As consolation for another year passing without a festival, Short Run has published The Short Run Comix & Arts Festival Catalog, which features 40 new releases from WA State comic artists, authors, and zinesters, ads for small print and publishing businesses, plus DIY projects and local stores. This free, 16-page newsprint catalog, designed by Jacob Covey, will be mailed all across the US. You can request a free catalog clicking here. Read more…
Pick up a copy of our new book Decade: 10 Years of Short Run Comix & Arts Festival at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, Elliott Bay Book Company, Push/Pull, Floating World Comics in Portland, Silver Sprocket in San Francisco, and Spit and a Half online distro.
What a great idea! The “Comics Festival” has become such a crucial and integral part of the comics community over the past couple decades, and while there are plenty of social media posts and con-reports that surface online, the experience is pretty ephemeral. Seattle’s Short Run Fest has solved that by producing this gorgeous, full color year by year look back at their festivals and events over the past ten years. – John Porcellino
If you cannot pick it up in person, it’s also on our Etsy page for $27 (US shipping included).
We loved talking with Jasmyne Keimig about our new book, our next project, and the festival’s future.
Decade is most accurately described as a sort of yearbook of the Seattle comics scene over the past several years as documented at the Short Run festival and at satellite events. The book plays with yearbook photo idea on the first and last pages, which are stacked with photo portraits of many artists over the years. When I first opened Decade I found myself searching for familiar faces, remembering what is was like to see these unmasked faces all together IRL.
Board Member McKenna Haley with our new book “Decade: 10 Years of Short Run Comix & Arts Festival” and with tote bag designed by Weng Pixin. Books and totes available on our etsy page.
Read Kelly Froh’s essay here.
The Short Run Festival takes place inside a huge hall with floor to ceiling windows, located in the middle of Seattle Center’s expansive campus of performing arts buildings, community gathering spaces and sports arenas. It’s where the Space Needle is. It’s where the monorail goes. In addition to our tried-and-true roster of supporters that we’ve built over the last decade, we have been able to count on tourists and locals alike, who just happen to be at Seattle Center, to find their way to the festival floor. Because of our size, we are filed in the “first to close, last to re-open” category of businesses. We are eager to return to festival planning, which we usually begin a year in advance, but our worry is that large, crowded, indoor events like Short Run won’t see the attendance we are used to anytime soon unless half of the population holding us back suddenly changes its collective mind and gets vaccinated.
Short Run Slideshow Series showcases the work of four Seattle comic artists—Lauren Armstrong, Megan Kelso, Myra Lara, and Meredith Li-Vollmer—and their processes of stepping outside of their familiar ways of working. In recent individual projects, each artist confronted unique challenges that inspired them to stretch their usual approaches to research, collaboration, and the comics medium. This video series, taking the slideshow as its model, brings together the artist’s voice with images of the artwork to highlight these new directions. Read more…
What have we been up to and what do we have planned? Check out this article by Paul Constant for Crosscut.
Copies are available for $27 (includes shipping, US addresses only).
The first 200 copies sold also receive a limited edition, two-sided, Risograph poster with art by Jasjyot Singh Hans and Eroyn Franklin, designed and printed by Hocus Pocus Press.
There’s lots of great online content out there to keep you inspired and help you keep up your drawing and comics-making practice. Read more…
Dear Friends of Short Run,
We are finding it hard to make a closing statement about 2020: It was hard, confusing, shocking/not shocking, boring, scary, and it went on and on. The best we could do was stay present and hold our community close. This year-end report shares what we did to make it through. Your donations and your support helped keep the lights on throughout it all.
Show your community that you’d like to attend a comic festival again one day! These logo masks are made locally by Misty Mountain Mfg. in Georgetown! They will be generously donating 50% of the profits to us! Here’s an easy way to order from our etsy site!
