Report from the Stumptown Comics Festival

Creating comics is a fairly solitary occupation, requiring endless lonely hours at the drawing board or computer workstation. It is safe to say that any cartoonist who devotes the time it takes to make good comics doesn’t get out much, which is why events like Portland’s Stumptown Comics Festival are so important. They provide the working comics creator with the two things he or she desperately needs: an audience for their work, and an excuse to get out and talk to people.

A Brief History of Minicomics

The 1980s were an an amazing and formative time in the world of comics. A direct market of comic book stores had sprung up, creating a more direct path between publishers and readers, free of the outdated ideas and concerns of the newsstand distribution system. Color comics from the major publishers still dominated the marketplace, but an explosion of black and white comics from relatively small publishers, fueled by the success of Dave Sim’s Cerebus and Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, made the industry accessible to an incredible array of talented writers and artists.

A chat with Shaenon Garrity

Shaenon K. Garrity is an award winning cartoonist and scriptwriter whose work includes the online comics Narbonic, Li’l Mell, Smithson and Skin Horse. She works as a manga editor for Viz Media and the content editor of the webcomics site ModernTales.com. Her writing on comics appears in The Comics Journal, Otaku USA and Comixology.com. Shaenon will be teaching at the 2010 PNCA Graphic Novel Intensive.

What got you interested in comics, and why do you think the form is worthy of serious study?

I read comic strips growing up, like everybody, and as I got older I got into comic books. As a teenage girl in the ’90s, I was powerless against the gothy appeal of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and from there I got into indie comics like Jeff Smith’s Bone and Tom Hart’s Hutch Owen.

Welcome!

Welcome to the new PNCA Graphic Novel + Comics website. Over the weeks and months leading up to the 2010 Graphic Novel Intensive, we will be presenting a weekly series of features relating to the graphic novel programs at PNCA as well as the Portland area comics community and the world of comics and graphic novels at large. We will talk with Intensive instructors both past and present, learn a bit about comics publishing and distribution, and even get some historical perspective, especially as it relates to creator-published work.

We will be mirroring much of this content on our Flickr photo stream, as well as providing additional content on our Facebook page.

We hope you’ll enjoy the material we present in the coming weeks, and we would like to encourage you to use this forum to comment and contribute to an ongoing discussion of graphic novels and comics.