Coiled Comics

Jet City Comic Show

By Peter

Last weekend, I went to the Jet City Comic Show in Seattle Center. It was as if someone took the Emerald City ComicCon and aimed a shrink-ray at it. It had all of the elements of the bigger show: vendors selling old comics books, people dressed in costume, and artists selling their graphic novels.  But it was about a fifth the size. I’m hoping we can have a table there next year.

I talked to a number of artists and ended up buying several books.

One of the coolest artists I talked to was a guy who is part of the Cloudscape collective, a group of artists in Vancouver, Canada, who put together anthologies on different themes. He also has a webcomic called Teaching English in Japan, written by Jonathan Dalton and Jeffrey Ellis (not sure which one he was), based on real life experiences of teaching English in Asia. It’s totally delightful, and really gives you a sense of being there.

I also met Nick Dragotta, who makes a living drawing for Marvel comics, but his real passion is HowToons, a collaboration with MIT where two cartoon kids build wild inventions that you can actually make from everyday objects.

I also met the writer/artist team that makes Wayfarer’s Moon. It’s a beautifully-drawn fantasy graphic novel with female protagonists. It’s your basic good vs. evil battling it out with arrows, axes, and magic, so not a lot of depth, but very enjoyable.