We hope you and yours have a happy and safe holiday season, filled with visions of comic panels dancing in your heads, and we hope you’ll stick around in the new year to see what’s coming up from Pop! Goes the Icon. Cheers!

Russell Lissau poses at the Reading With Pictures table.

Artist John Bivens surrounded by his array of published work.

Artist Michael Montenat showed up unexpectedly, seeing his work published in Omega Comics Presents #3 for the first time at the show.

Stay tuned for more creator appearances and special events!

Pj Perez, Hernan Valencia and Alternate Reality Comics owner Ralph Mathieu stand among donations for The Shade Tree shelter.

Las Vegas’ comic book community came together once again to help those in need during the release party for The Utopian trade paperback on Saturday, Jan. 22 at Alternate Reality Comics.

Fans, friends and family turned out en force for the event, which not only featured Utopian creator Pj Perez and cover artist Hernan Valencia signing copies of the recently released paperback collection, but also a 25-cent back issue sale, and food in the parking lot from the extremely popular Slidin’ Thru slider truck.

The event was a benefit for The Shade Tree shelter for women, children and pets. Two car loads of donations were brought in by customers, and almost $200 from the back issue sale was raised for the shelter as well.

A nifty Tron-like ceiling and Star Wars cosplayers were just part of the awesomeness at Emerald City ComiCon

We’re back, kids. And we’re still pooped! This year’s Emerald City ComiCon — our first — has come and gone, and though it was only two days, it felt like being transported for months to a magical world of huggable people, endless Starbucks and male Slave Leias.

Pop! Goes the Icon founder Pj Perez and Omega Comics Presents contributor Jason Copland spent most of the weekend manning the PGTI table in Artist Alley, wedged between the Ben 10 guys and superstar DC artist Dustin Nguyen (not to be confused with the dude from 21 Jump Street). We talked with lots of people, sold some comics and prints, and gave away the two pages of original art from Jason’s OCP story with Dino Caruso. It was an extremely well-organized and pleasant affair, and the crowds were amazing! Seriously, San Diego Comic-Con may be larger in general, but ECCC is growing quickly — even expanding to three days next year to accommodate the increased traffic.

We appreciate everyone who stopped by to chat, buy stuff or find directions. Sorry we weren’t much help on the third part there. Will we come back to Seattle for another round? Most certainly! Will they have us back? We sure hope so! Stay tuned here for updates on future convention appearances.

Did we mention one of the contributors is Russell Lissau, whose story “Greedy” can be found in the second issue of Omega Comics Presents this summer? No? WELL NOW WE DID. Get clickin’!

Your humble Utopian creator here (that’s me, right, with a lizard from the Discover Mojave booth) spent the day chatting with new and old fans, random passersby and Utopian cover artists Mark T. Zeilman and Hernan Valencia. We barely had time to sketch, eat or breathe between all the activity — and sales! We actually sold a lot of stuff, including the very popular mini-poster based on Hernan’s pin-up from the last page of The Utopian #1.

It was fun times, we’ll definitely do it again, and really appreciate all the hard work Suzanne Scott and all the volunteers did to put on a fun little show! Now look at some pictures:

The Utopian crew mans the PGTI table. Sweet T-shirts, fellas.

Local writer Matt Kelemen peruses the finest literature of our age.

The graphic novel will debut during the Vegas Valley Book Festival (Nov. 4 to 8), and an entire panel will be dedicated to Drunk at the concurrent Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival, where not coincidentally, PGTI will have a significant presence. And by significant, we mean possibly drunk behind a table with a stack of crap to sell you. In addition, original art from the comic will be on display at Atomic Todd gallery (1221 S. Main St.) during the month of November.

If you want to support independent artists and get your hands on one of these beauties, just hit up the Drunk website to pre-order your copy now for $25, and you may even get Drunk sooner than you’d think. Check out this nifty video preview, which should get you into the spirit. Or hitting the spirits:

A recent post by Warren Ellis over on his site lauded the continued perseverance of the DIY press:

” …I’m delighted by it, as a toner-stained Eighties kid who still remembers having to bend over staple tines with his thumbs because he didn’t have access to a longarm stapler…”

Five/One Magazine, R.I.P.

For about five or six years in the late ’90s, I published zines and chapbooks, and yes, I used to sit on the floor of my studio apartment, stapling through the center of folded 11×17 sheets with a pulled-open stapler, bending over the tines by hand. To this day, the greatest office supply item I have ever owned is the long-arm stapler I bought in the latter years of my DIY publishing empire. No, seriously, I was called “The Dean of Zines” at some point in my life.

I kind of miss that. I mean, the ease of the internet for publishing and reaching a mass audience is great, but I might write a blog post that 20 people will read, whereas if I printed 200 copies of a zine back in the day, not only would those 200 copies get picked up at coffeehouses, record shops and bars, but they’d also be read by multiple people at some of those locations. And I always like having something to hold, to collect — which is why I’m working on creating printed comics and not doing a webcomic.

I just found it vaguely ironic that I AM now creating a webcomic. Then again, it will be collected in print soon enough, so I guess I get to satisfy both media in which I love to work. And, you know, get copies of my comics into the hands of those who might otherwise never visit the website.

Creator Owned is a cool little blog dedicated to reporting on and promoting small press, indie, creator-owned and web-based comics — so it makes perfect sense that they’d pick up on the ongoings here at PGTI.

Comics Bulletin bills itself as “the internet’s most diverse comics webzine.” And who are we to argue? With reviews, interviews, columns, links and a whole lot more, Comics Bulletin leaves few stones unturned in the world of sequential art. And, you know, obviously they have great taste if they covered the launch of PGTI and our premier webcomic, The Utopian.

If you come across any appearances of PGTI out there in the interwebs, drop us a line and let us know!

Launched in 2002, Free Comic Book Day is celebrated every year on the first Saturday in May. Thousands of comic book retailers offer 100 percent free comic books from today’s top publishers, including Marvel, DC, Image, Oni Press and Dark Horse.

Why? To drum up interest in comic books for the larger reading public, especially kids — you know, those video game-playing, Internet-addicted, text-messaging little people whose literacy is questionable? See, back in the old days, comic books weren’t something just for overgrown adolescent man-children. They were de facto reading material for children everywhere, regardless of gender, class or social status. Whereas only the top-selling monthly comics struggle to sell close to 100,000 copies today, in the mid-20th century, titles sold a million or more copies regularly.

Somewhere along the line, the audiences aged, new ones didn’t latch on thanks to the distracting offerings of a million other entertainment options, and though the intellectual properties associated with comic books became big business (how many of you are feeding Hollywood’s coffers this weekend when you see X-Men Origins: Wolverine?), the actual industry itself has shrunken.

Why is this a bad thing? Well, maybe it’s not, but personally speaking, reading comic books growing up not only taught me to read, but also expanded my vocabulary, opened my mind to be receptive to all sorts of varying viewpoints, inspired my artistry and, yes, served as a connecting point for peers with similar interests. My careers in graphic design, journalism and music are almost all entirely indebted to my rearing on the four-colored panels to which I was overexposed in my youth.

Oh yeah, and comic books are one of those rare things: Like jazz, a uniquely AMERICAN ART FORM.

So visit your nearest local comic shop tomorrow and pick up as many of the Free Comic Book Day issues as you can. Give them to your son, your daughter, your niece, nephew, cousin or, heck, read them yourselves. Because the gifts of literacy, imagination and creativity are timeless … and priceless.