Zine as F*ck

Poster art by Amanda Blix.

How can I NOT write about the Portland Zine Symposium? 

I learned so much!  Mark Campos and I took the Bolt Bus down and rode the tri-met train from downtown PDX to the convention center.  There I wheeled our 20+ pounds of books and clothes through heat and past a Denny's (Woah, they still exist?) to the convention.

To our left was PsychoNotArt, the main progenerator being quite congenial and selling a space love romantic parody comic plus gooey eyeball art t-shirts.  MJ.  He was funny, laid back and an awesome table-mate.  To the right of us was Nada, a Seattle-based zine, the fearless leader of which compiled art and writing by other people.  His role?  To create beautiful objects out of what they gave him.  Zines with felt patterns, antiquated color Mickey Mouse prints inserted inside, AND


Lovely tiny, precious, rediculously cute match books folded up with a poem inside that says "Don't like it?  Ignite it!".  Reminded me of Lisa Gill putting Haiku inside of Hershey's Kisses the first Alburquerque Poetry Festival I attended. Too sweet.  Everybody melted for them.

Jim Joyce, before the haircut?

It made me think of art as object.  My shiny, flat comics may need a makeover.  Maybe.

At the after party at the Independent Publishing Resource Center (Seattle?  Why don't we have this?)  all of the zinesters were well-fed, well quenched and there was a crazy contingency of Chicago artists who kind of haunted me, since I'll be drawing Chicago into my grapic novel.  One gentleman who goes by Jim Joyce read some powerful prose about catholic guilt.  I tagged him to tell him I once read at the Green Mill as a slam poet, and later said "I think I'm too sensitive."  To which he replied "Not if you held the floor at Green Mill with Marc Smith."


Naw.  Marc "Slampappi" Smith is a sweetie.  Yes, the Green Mill is the birthplace of slam.  Check it out.

Rode home on the Bolt Bus again with Mark Campos and I talking about the graphic novel.  Where is the story about female friendship?  Where is the women's version of On The Road?

Is this my Cindy Sherman Film Still?
Maybe so.
True that, though.

The one story I can fall back on I saw first as a movie.  Julia.  Based on Lillian Hellman's novel Pentimento.  Just that one story.  Amazing.  So, There for the grace of God (or whatever you believe in) go I.

In the mean time, Mark took this shot of me preparing for day 2, lacking lipstick and resorting to Sharpie.  When I arrived I got to connect with several very powerful women comics artists--Colleen Frakes, Amanda Blix and again Annie Murphy.  Also met up with legendary slam poetessa Melody Jordan and had my comics enlisted into the archives of the Whatcom County Library.

I love my community.  Until next time.  I'm off to DUNE.



PS--Huge breakthroughs on the graphic novel.  I'll be writing about that next week.


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