So, the cat's officially been let out of the bag: After taking a break for a couple years so that I could pay more attention to my own creative work, I've jumped back into organizing the Stumptown Comics Fest! I started taking steps to move back into a directorship role just before the 2010 Fest, as I was helping with promotion and art direction. It was clear that Shannon Stewart, the current Director at that time, was ready to hand the reins over to someone with more time and attention than he could spare.

In taking the Fest back on, I realize that it will be dominating my attention again for the next few years, so I really want to make it worth the trouble. To me, that translates to making the Fest bigger and better than it's ever been before. To start with, the exhibition floor needed to expand - the show has had an ever-growing waiting list for spaces for the last four years - a need which necessitated the move to the larger Convention Center venue. I'm also going to be shifting the gaze of the Fest ever-so-gradually toward the more established, professional creators in the Portland area and beyond. For years Stumptown has been considered just another indie-show, like APE, SPX or MoCCA. And while it has catered predominantly to that stratum of creator, there's a lot more that a creator-focused show like Stumptown can offer. I've already reached out to a number of creators who might previously have felt like they wouldn't fit in at the Fest, and the response has been gratifyingly positive so far. We're also going to be expanding our workshop track to an additional room, allowing more flexibility in our curriculum and again, the ability to broaden our scope a bit to offer a range of classes for beginners and more advanced comics writers and artists, and even for those aspiring to self-publish and distribute their work.

So, that's the big news of the day. I hope you can join us at the Fest next year, and keep checking back at the site for additional updates over the coming months!

Just in time for Back To School, all Apparel and Badges in my Lunarbistro.com store are 25% off until Sept. 15! Also, check out the new lower price on the 8-Bit Tarot decks! That's a permanent discount of $10 off the deck! My hope is to clear out some of this inventory to make room for new products in 2011!

Also, hopefully, that'll be the last of the lunarbistro.com store news until I actually do get some new stuff in there. I'm working on getting prints made of the Sweet Peaches and Visit With Hades images I created earlier this year, and should have those in the store by the end of September.

Hey, all:

When I ended the liquidation sale, I shut the store down for a few weeks to let the dust settle. When that ended, I relaunched the store with a Recovery Sale! Prices aren't quite as low as they had been during the liquidation, but everything in the store is still 50% off, including all of the Ellie Connelly merchandise, while supplies last! Of course, I completely forgot to mention it here. So, here is my late notice of the sale, which will be ending on August 16th! So, you've still got another week or so to take advantage of the savings!

Celebration! Joyous Rapture! Calloo, Callay! The new site is finished! As I described in an earlier post, the biggest changes are that the blog is more prominent, the latest update for the comic has been moved over there to the right instead of dominating the top of the site. This brings the more active, frequently-updated content up to the top. That's really the biggest conceptual change to the site, the rest is all just window-dressing. Everything that was here before is still here - at least, the important stuff. I got rid of a couple things, the square ads that ran along the left-hand side, the link to my LibraryThing account... But hopefully I managed to condense the important, useful pieces of info and links in a way that makes them all make a little more sense in their context.

At any rate, I've been tinkering and pushing these boxes around for months now, and now I'm finished! Enjoy!

I just wanted to make sure I mentioned here, since I'd been making a big deal about possibly attending this convention before, that I am now Officially NOT EXHIBITING at Steam-Con II this November. Lots of things have conspired to make my financial situation very unpredictable at this time and, much as I'd like to be there sharing my work with everyone, I just can't manage it right now. I think I may still attend, though, but I won't be staying the night at the hotel. It would just be a day trip to check out the show and see what it's about, talk to the organizers a bit and start thinking about next year. So, my apologies to anyone who was planning on going just to see me (ha!) but I'm sure you'll see plenty of other interesting things there to make your trip worthwhile! I believe both Phil Foglio and Paul Guinan are still planning to be there, so that should still be pretty cool!