Move that muscle and shake that fat:

• And but so I'm just back from the first annual Stumptown Comics Fest!
  
• It was well-organized and well-attended for a first annual event, held on probably the rainiest day this year in Portland.
  
• PDX is a very, very good cartooning town with tons of talent, and something like this is long overdue.
  
• And maybe I missed their tables or something, but I didn't really see a presence from either Dark Horse or Oni Press, the two big dogs of comix in town--it was mostly independent producers of their own comix, so that rocked.
  
• Even though I had nothing to sell (oops), I sat at a table with fellow political cartoon guy Kevin Moore and hung out and sketched and stuff.
  
• The panel I was on started at 3:30. It was me, Shannon Wheeler, Barry Deutsch, and Kevin Moore (whose website I'm blanking on. This is because I suck), who was our moderator.
  
• None of us were terribly well-prepared, and we didn't have any copies of ATTITUDE (which I appeared in) or ATTITUDE 2 (which the other three guys appear in) to show and sell (as near as I can tell, no book store in PDX carries ATTITUDE 2 yet), but we managed to ramble on about cartooning and amuse the crowd for an hour, so yay.
  
• I guess they had tried to get the editor of the ATTITUDE series, the ever-controversial Ted Rall, to attend and be on this panel, but it fell through somehow. Oh, well--Portlanders will have to wait to have Ted inflicted on them another day. :-) Still--it would have been cool to see him--Ted is one of the top three people in the world to go out drinking with, because the man has stories like you wouldn't believe.
  
• Anyway.
  
• It's funny--now that I've done a few of these sorts of panels, I find them not to be that big a deal to do (i.e., I'm very relaxed up there, and can make relatively coherent and even humorous comments), while if I had to go up there alone and talk about cartooning, I'd probably have major Public Speaking Trauma, even though really, there's very little difference between the two situations.
  
• Anyway--I got to see lots of cool-ass people (but no LJ people...? Where were my PDX LJ peeps?) and pretend I'm a member of The Portland Comix Scene for a day.
  
• Plus:
  

  
  

  
  

  
  
  

MP3: DJ Shadow: GDMFSOB (UNKLE remix with Roots Manuva) (Roots Manuva is a British rapper; I love rappers like him who have a really authoratative-sounding flow. check out his song "Clockwork").

From Scott Bateman's damn sketchbook thing:

Fun fact: I actually came up with this drew it while I was onstage at the Comics Fest.