SF Zine Fest 2009

SF Zine Fest 2009
August 22 & 23
SF County Fair Building, Golden Gate Park

The SF Zine Fest has grown in recent years, & it is now something like a smaller, more manageable version of APE. I always have fun at these shows. I'm in awe of creative types, & these people make me feel embarrassingly unproductive. Zines are produced with a real sense of personal investment, & it's a treat to obtain one straight from the creator's hands. The effort involved can be obsessive. I watched Peter Conrad painstakingly use an x-acto knife to emulate a die-cut "2" for the covers of his papperdummy 2. Waving to a pile of cut-out 2s, he told me, "The 2s are free." I felt privileged to handle the multi-layered, hand-bound art books of Aaron Cohick. Andy Warner of Indrind Press proudly showed me the injured arm documented in his zine A Tough Break. I admire the constancy of Jason Martin, whom I have come across for several years in a row now, & each time he has a new issue of his sweetly unaffected Laterborn.

I slipped in & out of a poorly attended interview with Andy Hartzell, a great illustrator & story-teller. Turns out he has a somewhat colorful past, having worked as a carny, drawing caricatures. He's currently working on a video game featuring Wallace & Gromit. He got this job partly on the basis of Fox Bunny Funny, as both have characters who do not speak. I find this very strange, since, other than that, the 2 worlds seem poles apart. When I ran into Mr. Hartzell again a bit later, he was super nice, even though he must have caught me sneaking out of his event early.