redundantly redundant: APE! APE! APE!

Start your day with a healthy breakfast. Unlike this one.

APE stands for Alternate Press Expo. It is a miniature comic convention specializing in small independent publications and anything non-mainstream. It takes place at the San Francisco Concourse at 7th St and Brannan in the West SOMA area of San Francisco. No one really calls it West SOMA but if they did, it would be SWOMA.

This guy was pimping the Super Kaiju Big Battle booth. A weird show I've never seen which is like Wrestling, but the guys wear these Japanese monster costumes and have funny special moves. Like one I saw at their booth display had a shelled monster pull out a conch shell and deafen every while simultaneously summoning illegal outside help. Here is an example clip. It's actually a Japanese clip about this American program.

And then there were other costumed freaks. um... I mean custom costume enthusiasts.

Hey wait a minute! Them again? What's going on? What sort of racket is this? Either they have way too much time on their hands or they were paid to walk around. They did tell me they had more costumes for later.

Crazy costumes aside, APE was really great. Not only can you buy lots of cool art books, but it was fun knowing a lot of the people behind the booths. Such as Ben Collison.

or Lark Pien (and here) who looks like she's reaching for a shuriken. As well as husband Thien Pham.

Here's an old classmate of mine, Lanny Liu

From Shaba, Vince Riley (no webpage Vince?) and at another table (not pictured) Danny Burbol.

Sharing a table with the ever impressive David Chong Lee was my first figure drawing teacher Henry Yan who has an INCREDIBLE figure drawing book out now. APE was so very inspirational. Let me make a blog aside for a moment and tell you how cool artists are. Well at least the ones I know. Whenever I go to one of these or an art show/reception I often here (as an easy point of conversation) "Which one is yours?" or "Where's YOUR work?" or "Why don't you have anything?" This is always followed with genuine or goading encouragement. And even though I lament "oh I haven't done that in so long" it really doesn't matter and they know it. So anyways, I'll be going back to my basics and using Henry's book as a guide for the next few months to get things started. Get my value eye working on all gears cause next year, I'm gonna get a table at APE!

Debbie Huey who writes and illustrates the all-ages book Bumper Boy.

Anthony Hon (TFB) and Wahab Algarmi as well as Cannon Tissue w/ Sturdy Comics.

others:
Nathan Stapley
Jennifer Chang
Eun Ju who is now married so I'm not sure how to google her.
Another former classmate from my Color & Design class. I forget her name! =(
um... did I miss anyone? Oh well! I mean Sorry!

There was a panel with the famous Art Spiegelman, writer of MAUS.

And a Bay Area Indie panel with Debbie et al.

It was a long day! We headed over to the crepe house on Polk and Washington.

Belgium Waffle

and then to the APE "Indie" show at the new art gallery on Sutter (x-st. Polk) called 1988. They had a lot of cool stuff.

Some of Graham Annable's (who did the funny Space Wolf (below) animation) work.

Camilla Derrico. Preparing these pictures, I noticed that a lot of the works at this show sold (see the red dot on the price/name tag?). Good first show for the gallery!

Jeremy Tinder. I thought this picture was amusing.

Scott Campbell (not to be confused with the comic book artist J.Scott Campbell) who works at Double Fine (video game company). The concept artists there (including Nathan Stapley) do comics almost every morning. I bought one of his prints at the show.