I was up in Portland for the WarTron Game, but I got into town a couple of days early to visit with relatives and ask them to think of locations that might be used in the WarTron game. I was especially interested in what my cousin Dan Fineberg had to say. Dan does PR for high-tech companies—and he moved from Silicon Valley on up to Portland a while back. He's worked for a graphics spinoff from Tektronix, for Intel... You want to know where Portland's high-tech stuff happens? Ask Dan, he's been there, right? Except, well... actually most of those places aren't such great game locations. Most of the high-tech stuff happens in business parks; those aren't so great for visiting.
So Dan was brainstorming further and further out when he remembered: Dark Horse Comics is a Portland-based company. (He didn't think of Oni Press, publishers of the fun noir mystery "Stumptown" but then again, neither did I and I've read the book.) I might have made a face. You're not supposed to say discouraging things during a brainstorm, but I was thinking them: The WarTron organizers had done a superhero game several years before. I was pretty sure they weren't going to do something with comic books again.
This was my mindset: don't think about comics now. Thus, I almost walked past Floating World Comics without even glancing in the door. I was on my way to Ground Kontrol, a video and pinball arcade. WarTron was based on WarGames and Tron, and Tron had featured a big video arcade. For sure Game Control would send us to Ground Kontrol. Still, I flicked over a sideways glance... And, wow, you can tell Floating World is an awesome comic book store even if you only use your peripheral vision: lots of independent books, displayed so that you can see their covers, lots of shelves...
So I went in. Picked up the latest The Massive and Resident Alien, fine Dark Horse Comics books.
There were also some issues of Papercutter, an anthology comic I hadn't noticed before. Maybe because it's by Tugboat Comics out of Portland and thus this is the first time I've been in a place that presented it so prominently? Of these, my bestest favorite was Papercutter 15. There's a neat story by Jonas Madden-Connor with multiple universes and myths and and and it's neat. And there was a story by Melinda Boyce called My Two Front Teeth in which our heroine gets onto a trampoline and urgh it didn't go the way I expected after that. Plus another story which wasn't my thing, but yay for anthology comics that can come up with 2/3 things I like; that's pretty darned good.
