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While I have a few minutes here in the beautiful Eastworks complex in Easthampton, Mass…

Webcomics Weekend officially kicked off this morning, but yesterday was a whirlwind tour of the places and faces that make webcomics one of the rare scenes I feel comfortable calling a “community.” Since there was lots of fun stuff to reflect on, here’s a quick recap of the day:

- Met Gary Tyrrell of Fleen in Tarrytown and we had a great, long-winded chat about life, the universe and comics (print and web) en route to Easthampton. We capped off the trip by listening to the latest edition of the Webcomics Weekly Podcast (the first time I’ve listened to the program, in fact), featuring Scott Kurtz, Dave Kellet, Kris Straub and Brad Guigar of the Halfpixel webcomic collective.

- Arrived in Easthampton and drove directly to the Eastworks complex, where Meredith Gran (creator of Octopus Pie and organizer of Webcomics Weekend) and some of the Dumbrella crew gave us a quick tour of their studio and warehouse space. This was my first look at their setup, which is located in a massive old (textiles?) factory that’s been repurposed to host a variety of boutique shops and creative studios. It’s an absolutely amazing complex — which somehow manages to maintain the tone of both a creative- and business-minded mecca for the evolving webcomics scene. One gets the feeling that there is something very special blossoming here in Western Massachusetts, and this weekend’s events are a big part of that growth cycle.

– After touring Eastworks, the next few hours were a blur of food prep and consumption, and a long list of new faces (to me, at least) during a private get-together for some of the creators attending the event. The food was outstanding (including Gary’s homemade pizza and more pounds of homemade lasagna, pasta dishes and other snacks than I could hope to account for here) and once things got rolling (read: “people started drinking”), the hours flew by in a flurry of connecting faces to names and names to comics. Among the creators I chatted with over the course of the afternoon (whose sites are all equally recommended):

Spike (Templar, Arizona)
Rob DenBleyker (Cyanide & Happiness)
Bill Barnes (Unshelved)
Jorge Cham (PhD Comics)
Rene Engstrom (Anders Loves Maria)
Chris Yates (creator of the “Poop Sign”, among other nifty things)
Jeff Rowland (OverCompensating)
Rich Stevens (Diesel Sweeties)
David Willis (Shortpacked)
Vincent LaBate (Kitty Hawk)
Joey Comeau (A Softer World)
Jon Rosenberg (Goats)
Andrew Bell (Creatures in my Head)

- Later that night, we ended up in “downtown” Northampton for a pub crawl that started out with a significant bit of crawling as we wandered between the local comic shop, a coffee house and other locations, but ended up with Kurtz, Kellet, Tyrrell and I sitting in a nifty little establishment called “Tunnel Bar.” (The bar was built in a semi-circle network of tunnels, filled with leather chairs and dimly lit for a great War-era atmosphere.) I also managed to finally meet The System creator Rosscott. Crowds of webcomic fans tagged with day-glo stickers spilled into the bar all night and crowded the streets of Northampton, making for an interesting trek around town prior to settling into the bar and an even more interesting evening. Attendees outnumbered the locals by a pretty noticeable tally in just about every stop along the identified pub crawl landmarks. There wasn’t any decent way to keep count of the showing, but I’d estimate at least a hundred or so fans and several dozen creators wandering Northampton the night before the event kicked off.

– On another observational note, this was the first time I chatted with Kurtz and Kellet, and it was a conversation punctuated by a near-constant stream of fans as the pair held court in Tunnel Bar. It was yet another reminder of how massive the fan base for webcomics tends to be — and how underexaggerated (and undervalued) it tends to be at typical comic conventions. Substitute Kurtz and Kellet (or any number of other creators bopping around Northampton this weekend) for a pair of notable creators from the print comics world and I’d be hard-pressed to say there’d be any difference in the size of the crowd that develops. Heck, I’d put money on a few of the creators attending the show this weekend to draw a bigger crowd than some of print comics’ A-list creators. If anything, the weekend has provided a controlled base of sorts for comparing the two scenes — minus all of the trappings of the print comics scene, how does an event by and for webcomics stack up? The answer thus far: a lot better than I expected, to be honest.

– The night ended at a greasy-spoon diner near Tunnel Bar and some of the worst food I’ve tasted in a great many years. Tyrrell and I tagged along with the crew from Halfpixel, as well as Jorge Cham, Bill Barnes, David Willis (and his fiance), and a host of other creators, fans and assorted other people in various stages of drinking and drunk and well-past drunk. This was the wind-down portion of the night, but produced one of my favorite quotes of the weekend thus far:

“The Oscars and the Emmys of webcomics are the refrigerator door and the bathroom.”
– Scott Kurtz, explaining where he’d be proud to see his comics end up in a reader’s home.