It’s not Stumptown till I file my report. This year I decided not to bring my trusty Palm Pilot and instead left it to others to record the event in photos; the official pool of snaps can be found on the Stumptown home page.
David Chelsea is listening to:
“Swing Guitar Masterpieces”
by Oscar Aleman
Stumptown is usually more about the selling and the chatting than buying comics for me, but I did manage to pick up a few choice items including Colin Upton’s autobio comic about dealing with diabetes, parts two and three of Gina Siciliano‘s sexy minicomic series Summertime, Mike Russell‘s Beware The Sabre-toothed Vampire, Stevie Van Bronckhorst’s date ruiner (Stevie also sketched a portrait of me during an afternoon lull) Steve Lieber‘s true facts comic Escape from Alcatraz (which he says was commissioned by the Alcatraz Historical Museum specifically to correct the errors in the classic Clint Eastwood movie), musician/cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis‘s Fuff ( now also available in an iPad edition) and Jesse Dewyer‘s Hawt.Dawg!
My big item this year was my new book Extreme Perspective! For Artists: Learn the Secrets of Curvilinear, Cylindrical, Fisheye, Isometric, and Other Amazing Systems that Will Make Your Drawings Pop Off the Page, and that did very well- I sold all my copies the first day. I also appeared on a panel discussing the new print version of Dark Horse Presents with editor Mike Richardson and fellow contributors (you can see how that one went in this Youtube video), and did a demonstration of drawing over the perspective grids on the DVD that come with Extreme Perspective! I had a good time doing that one, and I think the folks in the audience enjoyed it- l heard a lot of laughs, anyway.
The reprint envelopes I brought with me did not do quite as well for me as the books, but I did sell out this Easter-themed one.
l spent downtime sketching one-of-a-kind envelopes, which I hoped to sell for $5 each. l decided to follow the Portlandia formula and “put a bird on it”, but results were mixed- I sold just one envelope with a bird on it (and one without). I switched to unicorns and rainbows after a while, figuring that might be more commercial, but those didn’t sell any better. Finally I pulled out all the stops and drew an envelope with a unicorn, a rainbow AND a bird on it. That one sold.