24. Uprising by Muse

23. Angels by Flight of the Conchords

22. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan

21. Let’s Go Surfing by The Drums

20. Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See by Busta Rhymes

19. No Surprises by Radiohead

18. Condemnation by Depeche Mode

17. Time to Say Goodbye by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman

16. Such Great Heights by Iron & Wine

15. Psychic City (Voodoo City) by YACHT

14. Karma Police by Radiohead

13. The Food [Live] by Common

12. All for the Best by Thom Yorke

11. Home by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

10. Fog (Again) [Live] by Radiohead

9. Amnesiac / Morning Bell by Radiohead

8. Hurt Feelings by Flight of the Conchords

7. Doomsday by Elvis Perkins in Dearland

6. Starlight by Muse

5. You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC

4. Sleepyhead by Passion Pit

3. I Am A Citizen Insane by Radiohead

2. Bulletproof by La Roux

1. Gagging Order by Radiohead

For the uninitiated, “CosPlay” is simply an abbreviation of the words “Costume Play,” and refers to the act of dressing up as characters from Science Fiction, Fantasy, Comic Books, Anime and video games. This phenomenon isn’t new—people have been dressing up as superheroes and characters from Star Trek and Star Wars for decades—but those who associate themselves with the CosPlay scene tend to skew younger and have a greater affinity for Japanese pop culture. I found this to be true at Sac Con: while there were a few exceptions, most of those in costume were teenagers. They were so young there was even a game of Red Rover going on out front when I got there:

Of course, just because you’re a teenager into CosPlay, that doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily limit yourself to characters from Japan. Here’s a kid dressed up as the Mad Hatter from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which wasn’t even out at the time of the show:

The nice thing about people who dress up for comic book conventions is that they’re always quite happy to take have their picture taken, so I was able to get a photo of a group of kids who didn’t even know each other. I told them we old people are fascinated by their strange customs:

CosPlay outfits can be quite intricate, as seen in this Link / Epona duo (Link is the hero of the Legend of Zelda video games from Nintendo; in the popular installment Ocarina of Time, Epona is Link’s horse). The kid dressed up as Link wasn’t content to let his own face substitute for Link’s, he actually wore a Link mask that more closely resembled the character’s blocky, Anime-style features. The Epona costume was even crazier, worn and operated by only one person using hand-stilts for the front legs!

As weird as CosPlay may seem to us old people, the Furry phenomenon is even weirder. Furries are fans of fictionalized anthropomorphic characters that also create their own costumes, either of existing Furry characters or characters of their own design. Some Furries enjoy pornography featuring anthropomorphic characters and even have sex in costume, although the Wikipedia article I linked above downplays this aspect of the subculture. Still, being aware of Furry sex makes seeing Furries a bit awkward:

The last weird thing I saw at Sac Con was a doppelganger of my young protégé Clave! Although he cut his hair last year, Clave used to have long, wavy red hair, not unlike local cartoonist Griffon Lyles, seen here with fellow cartoonist Devon McMindes:

Griffon even has a similar drawing style to Clave’s, as seen in this self-portrait:

Like I said, Sac Con was a lot of fun, and there are several such events in Sacramento every year, so check out their web site and go to the next con, if only to be a voyeuristic creep like me! I can’t be the only cultural tourist at these things!

It reminds me of Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings, such as “Surprise!”

Another student in the same class, Josh Johnsen, created this drawing while waiting for a computer. It was very offhand for him—I think he intended to throw it away—but I found in it a sense of power and mystery one often finds in more “primitive” drawings:

It actually reminds me of a recurring dream I have that seems to be a mix Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “John Carter of Mars” series and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, where a sweaty, heavily-muscled red-skinned warrior battles his way through frightening alien landscapes. So, I decided to color Josh’s piece, and here is the result:

Given that both Skinner and Posehn are from the Sacramento area and love metal, I’d say this is a match made in hell!

Speaking of comedy in Sacramento, the Punch Line has been bringing in some great comedians lately, and Dave Attell will be here on March 16th and 17th!

Update: Check out the awesome He-Man show Skinner was in!

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.

Complaining about the assholes we interact with on a daily basis is the #1 eternal pastime of the human race. We all do it, and we get to do it every day, because the world is full of assholes. Me personally, I waste an enormous amount of time seething over people [. . .]. We all get into furious arguments at work that make us want to explode in self-righteous fury (in my office dramas I always realize I was actually the asshole a day or so later) and when we get home from work, this is usually what our loved ones hear about for at least the first hour or so.

Therefore,

[. . .] Katie Couric’s notorious Palin interview last year really was a cheap shot. After all, Katie was trying to nail Palin — which is mean! Who among us can’t sympathize with the experience of being sandbagged by some slick professional rival who catches you in a moment of weakness and, instead of lending a helping hand, drives a fireplace poker through your eye? [. . .]
You’d have to be thinking about the broader picture, about the fact that the president of the United States ought not to be a drooling yahoo [. . .] who thinks living near Canada counts as foreign policy experience, to not see what an asshole Katie Couric was being.

[. . .]

With Going Rogue, the 2012 reality show has already begun. As brainless political theater, she can’t be topped. It’s just too bad for conservatives that she happens to be unsustainably divisive and, as Newsweek points out, a really good bet to permanently marginalize the Republican party by reducing it to a pissed-off, semi-coherent mob that repulses independent voters on a visceral level. To paraphrase John Doman’s Deputy Ops Rawls character from The Wire, she’s “brilliant — fuckin’ shame it’s gonna end our careers, but still.”

The whole thing is worth a read, and bonus points for quoting The Wire.