Short Run

Where to get our new book

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).

Books and Totes

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.

Book Release Party & Art Show

Celebrate the release of Short Run’s “festival in a book” on Saturday, September 11 from 5-8 pm at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery in Georgetown. Made during the pandemic for a community missing connection, Decade chronicles 10 years of Short Run festivals, workshops, residencies, performances, parties, and people.

Short Run Slideshow Series

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…

“DECADE: 10 years of Short Run Comix & Arts Festival” (a festival in a book)

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.

Looking for online comics workshops?

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…

Year in Review/ Annual Report

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.

Short Run presents a socially-distanced public display of Robyn Jordan’s Covid-19 Comics

What has it meant to live through this time? It’s been different for each of us, but many of our experiences are shared. We’ve watched our collective anxiety creep to a boiling point as we’ve learned to fear one another’s touch and presence. Read more…

Blazers art show featuring work from 2020 Trailer Blaze residents

Short Run and Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery present: BLAZERS NOV 14 – DEC 09 Read more…

HOT MACHINES a Risograph art show

Short Run and Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery present: HOT MACHINES

OCT 10 – NOV 11 (all day opening on Saturday, October 10th)

Hot Machines is a Risograph art show featuring prints and books printed at Paper Press Punch (Jessica Hoffman & Justin Quinlan, Georgetown) and Cold Cube Press (Aidan Fitzgerald & Michael Heck, Pioneer Square), two homegrown small businesses hanging on through it all – Read more…

Coronavirus-related comics

Are you stuck at home? Are your anxieties through the roof? We’d like to collect 1-page comics about what your daily life looks like now, whether it be good or bad. We’d like to share what this experience LOOKS like. Pages will be reprinted in a quick & dirty old-school photocopied zine (once we feel safe going out to print it), in the meantime, we’ll post the comics on our tumblr page and share the link widely. Stick to 5.5″ x 8.5″ digest mini-comic format so that we can easily put it together. No deadline, comics will be loaded as they are received.

Email your comic page to short.run.info@gmail.com

Dash Grant winner 2019 Rumi Hara

We’re so thrilled that our Dash Grant winner Rumi Hara was able to come to Seattle a few days early and screen print her covers for her gorgeous new mini-comic, The Peanut Butter Sisters. She had this to say, “I had a wonderful time in Seattle! It was amazing being part of the Short Run community, meeting new friends through comics and being inspired to keep making more books. I’m so grateful for the time and space and all the encouragement I was given to make the new comic.”

2019 Festival Concludes!

Thank you everyone who exhibited, attended, volunteered, promoted, or funded us! What an amazing year! We’re still compiling photos but keep your eye on our flickr page, where all the photos will be stored.

2019 Katie Kelso Travel Grant Winners!

Congratulations to Alejandra Espino and Cole Pauls! Each artist exhibitor will receive $200 to be used towards traveling to Short Run on Nov. 9th!

**Alejandra Espino (Mexico City, Mexico)**

Katie Kelso Travel Grant

Two $200 grants will be awarded this year to traveling exhibitors who express financial need. Short Run had the honor of knowing Katie Kelso, a true adventurer and lover of books, who passed away in 2017. Her gift helps artists with travel expenses getting to Seattle for Short Run. We will never forget her!

Exhibitors – this is not a separate application, simply mark that you are in need of financial assistance in the exhibitor app. No explanation needed.

Dash Grant winner announced!

We are happy to announce that after much deliberation, we have selected Rumi Hara, a comic artist and illustrator from Brooklyn, NY, as this year’s Dash Grant winner. The grant provides $250, a half table at the festival, mentorship by a special guest, access & instruction to local screen print co-op, and a place in our annual art show at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery. Rumi’s book is about the adventures of the scavenging “Peanut Butter Sisters” as they get along in life with the guidance of nature- they travel on the backs of whales and energy of hurricanes. The story evolves as their resources dry up and they have to have more human interactions.

Trailer Blaze 2019

The concentrated time spent at Trailer Blaze, with such an amazing and diverse group of artists, was exactly what I needed to reconnect to both my work and myself. – Jessica Hoffman

International Artists at Short Run

Short Run is Seattle’s local comix art festival, with almost 50% of the exhibitors being from the Pacific Northwest. But we also are committed to making it possible for national and international guests to attend to help widen our artistic and cultural perspectives and to work collaboratively across borders.

“Short Run is Seattle’s best book festival”

So says The Seattle Review of Books (writers Paul Constant and Dawn McCarra Bass)

From a visitor’s perspective, Short Run was as smoothly run and as packed with intriguing new titles as ever. The show has grown nicely into Fisher Pavilion — so much so that it’s hard to remember when it was held at Washington Hall or in the Vera Project. Short Run is home, and the festival reached a point in its development when most people involved know what to expect. “Short Run” has become a shorthand for a very particular aesthetic: supportive, enthusiastic, eager for new work and new talent and new artistic perspectives. It’s becoming an institution of its own. (Click link for full article!)

Short Run studio share in Georgetown

Paper Press Punch, Hocus Pocus Press, and Short Run Seattle will share studio space in the Original Rainier Bottling Plant building in Georgetown. Read more…