SPX: and otherwise: several things are happening at once

This upcoming weekend is packed full of events, do you hear me? Packed! Some events are nested within others like Russian stacking dolls, while others are up in a different corner like a Malevich painting or zooming in from out of nowhere like a mummy on a skateboard. Events!

(poster by Laura Park, who kills at making posters)

First: Shawn Cheng, John Mejias and I are going to be exhibiting at SPX in Bethesda, MD this weekend. It's the last of the Big Several alternative comics conventions that take place on the East Coast every year, and I am all sorts of excited to be there. We'll be at Table D15, right next to the good people at AdHouse Books and just on the edge of the Vortex of Swellness that is Dustin Harbin and Scott Campbell's table at D1. I'll have a new dollar book collecting the "Head to Head" drawings I've been making for the Partyka site, and I should also have some prints for sale.

While at SPX, you may want to attend these panels, featuring or moderated by my excellent pals:

• The New Action, moderated by friend and collaborator Sean T. Collins and featuring Shawn Cheng, as well as Frank Santoro, Brian Ralph, Benjamin Marra and Kaz Strzepek. It's about action, spectacle and genre in today's art-comics world, and man, just look at that lineup. This panel is a man in sunglasses walking in slow-motion with an explosion behind him.
• Mr. Collins is also going to be on a critics' roundtable with quite a few of the other worthwhile-to-read comics writers out there. They'll be talking about both comics criticism and notable recent books.
• Also of note: Sally Bloodbath, who as co-editor of Always Comix has published some things of mine and Shawn's, will be on a panel about comics and community: friends, drawing nights, conventions and general getting-your-stuff-out-there. Dylan Williams of Sparkplug moderates. Also features the omni-presence that is Frank Santoro, and Robyn Chapman and Benn Ray.
  

...If you're not in Maryland that weekend, but are instead in New York, Partyka's friend and frequent guest Danica Novgorodoff is having a book release party at Rocketship in Brooklyn for her second book, an adaptation of the Benjamin Percy story "Refresh, Refresh." Featuring the holy trinity of books, drinks and a store.







Also up in NYC: Team Macho, a collective of dudes from Toronto with whom we had a fine time at TCAF '05 (they had a 27-toed cat living in their studio, therefore Automatic Fun Time), have a show at Giant Robot.

...Hope to see you at SPX! I think I might actually be done with everything this year and not have to spend the show stapling things behind the table. Probably I will come off as a better, livelier person, but who knows how these things work?