by Elisabeth@TFAW
By any measure, the sixth annual Stumptown Comics Fest was a huge success this weekend! Rumor has it that the number of attendees on Saturday alone of the two-day convention beat the total attendance in 2008, and I believe it.
Thousands of people milled around the Lloyd Center Doubletree Hotel in Portland, OR, meeting hundreds of cartoonists and writers, from big names like Brian Michael Bendis and Jeff Smith to local talents like Carolyn Main and Ian Smith. Fest-goers rubbed shoulders with publishers like Dark Horse Comics, Oni Press, Top Shelf, and Fantagraphics, and web cartoonists and self-publishers came from as far away as Minneapolis and Chicago–and some even further!
As a fan, the best part for me was the mixture of larger publishers and indie artists. I was able to pick up Ghost of Hoppers from the Fantagraphics table, and then turn around and buy BT Livermore’s Mustaches for Fun and Profit, a tiny, hilarious book from Robopocalypse. What else did I see? Web comics, web comics, web comics. In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past couple of years, web comics are the future, especially since print newspapers (and their dearly beloved comics sections) are slowly dwindling.
Of course, the cool thing about web comics is it’s pretty easy for almost anyone to create one and post it for all of her friends to see. Don’t believe me? Check out toonlet. Here, you can build your own characters, add dialogue, change the background color, and embed the resulting strips wherever you want (they’re also displayed on the toonlet site).
“But wait,” you say. “I’m not a writer. Wherever will I come up with dialogue?” toonlet has solved this problem as well with its twittercomic feature. Simply search Twitter for whatever you want (I chose “TFAW,” natch), select the posts you want to use, choose your characters, clean it up a bit if you’d like, and bingo! I made the following comic in about two minutes (yes, it shows, I know!):
TFAW you make me wish I had…
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So what do you think about this brave new world, readers? Are you planning on making it to Stumptown next year? Did you hit all of the after-parties, lavishly supplied with free beer from MacTarnahan’s? Did you fall in love with a brand-new web comic? Post your experiences below!
