Another APE tucked away! I found a number of delectable things there that are worth checking out, and Here They Are:

- First off the block, War Head by Katrina Kunstmann. Visually, it's one of the most interesting things I've seen in a while. The character design has this dark whimsicality to it that I just like looking at. It's about a chap with an A-Bomb for a head going about life amongst other similarly improbable phantoms of London. There are only a dozen or so pages up now, but definitely something to look into as it develops!

- The Poet and the Flea A comic about William Blake! That's pretty much all Gallas needed to say to sell me on it, but it's really a beautiful and touchingly told little book. I picked up the first zine of it which contains the first 10 pages, and it was enough to make me check in on the website, where the first 30 are up and available for viewing. Blake is such an oddball figure in literary history, he was More Than Due for a comic treatment, and Gallas does it precisely as it ought to be done.

- The Forgotten Order : This is a lovely book collecting the first bit of Christy Morgan's webcomic, which has been going for nearly two years now. The universe is tantalizingly set - you only get pieces of its workings at a time, and so avoid the usual "For the next ten pages, we're going to lay out the rules with dense rigor" syndrome. A world of dreaming where two beings struggle to find each other, and a world of the living where a talentless girl in a family of magicians struggles with their inhumanity, and linking the two are mysterious creatures called bone servants. The art is beautiful and open, and the mysterious elegance of the setting keeps you moving forward. I hope that next year brings a print edition of the next chapter.

- Quail Comics: This webcomic just started up a couple of months ago, and we got to talk with the writer a bit, a thoroughly charming and just pleasant person. The comic itself is basically, well, I'd say Star Trek Tactics if you replaced the cast with birds, and every once in a while the crew heads down to The Bay to get exasperated by the locals. It will be most interesting to watch it unfold, I think.

- Clockwork Twist : The first three chapters of this steampunk novel by Emily Thompson are online, and to order the digital book is only like $3 so how can you lose, really? I just read the first chapter now, and it features the solid premise of a master clocksmith being lured on an airship journey to find and repair The Clockwork Princess. All of which sounds entirely cool to me, though I don't read as much steampunk as people generally think I do, so I don't have much of a basis for comparison. But it's on my list of Things To Read now, and I'll let ya know how it fares!

And, of course, Elle Skinner is still charming and wonderful and we love her, and Sara McCardle-Blunk showed up to chat for a bit, and she's one of my favorite people ever too, and Doctor Lollipop comics were available for purchase, so that's never a bad thing, and all in all, as a pure shopping experience, APE lived up to itself yet again. Next year, it's going to be at Fort Mason if the rumors are correct, which I have my reservations about, but we shall see!!

- Count Dolby von Luckner