Jesse Bloggs

Indy Euphoria is over, and while attendee turnout was disappointing, there was an abundance of good people, books, art and merchandise. As illustrator, painter and toy maker Jesse Hernandez put it, “I came with no expectations other than to draw and meet cool people.”

The con was held in the Scottish Rites Center on J Street. I recently read The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, which taught me that the Scottish Rites people are Masonic, so I was on the lookout for secret symbols. Sure enough, as I crossed the American River on Sunday I saw what appeared to be a pyramid on the back of the Scottish Rites building! Aha! Dan Brown put me in the know! Turns out though I’m more of a know-nothing: the pyramid structure is actually part of a Seventh Day Adventists church East of the Scottish Rites Center. Robert Langdon I’m not.

Anyway, Indy Euphoria’s special guests included Jeffrey Brown and Nate Powell; Jim Woodring cancelled, apparently. Like many female fans of alternative comics, the girlfriend of local painter and metal God Skinner has an inexplicable and unhealthy crush on Brown, and used the cartoonist’s appearance in Sacramento to further stalk the poor man. “He better not have brought his fucking family!” she told me. I bought Powell’s gorgeous Swallow Me Whole, and upon learning that Powell has worked for some time providing support to adults with developmental disabilities, I also purchased his autobiographical book on the subject, Please Please, for insights on a field I recently entered as well.

Speaking of Skinner, he purchased my last copy of The Bridge Project, an anthology containing a story by Carolyn Main and myself. Skinner also bought a copy of The Time Tripper, a comic by Max Challender, one of the artists I work with at Studio 700. The comic tells the tale of Max travelling through time to meet beautiful women, his deceased father and even a version of himself in the far-flung future. Besides selling Challender’s book, my mini-comics and my flip-comic with Clave, How Hipsters are Like Superheroes / Baggs & Me, I was also selling, as always, drawings for a dollar. If anyone out there who purchased a dollar drawing finds their way to this blog, email me a scanned copy of your drawing and I’ll put it up on the Internet for all to see! In the meantime, here’s a scan of my dollar drawing ad:

(Scratch Papers, Page 77)

Also attending Indy Euphoria was a large contingent of Bay Area cartoonists and artists, including Jed Alexander, Kane Lynch, Josh Frankel, Andrice Arp and Jesse Reklaw (formerly of the Bay Area), Susie Cagle and Francois Vigneault. I got to better know a few of those fine folk, and get some of their comics, including Relic #2 and Laikia-23 from Kane Lynch, and the hilarious Pancakes Solve Nothing by Josh Frankel, plus the equally hilarious Desert Island Paradise and Only the Lonely, two Frankel-edited anthologies.

Having so many Bay Area cartoonists exhibit at the sparsely attended Indy Euphoria was a little embarrassing, especially with the great attendance at Francois Vigneault’s own SF Zine Fest. Still, it was organizer Anthony Leano’s, and possibly Sacramento’s, very first expo or convention for independent, underground and alternative comics. Which is weird considering Sacramento’s connection to many famous cartoonists. Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky lived outside of Sacramento in Winters before moving to France. Charles Burns went to UC Davis. Justin Green, who is now considered one of the first graphic novelists, and Carol Tyler lived in Sacramento for a time. Some of Green’s comics were published in now-defunct Tower Record’s music magazine Pulse! by fellow Sacramento resident Marc Weidenbaum and later collected as the anthology Musical Legends. Weidenbaum also published comics in Pulse! by Sacramento teenager Adrian Tomine, who went on to become one of the great talents of alternative comics. The aforementioned Josh Frankel went to high school with Tomine, and the aforementioned Jesse Reklaw also lived in Sacramento while growing up. There are, in fact, several similarities between Reklaw and myself: we both share the same first name, love comics, grew up in Sacramento and, as I learned in his Expo 2000 anthology story “How I Ruined My Bladder,” both have bladder problems.

Despite its comic connections, Sacramento may never have an alternative comics convention as well attended as Stumptown, SPX or SF Zine Fest. There were, however, some Sacramento-specific things about Indy Euphoria that I really enjoyed. Local DJ Roger Carpio was spinning the choicest dance-rock cuts in the lobby, just as he does at Lipstick, Tuesday nights at Old Ironsides, and Fuck Fridays, Friday nights at the Townhouse. When I was newly single after my divorce, Carpio helped me angry-dance away my troubles. There was also a live drawing session Saturday night with Mike Hampton, zombie girls, and Dan Brereton of Nocturnals fame, who was really fun and approachable. Here’s one of my better drawings from the session:

(Scratch Papers, Page 76)

The zombie girls were clients of tattoo and comic book artist Brandon Bracamonte, a guy I knew in high school and hadn’t seen again until the show. When I met Anthony Leano at a Drink and Draw last year I heard Brandon was still in the local comics scene, and then at APE his badge was accidentally included with the set of badges for my table, so apparently this meeting was pre-ordained. I also got to meet, for the second time in a long time, the Sacramento News & Review’s editorial cartoonist John Kloss, who shared tales of knowing Crumb, Justin Green and Carol Tyler back in the day, and revealed the number one cause of divorce: marriage. I also got to know local cartoonist and WoW enthusiast M. Neils, aka “Pocket,” who sat at the table next to mine.

A few final Indy Euphoria highlights: watching Chris Perguidi pretend to get beat up for his local access show in Gilroy, seeing a guy I don’t know wearing one of my t-shirts who gave me two funny mini-comics (send me an email guy and I’ll send you some credit!), meeting a girl who owns another one of my t-shirts, meeting Ann Masushima of Eyeball Burp and her fiancé Alex Chiu and reading their inspiring zines and comics, and of course everyone who stopped by the table to buy a comic or chat!

Oh, and one last thing: this super-cute doll by Chartruz Lovelace, which I got for my super-cute doll, Audrey.