Alison Hallett down at the Merc broke the news this morning that the popular Portland small-press comics celebration Stumptown Comics Fest will no longer exist as a standalone convention:
It's not particularly surprising, then, to learn that Stumptown Comics, Incâthe festival's organizing body, which attained nonprofit status last yearâhas cancelled the Stumptown Comics Festival, and is folding its activities under the umbrella of Rose City Comic Con, a big new pop culture show with ties to Seattle's Emerald City Comic Con. (Got that? After only two years, Rose City has both successfully partnered with Seattle's beloved show, and gobbled up a local rival. Impressive.) According to a press release, Stumptown will be "moving its panel programming and the annual Stumptown Comic Arts awards to Rose City Comic Con in September while the group's board of directors works on a new schedule of Stumptown community events to debut in 2015."
So Stumptown will continue to exist as a series of "community events" that will begin the year after next, but there's no more big show. This seems like a shame to me; just about every Seattle-area cartoonist I know considered Stumptown to be an important holiday in the comic book calendar. They'd head down there, sell some books, and network with their Portland counterparts. I've got no problem with big pop culture comic conventions, but the small-press conventions are important, too.
Giant conventions like Emerald City Comicon provide a platform for minicomics and small press cartoonists to expand their audience, but Stumptown was a place where they could strengthen their ties to the community. Even with the requisite panels and afterparties, you can't really get that kind of togetherness out of a mammoth convention. I'm glad that Seattle still has the Short Run small press festival and Emerald City Comicon. It's possible that Short Run could experience a bump in size next year as people look for a dedicated small press fest to call their own.
