Dispatch from a Domesticated APE
by Eve Adams
photos by Pinguino

San Francisco is a bewilderingly bright, clean city, and on the weekend of April 9, the 2005 Alternative Press Expo took place on a bewilderingly clean, bright street. In fact, from the parking lot outside the Concourse Exhibition Center on 8th and Brannan streets, there was no sign that within sprawled a world rife with heavily armed prostitutes, irascible Canadian flowers, illustrated Bibles and the odd anthropomorphized penis or two. Through the door, however, an orange-haired lovely lingered, clad in nothing but glow-in-the-dark fangs, blue paint and a matching bodysuit. This must be the place.

Last year almost 4,000 fangirls and -boys turned out for APE, which is organized and hosted by Comic-Con International, a San Diego institution "dedicated to creating awareness of, and appreciation for, comics and related popular art forms."

The face of comics has traditionally been a scruffy and somewhat unflattering one. In the 1950s, comic books were thought to cause juvenile delinquency; since then, they haven't fared much better in the public eye, often written off as the stuff of escapist nerd fantasies.

But on the floor of the Expo, the most cursory look confirms that this is no Android's Dungeon. Easily half of the artists at the booths and attendees are women. There are no more visibly socially inept mouth-breathers than anywhere else. It's crazy, but the people here are downright hip. It looks like a rock show in the palatial hall, and little coteries of fans eddy around the more popular artists' tables.

Of course, for every Jhonen Vasquez, there are about a hundred artists who would be happy if someone just looked at what they had to offer. Across from the Flight Comics booth, where people are still snapping up Kazu Kibuishi and friends' mesmerizing collaboration Flight #2, a tall, ginger-haired man is yelling like a carnival barker.

"Buy some comics! Come on! What are you here for?"

Seung Lee, creator of largely wordless, Groeningesque online Heart Comics, knows the man's pain.

"I'm sort of amazed at how hard it is to get people to come by our booth and even take stuff that's free. I'm guilty of doing the same, though. But now I'll probably be compelled to go to every single booth and feign interest."

Of course, Web comics are by nature a different animal than those in print. While many, such as Stephen Notley's furiously silly Bob the Angry Flower, have notoriety in both media, there is presently no Stan Lee of online publishing. Still, Edmonton, Alberta-based Notley says that given the overlap between demographics of Internet users and comics readers, there's no reason not to go online if your art can bear pixelation.

"I draw my comic as a print comic, so it's a weekly strip that runs in papers, but I also put it on the Web, and the odd thing is that now my audience is pretty much all over the world. The Web is magic — it just does it all for you. It's a really great way to get yourself out there and build and audience," Notley says.

"For better or for worse," he adds.

Fan Devin Donnelly agrees that the ease of Web publication doesn't necessarily mean exposure of better comics. "Web comics are a double-edged sword. There's no creative control, but there's also no quality control, and the Internet being the largest medium, you will find some utter tripe, as well as some truly creative stuff. But expression is the important part."

Some artists, such as Douglas Paszkiewicz, creator of Harvey Award-nominated Arsenic Lullaby, don't particularly worry about how their art gets into the reader's face, as long as it does its job, which is to horrify, disgust and amuse. I flip through the compilation and note its subtitle: "Year of the Fetus." Unhesitatingly I buy a copy, and the very cheerful Doug ruminates on his life's mission as he inscribes the cover with what appears to be a fetus dancing in a puddle of urine.

"Some philosopher said that heaven is watching your neighbor fall off the roof." Yeah, that's right out of "The Republic." "Other people's misery, gore, pain...to me, that's amusing." It shows. Arsenic Lullaby is generally disgusting, usually nonsensical and riddled with misspellings. But anyway, what am I here for?

The moralists of the '50s who chastised my parents for sneaking peeks at the Katzenjammer Kids might take some consolation in knowing that there's more to the art form than merch, misery and dead Girl Scouts. In fact, one of the more fascinating booths is that of the Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible Project, in which 3,000 illustrations (so far) from anyone who wishes to contribute are matched with Bible verses.

"Only 33,000 to go!" says Kate Hambrecht.

How are they faring accepting unproven submissions from the general public?

"Surprisingly well," she says, turning to a rather gorgeous depiction of the litany of spices from Song of Solomon 4:14. "A little hit-and-miss, but there's more like this than, well..."

She turns to Galatians. It's not clear what it's supposed to be, but it's nice to see that the children are getting involved.

I still can't find my personal comic-book god, James Sturm, in the crush of fans on the floor. He should be at the Drawn and Quarterly table just past the stairs, but the booth appears to be unmanned. Their merchandise is safe: both sides of the table are equally abandoned at this point. I linger, feeling not a little like a big-eyed fan posted outside the star's dressing room, and am soon engrossed in a binder of wide laminated galley pages.

Sturm's style is as distinct and immediate as Rembrandt's; I know before moving close enough to read the text in the bubbles that the spare elegance of the lines, the interiors shadowed so that simple cross-hatching is lent a photographic pop, the dramatic attention accorded a man sitting at a table talking to himself, are all his. It's easy to get lost in Sturm's books. The first comic book I ever loved was "The Golem's Mighty Swing," Sturm's epic story of a Jewish bus-league baseball team that rattles between ignominy and legend, set against haunting visions of small-town insularity in the 1920s. The panels on the wide pages on display exert the same pull: they're windows.

Suddenly, a haphazard clutch of girls has coalesced, some with fidgeting young men in tow. The seats on the other side of the table now contain two artily handsome fellows in vintage suits and spectacles. One of them is Seth, another Drawn and Quarterly heavyweight and the auteur of Palookaville and Bannock, Beans & Black Tea. Like Sturm, Seth is masterful at the extrusion of worlds of detail from quiet places, simple things and common people.

It's a theme that occurs again and again at the expo. While some artists (like Paszkiewicz, with his slim volumes of mangled horror, and Notley, who helplessly revels in the absurd) still cleave to the tradition of comics as vehicles for the fantastic, increasingly many seem inclined to examine the more quotidian problems of the human world. I leaf through a tiny copy of Kevin Huizenga's Or Else #2: Gloriana, featuring Glenn Ganges, and find within a fusion of both perspectives: an archetypal everyman steps out for groceries and, on his way home, wanders into the end of the world, complete with Godzilla.

Existential and historical questions aside, these artists and their characters work in the very spirit of Stan Lee and Peter Parker. On the page, one panel's brooding putz is burdened with powers and problems of cosmic import on the next. In the world of alternative publishing, though, your hero might well be a reanimated fetus.

An ersatz line has taken shape. Seth is available for autographs (his) and encomiums (yours). But where's my hero?

A somewhat weary-looking and vaguely familiar gentleman wanders over from the adjacent NBM Publishing table. Smiling wryly at the line, he sits, and unbelievably, nobody pulls forth for his signature.

"Mr. Sturm?"

He looks up, faintly surprised. I sputter.

"I'm a huge fan — I came all the way from Chicago to see you — and I left my copy of The Golem's Mighty Swing at home... could you sign my program?"

Looking a little bewildered, he accepts the glossy booklet and leafs through.

"Okay, where am I? Ah, here," he mutters, finding his abridged resume a few pages in. From The Cereal Killings to directing the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vt., this man has spent so much time in the trenches that his self-portrait on the facing page, in which he poses valiantly on a fire-blasted island, sternly gripping the Stars and Stripes against an ominous cloud of inky smoke, doesn't seem too exaggerated.

"There I am," he says, scribbling his name with a smile. "Holding up my little flag."

E-mail Eve Adams at ultimaluz at gmail dot com.