APE was a righteous blast again this year.

Too busy for a longwinded, detailed travelogue, but it went something like this.

THURSDAY: Drove down with Bwana, landing in Oakland in the early evening. I dropped Bwana off at a BART station and got lost finding Scott Morse's pad in the Oakland Hills. Arrived and spent a little time playing with wee little Finn Morse, before he was off to bed. Threw down a beer or two and stayed up shooting the shit with Scott before crashing hard.

FRIDAY: Woke up in the morning, talked about raising boys with Scott's wife Danielle, and then Scott and myself left to pick up Chris (AdHouse) Pitzer at the Oakland airport, and a trip to the swanky Pixar campus. In a word, wow! What a freaking playland, and seeming killer place to work.

(Picture by Chris Pitzer.)

Scott and three other gents at Pixar produced an AMAZINGLY beautiful art book called The Ancient Book of Myth and War, which Scott and Chris co-published. We met two of these cats, Lou Romano and Don Shank. Both these guys have blogs that shatter the senses. I'm really not sure if i can post any of their art here, so i HIGHLY recommend you check this stuff out. Two absolute fucking masters at work.

Then, Scott, Chris, Don and myself went out to lunch at the original Trader Vics. The food was fabulous (seared Ahi on my plate, please), and we all sucked down a couple bitchin' mai tais, putting a fine glow on the afternoon. Supposedly, Trader Vics invented the venerable mai tai, and as a connoisseur, i can tell you that i wouldn't doubt it for a second. These were some seriously tastey cocktails.

(PIcture by Chris Pitzer.)

Back to Scott's for a little down-time and more play with Finn, then i drove across the Bay Bridge, into downtown, checked into the Beresford Inn, and met up with old buddy Patrick Jodoin for some suds, nachos, hockey, and a nightcap beer at one of my favorite SF watering holes, The Toronado on lower Haight. They have a jaw-dropping beer list.

Mmmm... beer.

SATURDAY: Woke up, and drove down to the Concourse with my roommate for the weekend, Jeffrey Brown. Ex-intern and Top Shelf goddess Jacquelene joined us, and they set up the table, while i went to the diner across the street and nursed a hangover with some corned beef hash and eggs, over-easy of course.

Jeremy Tinder and Renee French showed up to work the table as well. (Lilli Carre, Nate Powell, Scott Morse, and Derek Kirk Kim were also in the house, but were all tabling on their own.) Jeremy was selling oodles of his neat little paintings, plus a number of adorable stuffed animals he made.

The show started out fairly slow. Maybe it was the competing Earth Day activities going on, but nonetheless, by early afternoon the joint was jumpin'. Sales were brisk, and the vibe was groovy.

That night i harveled down some grubbin' mexican food with Rob and Georgine Goodin (they of Robot Publishing), after which i worked my second annual bartending gig for the Isotope Mini-Comics Award After-party. Along with Kirsten and Adrienne, we rocked the house. I mixed mostly margaritas until i ran out of ingredients, and i didn't even have bartender's elbow (similar to "tennis elbow") the next day.

Once again, i got a little ham-boned. Luckily Georgine was kind enough to drive me back to the hotel. (Thanks, G!)

SUNDAY: Woke up and walked down to the show with Jeffrey. A nice little 30-minute walk, sun shining and the fresh air working away at this new hangover.

Again, the place was alive. We did some wholesale with a handful local vendors (Comic Relief, Lee's Comics, Needles and Pins, Giant Robot, Nuclear Comics, and one or two more), and by the end of the day, this turned out to be one of the most successful and fun APEs in memory.

I picked up lots of loot, saw some old friends and made some new, and was out the door no more than 30 minutes after the show closed to the public. Kudos to the organizers, and the folks who worked the table.

That night for dinner i hooked up with my excellent old comics pal Josue Menjivar, and his lady Anastasia. We met at some funky old Irish restaurant near our hotels, and got to catch the eighth-seeded Golden State Warriors spank the one-seed Dallas Mavericks. It was a glorious game, and along with the company was an ideal way to end the weekend.

MONDAY: Tired. Picked up Bwana. Drove home. Stayed up well-beyond when i should have gone to bed, and watched a replay of the Suns/Lakers game one on ESPN.

• Top Shelf stalwart Jacquelene took some choice photos, which you can find here on a Flickr page. I think she's going to post the whole set on our MySpace page. This one is Jeffrey, Renee, and Jeremy.

• I snagged this photo of the Kochalka-Corner from The Great White Snark blog.

• This one of Renee and myself from Lee Hester's blog.

• Like i said, i scored some great shit at the show...

• Nick Mullins continues to quietly produce beautiful comics, and gave me his two recent outings. Nick's work is really sublime. He's a real interesting, formalist-minded cartoonist, who is criminally under the radar.

• Robbie Robbins at iDW hooked me up with the second Dick Tracey volume and the first two editions of his stunning new series of artists books in a line called SPARROW, these first two featuring Ashley Wood and Phil Hale.

• Talked all-too-briefly with super-sweet Rebecca from Drawn & Quarterly, and walked away with the mammoth new tome, King-Cat Classix, a MUST-HAVE hardcover which features excerpts from the first 50 issues of John Porcellino's seminal punk-rock zine mini-comic King-Cat. Besides that i've been a raving and loud lunatic for John's comics over the years, this handsome collection will surely be known as one of the greatest collections of contemporary cartooning know to man-kind. This is not hyperbole. I kid you not... buy this book. It's truly remarkable.

• Stuart Ng was on hand and sold me the new issue (#9) of Animation Blast!, Amid Amini's vital animation-arts magazine, after a four year hiatus. The wait was SOOOOOO worth it. This new edition is the first in a line of annuals, which makes the jump from a more regular magazine, to a fat, perfect-bound bookshelf item.

If you like animation and its history, this book is indispensable.

Amid also created a new animation website called Cartoon Brew, and from all accounts, it's already one of the more widely respected a highly visited sites on the web.

I had to wake up with the kid this morning, so i went to bed "early" last night (i'm usually up until about 3:00 a.m.), and of course, i was unable to fall asleep until hours and hours later, as the sun was coming up.

And now, i'll be getting up early again for the annual APE road trip with my pal Bwana Spoons, down I-5, across the border and into Northern California and the truly awe-inspiring Mt Shasta wilderness/lake area. We'll head down past Redding (home of the Liquor Bar … it's huge, like Home Depot huge, but it's ALL booze!), then eventually cut across diagonally on the 505, and then onto the I-80. I-80 is great for me on this trip. It's like one long strip mall, with a highway running through the middle of it, and after i've been behind the wheel all day, it's a total adrenaline rush, what with the blinding speed of people obviously with places to be. The slow lanes cruise at 60 - 65 MPH, and the fast lane hovers usually between 85-90 MPH.

I'm staying the first night in Oakland, with Scott Morse. Whoo hoo!

• Dave K. has a new 20-page comic, about girls hanging out at the mall, up on his website.

• Received this shameless self-promotion in my email in-box, from some students at the Center for Cartoon Studies. How can i turn THAT down. Glad to, in fact. There's some good stuff therein.

"My name is Adam Staffaroni and I'm currently a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. A group of other students and I got together to create a collective website to showcase all the work we've been doing. The site is titled I Know Joe Kimpel.

"We have a minicomics store which, in addition to student work, has work from CCS Fellow Ken Dahl and artist/sometimes professor Rich Tommaso. We've just added a blog to post artwork samples, updates on our projects, and about all the visiting artists constantly coming to the school. Also, some students are already receiving very good reviews from The Comics Journal and Indie Spinner Rack.

• In the same vein, Jeffrey Brown wrote to tell me about the new Holy Consumpton blog where he'll be posting about upcoming events and signings. Speaking of which, Jeffrey will be signing copies of his new book Feeble Attmpts this Friday night at Giant Robot in San Francisco. (Off upper Haight, around the corner from Amoeba Records.)

I'm guessing there might be a few Top Shelf fans out there who tire of my fanboy ramblings. Several months ago i ranted on and on about what i think i one of the single greatest men-in-tights collections ever, the X-Men Omnibus, collecting the bulk of the infamous Claremont/Byrne run, so fondly remembered by aging geeks everywhere.

Well, for those elitist snobs who poo-poo on the idea of legitimacy of spandex comics as an "art form," along comes one of the most gorgeous hardcover collections ever to grace American shores. From Dutch publisher Oog & Blik (the same folks who did those wonderful Waiting for Food books by Crumb), comes The Complete Universe of Dupuy & Berberian.

Now granted, this really isn't comics. But this two-man team extraordinaire, who together created the great Monsieur Jean stories in French (and partially collected in North America by Drawn & Quarterly), are such amazing illustrators, that this hodgepodge of miscellaneous freelance jobs, sketchbook drawings, wine labels and whatnot, is so mouth-wateringly stunning, that you won't care that, A) it's not "really" comics, and B) it comes with a $55 price-tag.

Seriously, this is the art-fag equivalent of the fanboy's X-Men Omnibus. It might be hard to find (since 90% of the North American comics retailers wouldn't recognize great work like this if it bit them on the leg), but if you happen to live near one of the few stellar comics shops around, then track this down. It's THAT good.

FEB073684 COMPLETE UNIVERSE OF DUPUY & BERBERIAN TP

From the Previews solicitation:
A beautiful retrospective of the work of Phillipe Dupuy and Charles Berberian, best known for their Drawn & Quaterly publication Monsieur Jean. Over tewnty years of collaborations are featured here including their portaryals of everyday Parisian life, homages to Billie Holiday and Jacques Tati, and their commercial art for book jackets and CD covers.

You can read part of the Comics Journal interview with Dupuy & berberian here, but you'll need to track down the actual issue to read the entire thing. And it's well worth the effort.

The only image i could find was this tiny cover i nicked from Christopher Butcher's sublime blog. It's enough to give one an idea of what to look for... meanwhile, i've also pulled an image from Dupuy and Berberian's official website.

• Graham Annable writes:
Show: Music of Hickee Mountain
Location: Red Bird Studios, 135 Avenue Van Horn, Montréal, QC, Canada
When: Thursday April 26th, 2007 8pm

(Brett writes: These Hickee cats are all incredible ink-studs... i really wish i could hit this gig.)

• And here is the fourth set of theater ads Chris Ross did for us, these featuring Owly, in a set we co-opted with Guapo Comics.

•Â Oh, and i'll be down at APE this weekend, so if you're in San Francisco, you should swing by. It's still one of the most important, energizing, and fun conventions in comics. More like one of the many fine festivals you might find in Europe (which are all about celebrating the art form), than the plethora of crappy flea-market cons here in the good ol' USA.

Renee French's new book Micrographica will be there (as will Renee herself), plus i just received a handful of advance copies of James Kochalka's SuperF*ckers #4. It's a hoot.

Also appearing from Top Shelf will be Jeffrey Brown, Lilli Carre (i think...), Jeremy Tinder, Nate Powell, and long-lost pal and fabulous cartoonist Josue Menjivar.

Rock!

Jeff Lemire's eagle eye spotted this sign along the rink boards, when his hockey team, The Flying Burritos, were playing in a tournament this last weekend.

Pretty damn cool, eh?

•Â And here's more of the ads Chris Ross made for our Laurelhurst Theater ad co-op.

Back from Emerald City in Seattle last weekend (which is, unfortunately becoming more a "hot-creator" mainstream show, and less indy friendly) and already i'm gearing up for my annual trip to APE, back down in San Francisco.

(The Fantagraphics party was a hoot, though; hosted at their store, it's located in some seedy industrial neighborhood in South Seattle, chockablock with cool bars and even some goats tied up on the sidewalk. Also great fun was hanging out with former intern Carlos, and his delightful girlfriend, whose name i suddenly can't remember.)

Tonight, the family heads over to cartoonist extraordinaire and great pal Garret Izumi's place, to be guinea pigs sampling his mole´, which he plans to enter into a Betty Crocker contest. Who said comics people only eat mac & cheese for dinner! (Well, certainly not Matt Wagner, who's cuisine i've had the pleasure of sampling. Mmmm... he's REALLY a great chef.)

Anyway, moving right along...

• Webmaster Nate has updated the comics section of our site.

There's some really fine work up there, featuring Steven Dhondt (Stedho), Brecht Evens, Zeno Sworder, J.D. Wilkes, and Jeff Zwirek.

• Tom Hart's syndicated comic strips is loads of fun. Don't believe me? Then check out this, this, and this.

Here's a sample.

• More YouTube fun... two absolutely freaking wingnuts … O'Reilly and Geraldo … going toe-to-toe. And weirdly enough, even though he's become a huge joke in recent years, i love how Geraldo held his ground here. An epic battle of talking heads.

• James Kochalka continues to send me weird links, and i'm glad, because it's often quite interesting, ergo fodder for the blog!

And speaking of Kochalka, WIRED magazine's blog posted a neat plug for his "monster Mii" diary strip.

• Dave K. recently posted some comics that he has in recent/upcoming publications.

The color comic will appear in the next issue of Meathaus (summer 2007)
The black and white piece appears in Syncopated #3 (out now)

(Here's a cool image i nicked from his blog.)

• The Daily Cross Hatch has a nice piece about ink-stud Alec Longstreth.

•Â I can't recall if i posted UIana Zahajkewycz's final poster design for our 10-Year Anniversary or not, so here it is again. I can't wait to see this in print!

•Â Finally, here is another round of ads that Chris Ross put together for the co-opt ads we made with Portland-area retailers (this one with Counter Media), which run at the Laurelhurst Theater.