Hey! I’ll be at San Diego Comic-Con next week speaking on panels. First up is Progressive Politics in Comics, moderated by Douglas Wolk, on Thursday July 12 at 1 p.m. Then Sunday July 15 at 3 p.m. it’s Publishers Weekly Comics World: Serious Pictures: Comics and Journalism in a New Era with a bunch of great people. I’ll otherwise be wandering the convention floor and doing some reporting drawings. If you see me, please come say hi! I’ll have plenty of ibuprofen and vegan jerky.

On Saturday July 21 I’ll be at Code for Oakland all day doing some livesketching of the coding festivities and wooing all those tech minds with tactile tools. And then wrapping up this month on Tuesday July 24 from 6-10 p.m. I’ll be creating small paintings for quick sales at 111 Minna in San Francisco with some other great artists. There will also be a reception for my show at the Cartoon Art Museum soon! But the show will be up through September.

I’ve been working on some longer projects lately that haven’t yet seen the light of the internet, but stay tuned for big drawn journalism pieces at the Boston Review and Cartoon Movement before the month is out. And that’s just the line-up for this month — there’s a ton of awesome stuff in the works for later in the year, including comics conventions, speaking engagements, and new, rad-as-hell multimedia projects. My excitement is founded, trust me.

The sidebar is now full of all the cool stuff I’ve been working on lately for all the cool people I’ve been working for. Our SXSW panel went great — check out the list of resources and links at Graphic Journos. Here’s the little video I made as a proof of concept of my Occupy Oakland reporting — more of these are in the pipeline.

And I won a James Madison award from the SPJ Freedom of Information Committee! Yes, they give those to cartoonists too.

For more beat reporting, keep an eye on Twitter but also Tumblr, where I’ve been doing some original little pieces lately, like this one on the SXSW Homeless Hotspots.

I have a new piece up at Cartoon Movement about my trip with Cartooning for Peace to Corsica in June. And this weekend is Zine Fest! Where I will be selling comics per usual with the inimitable Joey Sayers. It’s the 10th annual Zine Fest, so if you’re in the Bay Area, I recommend stopping by — after all, it’s free.

In two weeks, I will have a big new piece up at Cartoon Movement culminating a lot of research and reporting over the last couple months. I’m pretty excited about this one.

I updated the events page with some actual sweet upcoming events: comics demo at the Museum of Craft and Folk art in SF in March, a comics journalism workshop/panel at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston in April, and a whole mess of comics conventions are on the docket for the next couple months. Hope to see some of you at some of these.

My first installment in a new bimonthly series for The Rumpus just went up! I’ll be telling mostly Census stories, with some others thrown in when the paperwork gets too boring. I’m really excited to be working with The Rumpus, even though I think the Blue Bottle in Dolores Park is no big deal.

Also tonight I’ll be reading second in a sweet line-up of cartoonists at Comic Relief in Berkeley, starting at 8 p.m. Free beer and lots of talent! Tao Lin RSVPed “maybe” on Facebook!

(or you can start with episode 1)

I’ve been so busy with preparations for this weekend’s San Francisco Zine Fest events that I haven’t done much to promote them! So here goes!

Tomorrow evening I’m doing my first ever comics reading, at the Cartoon Art Museum starting at 7 p.m. I think I’m third in the line-up, which includes such luminaries as Jonas Madden-Connor, Jamaica Dyer, Jesse Reklaw, Ed Luce, Noah Van Sciver, Eli Bishop (who made the flyer) and John Freaking Porcellino. Food, drink and entertainment for a measly $5 — but tell ‘em you’re poor and you’re in free! I’ll be reading a compilation of Nine Gallons stories, mostly from the nearly finished second issue, which no one has yet seen. Special!

Then on to the County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park for the Zine Fest proper! This weekend I’ll have all the old and less-old comics on hand for con-special low prices, plus some brand new purchase-ables: three-color screenprints, small postcard-sized prints and five different pin-back buttons! All for cheap or potentially free with book purchases. I’m also selling a bunch of original art of various size and quality, priced to move from $2-$75. And! I also contributed this centerfold to Laura Beck’s Fat Zine, which will be making its sassy debut as well.

On Sunday at 2 p.m., I’ll be moderating a panel about small-press journalism in San Francisco with a seriously stellar line-up: Michael Stoll (founder, SF Public Press), Dan Archer (reportage cartoonist and Knight fellow at Stanford), Josh Wilson (proprietor, Independent Arts + Media), Antonio Roman-Alcala (founder, SF Arts + Politics zine), and Mat Honan (Longshot Mag). Bring your tough questions and notepads!

Bonus: I’ll be sharing a table with the lovely and talented Joey Sayers, whose autobiographical Just So You Know series is a goddamn revelation. So if you can make it out (Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.) we’d be more than happy to accommodate your moneys, or at least your companies.

So much to see! Maybe even too much! But I hope not!

I wrote up my thoughts on the SF Zine Fest for the Daily Cross Hatch, an internet repository of indie comics news and reviews. Feel free to disagree with me if you think it’s a good and logical idea to pay $400 for a table at a convention where you’ll likely not even make that money back in sales — I’d love to hear your reasoning! (And if it’s “networking,” please show your work on the page next to your answer.)

Also, look forward to a neat series of interviews with cartoonists whose talent to press ratio is far higher than a lot of the cartoonists you read about.

I realize this blog has become a clearinghouse of excuses as of late, but what can I say? It’s in the works, but so are a lot of new comics and, well, you know my priorities.

Speaking of which, this coming weekend, I’ll be exhibiting at the San Francisco Zine Fest at the County Fair Building’s Hall of Flowers in the Inner Sunset. It’s completely free, besides your N-Judah fair or gas, plus the willpower to withstand the Sunset fog, and there will be 100 exhibitors, several interesting workshops and lots of cute 20 and 30 something hipsters with tattoos and expensive cheap-looking clothes. I don’t have the latter two, but I’m still hoping to move some comics (I’m even reprinting some of last year’s stuff, since I now live around the corner from a $.02 copy place). I’m also whipping up some affordably priced watercolors for the occasion, and I might even offer $5 portraits. Plus: free chocolate chip cookie with every purchase.

I think the “Zine” part of this fest is sort of misleading, as the majority of the exhibitors seem to be cartoonists, small publishers or crafters. But I won’t get snarky about my take on how worthwhile it is to make a zine in 2009 considering the love-in poster over there, plus the fact that I’ll be Xeroxing, folding, trimming and stapling more than I’d like to admit over the next few days.

Honestly, I had no idea the economy was so bad as to drive the Mountain Goats and the Weakerthans into the cruise industry. Et tu, Kids in the Hall? Et tu?