The Alternative Press Expo (or APE) was this past weekend at the Concourse here in San Francisco. The show, which is put on yearly by Comic-Con International, features indy and small press creators of zines, comic books, mini-comics, and more. After getting Larry Young's help to kick off our coverage, we attended on Saturday. We met so many cool people and saw so much neat stuff that we're breaking our experience into several posts. First up: the funny stuff. ...

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....