Gosh but we look solemn there, though I swear we were having a ball. This was Free Comic Book Day at Cosmic Monkey Comics in NorthEast Portland Saturday. Andy Johnson and his wife Christy run one of the best comics shops you could hope to find yourself in, and there was a good turnout for the event. Here of course you see me (Interman, Tales of the Vampires), Steve Lieber (American Beauty, K-PAX), and Matthew Clark(Adventures of Superman, Felon), but also in attendance was Too Much Coffee Man's Shannon Wheeler. He doesn't photograph.

The Monkey provided pizza and chocolate for us so we had sketching and signing energy. I promised Shannon I'd come up with a good feature for his magazine while Lieber lectured kids on how to get better at drawing so one day they could be crammed behind a table they have to crawl under to sit behind. Lieber and I rushed to a late show the night before to see Spider-Man 2 assuming everyone would be talking about it at the signing, when hardly anyone had been yet. So we spoiled it for everyone rather than the other way around. A lot of people picked up Interman from me, and I drew a Sandman piece with Morpheus, Death and Matthew the Raven hanging out. I assumed I was going to be drawing Spiderman for people, but it never happened.


So the shop isn't Target-sized, but it really does manage to fit a huge variety of books in its space, and I have to say, has one of the cleanest bathrooms I've ever seen in a comics shop. Relatively new, Cosmic Monkey is out at the eastern edge of Portland where it doesn't so much compete with the city's other shops as provide a place to buy comics to an area that had no options before. I predict a bright future for CMC. Before leaving we all did different space monkey sketches for the store's collection, and then drove Clark back to Mercury Studio where he heroically got back to work on Superman. A great time, and again we salute the contributing publishers, Diamond Distribution, and Joe Field, the man who came up with the idea of Free Comic Book Day.