Portland is a small town, except when it isn’t.
It’s pretty much a truism, once you’ve been here longer than, say, six months: you go to a party here in Portland, you’re going to meet somebody you know from a context other than the one which occasioned the party. (Someone who actually knows network theory help me out: your supposedly discrete nets overlap in ways you don’t expect. Two degrees of separation recursing back to yourself. Or something.) Anyway: Portland’s a small town, is my point; maybe the largest I’ve ever lived in, and it’s a small town in part because it’s easy to curl up with your own ontogroups of choice and let the rest of the world go hang, until you’re at a party and see somebody you know that you’d never have expected in that context.
So it’s nice to pick up the Mercury and read an article on the local comics scene and realize I only know one of the cartoonists mentioned. (Though if I’d been paying attention, I would have remembered most of the rest from Team Alternative. Did I tell you Team Alternative totally rigged the scoring? Had some people up on top of this closet that boomed when you kicked it. Plus they had foam fingers. On the merits, trust me, Mainstream kicked their scrawny indie butts. —Did I tell you I was cheering for Team Mainstream? —Did I tell you the most mainstream team Portland could field was three out of four self-publishers, who’ve dabbled in the capecapades trade? Portland. Small town.)
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