It's that time of the year again for San Francisco magazine's Best of the Bay party. The annual bash features lots of eats, drinks and chances to win prizes. Be prepared to fork over nearly a bill for your ticket here -- but as an added bonus it will also get you into the afterparty at Slide. San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 8th St. Come watch contenders for the Air Guitar championship title......

Tonight, the SF Indiefest anschlüss continues, with a party celebrating the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski at Balazo Gallery (2183 Mission at 18th). Costumes encouraged. (9pm) Two great alcohol-accessorized reading events at the Make Out Room (3225 22nd St between Mission and Valencia): Friday and Saturday night is Mortified's annual doomed Valentine show with teenage stories of hopeless love, awkwardness and pain. (8pm) All this weekend it's the California International Antiquarian Book Fair at......

On a day when the sun finally came back to San Francisco, we thought it best to hide from those destructive rays in pursuit of a hobby often associated with living in one's parents' basement--the collecting and reading of comics. These aren't your typical funnybooks, though--this was the yearly Alternative Press Expo (or APE), wherein the exhibits center on the self-published, the smaller markets, the oft-ignored subjrects and probably the most creative stuff going on in the world of sequential art today. We spoke with Bob Lipsky (Uptown Girl); Alex Robinson (Box Office Poison, Tricked); Randall Christopher (Kleeman and Mike); Deb Aoki (Bento Box); Miriam Libicki (Jobnick!; Towards A Hot Jew; Shannon O'Leary (locally produced Pet Noir); and SFist favorite Julia Wertz of Fartparty.org....