SSCA by the vast archives of the city of Mt. Holly. I took a few pictures.
The Mayor of Mt. Holly didn’t want to stop speaking.
The Crap~O~Mat represents the latest in zine dispensing technology. From the laboratories of Mt. Holly.
Mt. Holly researchers have been able to achieve a high level of zine miniaturization.
The Mayor doesn’t like it when top-secret ciphers go missing. JP Coovert plays innocent.
Will Dinski shows off his high pressure sales tactics.
And there’s more here.
Fall Con 2007
Actually this sketch is from TCAF, but I never wrote a report from that.. so there.
A very late (and very brief) report on Fallcon in St. Paul from a couple of weeks back. Fallcon 2007 ended up being a great show despite the fact that it mostly catered to the back-issue crowd. That’s actually what made it so refreshing for me. I haven’t been to a convention like this in a long time. On top of that tables were free for creators and there were free sodas and hot dogs… how can you not go wrong!?
It also helped to have awesome neighbors: Will Dinski, Sara Morean and Sam Hiti. I was sorry I had to miss the second day. I wish I had taken pictures! Here are a few people that did: The Cartoonist Conspiracy, Big Time Attic and The Daily Crosshatch.