June 22, 2009

We are just a big Comics-Tease

Been working on some art for silkscreen posters and shirts and demo labels for the band I'm in...

Here is a comic I did for tonight's Encyclopedia Show. Are you in Chicago? You should go check it out!

I'm very excited about TCAF this weekend. I was going over the guest list yesterday and thinking, oooh I can't wait to meet Kate Beaton, oooh look Jeff Lemire will be there. And then oooh John Campbell will be exhibiting!



Campbell's one of my favorite webcomics artists, and in anticipation I was poking around his site, and noticed on his about page that HE LIVES IN CHICAGO. I'll be going all the way to Toronto to meet someone who lives in my own damn city.

At Stumptown this year I was chatting with Lucy Knisley, and asked where she was living - I think I thought she was still in the Northeast - and she says "Logan Square". That is MY VERY NEIGHBORHOOD. She seriously lives only a few blocks from me. Actually, quite a few comics artists live in Logan Square for some reason, and yet we rarely hang out with each other. A few years ago Grant and Neil and I were trying to hold regular comics-hanging-out-nights, but they fell apart pretty easily. Sara Bauer, also a Chicago resident, is one of the sweetest, nicest comictype people I have ever met, and as many times as we've threatened to get together it never seems to happen. Corinne Mucha was next to my table at Stumptown, and it was the first time I had seen her in months.

I'm as much to blame as anyone. I've got a pretty busy schedule and I certainly don't go out of my way to call anyone else up for a drawing night or comics get together. And I've joked multiple times that trying to get comics artists together to do stuff is like herding cats. And maybe it's the nature of the medium that we work better in isolation for the most part?

Who knows. I considered writing John Campbell to say hey, we both live in Chicago and make comics, but thought better of it, and decided to wait until we're both in Toronto to introduce myself. :)

I spent some time Sunday painting a banner to take to TCAF. This'll be the first time in a while that we'll have 3 feet of space instead of 6 or 8, and I had some spare blue canvas lying around (who doesn't, am I right?).



Once the spring calms down (officially, after the ManMan/Gogol Bordello Show on May 31st) I'm going to paint a banner for Shortpants Press, on the same material, for use on the 8 foot and 6 foot tables. It's incredibly dorktastic how excited I am to have a banner I can FOLD and put in a suitcase rather than one I have to roll up and carry in a geeky poster tube.

I never remember to take many photos when I'm at a convention, and I certainly almost never get any of myself. But Richard Krauss of Midnight Fiction took a bunch of a lot of different creators there, and you can see them all on his site. Here's me!



Don't I look pleasant and approachable? Don't you want to buy comics from my table? :) Also note the guy in the hat, behind me. He had the most interesting faux fur jackets.

I spent much of yesterday painting a banner to take to TCAF. I'm tired of lugging a poster tube around to these shows, so I'm hand painting canvas banners for them, banners that can be folded and stashed in a suitcase. I'll have to get some pictures once they're done...

One of the things I picked up at Stumptown was this little gem.



Art Bureau puts out some really lovely stuff. Silkscreens, gorgeous little offset books like this one, all to promote artists and designers. The book I picked up has some great work from artists like Bubi Au Yeung and Catalina Estrada.




My pictures are terrible but the book is lovely, and so is all their other stuff. Go check it out!

What else was I going to tell you about Stumptown? I bought a bunch of books that I will be writing up over the next few days, but in the meantime, here are some random photos:

This is my favorite photo from the weekend. Our hotel rooms had painted the doors with chalkboard paint, and Saturday night this showed up on the door across from ours. Mr. Onstad was at the festival for a signing, I was excited guessing that the room was his; Niles thinks it was maybe a fan. Either way, awesome chalking dood:




This is a bucket o' donuts that someone brought in Saturday morning. I'm sure they were day-olds but they were still fabulous. (that's Corinne Mucha's fabulous quilt under the bucket)




AAANd here is a robot, for some reason.

Whilst in Portland, Shortpants and the Shortpants Boyfriend happened upon a thrift store, where this amazing shirt was purchased:



Don't you wish you had this shirt? 1940s Superman is vastly superior to modern day Superman, and this shirt is evidence. Note the dashing ubermensch in question, macking on a hot piece of lady:



Also note the swiftness with which he rebuffs critics:



Oh, you think Superman is not everything he promises to be WELL NO ONE ASKED YOU BITCH! Snap! Damn straight. Now be off before you get your smart mouth SUPER-PUNCHED.

I have lots of Stumptown stories for you people now that we are back in the Middle West, but first, take a look at this rockpants shirt we got from Lucy Knisley.



Niles claims that he has eaten every cheese on that shirt, except for one. He also says that the cheeses are drawn exceptionally well, and he is an avid cheesemonger, so that is pretty high praise, coming from someone with considerable experience monging cheese.

Hey, guys, did I mention we're going to be at Portland's Stumptown Comics Festival this weekend? It is Shortpants's first time at Stumptown, verily, our first time in Oregon at all! Shortpants is pretty jazzed.



So if you are in the Pacific Northwest, you should come see us at Stumptown, and then tell us which microbreweries to check out while we're in town.

So if you're reading this, you've probably already deduced, with your Holmesian cleverness, that we redesigned our website! Welcome to the new www dot short pants press dot com. We've spiffied up the catalog, added quick links to our flickr and twitter thingies, and generally made everything lots shinier and prettier.

Many, many, many bazillions of thanks go to Dr. Ogres for the programming of the new site!! Go to his site and buy records, they make nice musics over there.

Anyway, it's still pretty new, and there are still a number of kinks to work out, so please be patient with us as we put the finishing touches on everything.