What a great weekend! The Portland Underground exhibited a table at its second show, and first Stumptown Comics Fest. This time we had our recently-printed (as of last week) issue #2 to offer as well as #1, buttons, and Zombie trading cards. Present at the PDXUG booth were Chris Kohler (artist) and Vernon Hall (sales/marketing/spokesmodel).
The show was very well-attended, with every aisle crowded during peak hours. We did very well on Saturday, selling enough books to pay for our booth costs by about 2pm! It was pretty busy all day, so we didn’t have a chance to really stroll around and absorb the rest of the show. Sunday was a bit less frenetic, allowing Vernon and I to spend more time checking out and shopping for others’ work.
In addition to hawking the physical books, we spoke with many fans about checking out this here website for our upcoming weekly/bi-weekly page updates following up from the end of issue #2.
I really enjoyed hearing in-person feedback from folks who liked the comic. While we both got to the point where we were able to lay down the fundamental who/what/when/where/why of the comic in a couple of sentences, it was most fun when the conversations would expand from there into the fest, comics in general, or even our beloved Portland Timbers. I also enjoyed “talking shop” about traditional inking/comic-making methods with other creators.
I picked up some ideas about our next show(s), as well… maybe some logo/art add-ons to spruce up our ugly-ass PVC pipe sign holder (although the big poster of issue #1′s cover snared us the most eyeballs!), T-SHIRTS (“We Can Brew It!”), maybe some prints.. etc.
A big thank-you goes out to all of you who visited our table and have checked us out here at the site as a result – we hope to get new pages rolling to start issue #3 (“The Sequestered”) as soon as we can!
If you didn’t have a chance to pick up either issues 1 or 2 of the book, I’ve updated the PayPal shopping cart at the bottom of our website sidebar – orders will be shipped the next day in a sturdy bubble mailer, and I’ll throw in 3 buttons while those last!
