This Halloween, Saturday, October 31st, Short Run Comix & Arts Festival presents their fifth annual showcase of indie comix, zines, art books, small press lit, poetry, animation, and more.

The spacious Fisher Pavilion at Seattle Center will overflow with 200 artists from across the country, with comics trick-or-treating for the kids, innovative animation by Seattle Experimental Animation Team (SEAT), mask making, an epic bake sale, and swag bags overflowing with comics.

Jaimee Garbacik will launch The Ghosts of Seattle Past-a collaborative atlas of memories and interactive art installation. The audience will create hybrid texts combining elements of illustration and poetry with Kundiman poets Jane Wong, EJ Koh and Michelle Peñaloza. Fictilis will conduct a creative census and Most Ancient will present a Virtual Reality art and sound experience.

Special guests this year include indie comics couple Charles Forsman and Melissa Mendes, from Massachusetts. Forsman has released two graphic novels with Fantagraphics, 2013’s Celebrated Summer and 2014’s The End of the Fucking World, and is currently self-publishing his ode to action comics, Revenger. Mendes, a Xeric Grant-recipient and member of the global feminist artists collective Ladydrawers, will present her latest work The Weight, an epic family saga inspired by her late grandfather’s life in rural New York state, spanning from the 1930s onward.

Celebrated Northwest visionary Jim Woodring will unveil his latest creation, Frank in the 3rd Dimension, out this fall from Fantagraphics Books, Inc. For the first time ever, you can enter Woodring’s hypnotic drawings through 32 pages of full-volume 3D visual vignettes. Short Run will bring Woodring’s world to Seattle Center with a 3D screening of the book. You’ll also have the rare opportunity to meet the mostly-reclusive local animator and outsider artist Bruce Bickford, most-known for his late ’70s collaborations with experimental musician Frank Zappa. His near-hallucinogenic claymation films have inspired generations of animators. Get an exciting first-look at pages from his now colossal graphic novel tome Vampire Picnic, or sneak a peek at his newest film Cas’l in our animation tent.

These special guests will feature their work alongside 200 fellow mid-career and emerging talents including traveling first-timers Box Brown, A.T. Pratt, Robyn Chapman, Hellen Jo, Calvin Wong, Georgia Webber, and locals Max Clotfelter, Jesse Lortz, Darin Shuler, Wave Books, Chin Music Press, Raychelle Duazo, Josh Simmons, E.T. Russian, and Pat Moriarity.

Charles Forsman’s appearance is made possible with help from Fantagraphics Books Inc.

Much more info: http://www.shortrun.org