Plaidophile

Today I went to APE with Pat and Mark. While there I met, chatted with, and bought things from the following cartoonists whom I admire:

• Shannon Wheeler
• Meredith Gran
• Aaron Diaz
• Keith Knight

and I also bought some stuff from a bunch of cartoonists I'd never heard of before. Also apparently I was sharing the same oxygen as Jeff Rowland at one point without realizing it. Oh well.

I also exchanged some words with Stephen Notley and chatted a bit with Andrew Farago and Shaenon Garrity.

After that I went to the Cartoon Art Museum's APE party and hobnobbed with some of the above, and also met Rob McCarthy, Jonathan Lemon, and a few other fellow monsters (whose names I forget, unfortunately), and most importantly, Jesse Reklaw who I have admired for a long time and who was probably the single most influential person when it came to my decision to start webcomics to begin with. As it turns out, he was glad to meet me too — he had been trying to find my email address so he could give me a copy of his first book, which had a strip I'd written back in 1999 (or rather, which my subconscious had written when I was like 5 but which I submitted to him in 1999).

Anyway, between all the merch I bought and the money I donated to CAM, I completely drained my checking account and spent nearly all of it. And it was worth every penny.

I think the most surprising thing is that of the ones I'd talked to before, all of them remembered me based on our previous communication (and Rob McCarthy actually remembered me from a comment thread on LiveJournal which I didn't realize was with him, heh). The second-most surprising thing is that I was completely unsurprised by how everyone was; they were all exactly as I'd imagined them being (and they were all awesome).

Oh, and I finally saw my comics in the virtual gallery. Unsurprisingly, they displayed too briefly to be read properly and had been scaled down with nearest-neighbor filtering so they were unreadable anyway. Oh well. The three particular strips were a Unity, a journal, and a Womble. Of course, Shaenon had submitted three strips from all of her comic series (which she's several of) and she said that I could/should have done the same thing, and thus I could have gotten a lot more rotation time in the slide show. Oh well. I'm just happy to be a part of it anyway.