Go & Do: Cowtown Alternative Comix Festival

Go & Do: Cowtown Alternative Comix Festival
by John Wenzel on June 26, 2009

Anyone with half a brain cell and interest in culture knows Denver has had a fertile underground music and arts scene for several years now. Less visible, however, is our alternative comics scene (and no, I don’t mean indie stand-ups, although we have a kickass scene of those, too). I mean comics, as in comic books and cartoons.

The Mile High City’s finest of the bunch will get together on Saturday at the Tattered Cover bookstore in LoDo for the Cowtown Alternative Comix Fest, which offers and presentations and exhibits of the work of John Porcellino, Noah Van Sciver, Lonnie Allen, Will Barnes, John Bueno, Patty Leidy, Ozzy Longoria, John Peters, Ron Ruelle, Felix Tannenbaum, Stan Yan and more.

I chatted with co-organizer Porcellino, of the internationally-renowned King Cat Comix, in advance of the event.

So where does this idea come from?

Myself and a couple other local cartoonists. We’d been talking about it for a little bit and then maybe around New Year’s we really started getting together at the Tattered Cover, sitting around talking, seeing if we could come up with something that worked for Denver. There’s been the Denver Zine Fest for the last couple years and that’s been really cool, but this year it’s seemed like we needed to do something else.

Is the Denver Zine Fest not happening this year?

Right. Normally it’s around this time of year, so it seemed like a good chance to do something like that, but really more alternative comics-reated.

It seems like a unique event. I’ve certainly never heard of anything like this happening before.

There are’nt a whole lot opporutnities for comics-related stuff in Denver, and a lot of things that happen are usually more mainstream comics-related. We wanted to come up with something that would raise awareness of the more unusual things people were doing in comics.

Artists Noah Van Sciver (left) and John Porcellino. Photo from MySpace.com.

Is there sort of an overlap between the zine world and alt-comics world?

There’s a good amount of people who were at Zine Fest for sure. For me, personally, with my comics I always feel like I have one foot in the zine world and one foot in the comics world. I draw comics but a lot of my stuff is in zine format and I’ve been doing that for a long time. So I kind of have little bits of both. I think a lot people who are going to be involved in this event are kind of the same way. They just happen to be self-publishing or working with small independent publishers.

What kind of alt-comics scene does Denver have?

It’s definitely a pretty small comics scene. There are a lot of people doing a lot of wide-ranging things. We were trying to focus this particular event on the more alternative comics or the more unusual, outside-of-the-mainstream type comics, so when you narrow it down that way it’s even smaller. But people are really enthusiastic about it and the people who are into it are very cool. We’ve been doing events at Kilgore Books and stuff and those are usually pretty well-attended.

People who don’t know about alternative comics probably misinterpret the term quite a bit.

I just think in Denver is like a lot of towns. When you say you’re a cartoonist people think of superhero comics and and daily newspaper strips. Some of the exhibits at this thing have their toes in those genres a little bit, but they’re still doing things on a more personal level, a little more idiosyncratic level. What we’re trying to do is raise some awareness that this kind of work being done here. A lot of it flies under the radar. And a lot of exhibitors are better known outside of Denver than in their own town.

A cartoon by Will Barnes.

That’s exactly the principle at work in a lot of underground art forms, particularly music, where you have American bands being bigger in Europe than the States.

With comics it’s probably even rougher because this partiuclar kind of artwork is so individual. There’s no other way to do it than to sit there by yourself and knock out these pages. At least a band can go out and try and play somewhere and get some contact that way, but for cartoonists it can be a pretty lonely thing. So a bunch of us try and get together just to get out of the house.

How many exhibitors will there be?

The latest I have is 19 or 20 exhibitors. One guy’s coming up from Pueblo and we’ve got people coming in from Grand Junction and New Mexico, in addition to all over Denver.

Why is it important to support these artists?

It’ a very interesting, beautiful art form that doesn’t get a lot of attention. We’re using this medium of comics to do things that a lot of people do in the more literary worlds or fine arts-type worlds. People who are interested in those kind of things might be surprised at what is really going on in the comics world. It’s great to support it because people are doing stuff here that’s really high quality. We’re not New York or San Francisco or anything, but in our own small way we’re trying to raise some of that awareness here.

Another challenge is that comics aren’t traditionally considered high art.

In the U.S. there really is this sense that comics have been neglected and looked own upon as this kind of lowbrow art form. Probably most people wouldn’t even call it an at form. In a lot of ways that’s just historical circumstance. There were comics for every type of interest in the early 20th century and as years went on for various reasons, the superhero thing kind of became a safe outlet. But there’s so much more out there and it’s really great stuff.

Cowtown Alternative Comix Festival. Local artists presenting comics, graphic novels, and mini-comics. Saturday, June 27. 1 p.m.-5 p.m. Tattered Cover LoDo, 1628 16th St. in Denver. Free.