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| Art by Rob Rogers |
FOR THE SECOND year in a row, I was on the
committee which put together the ToonSeum’s annual fundraiser, KA-BLAM! It’s a really
fun event that allows us to get together with friends and comrades to celebrate
and support our local bastion of the cartoon arts. Everyone who I’ve ever
talked to who has attended one enjoyed the experience immensely, so it’s a
pleasure to be one of the people who help put this together.
It’s also a lot
of individual and collective work. Fundraisers don’t throw themselves, and
there are tons of organizational details involved in making it to the big night.
Fortunately, KA-BLAM! isn’t the first event of this type I’ve participated in,
so a lot of the challenges were anticipated. Like last year, my primary role involved
networking with local artists and coordinating their art donations for auction
and sale. As before, the pieces we received were beautiful -- in some cases so
beautiful I wanted to outright steal them. (I didn’t, but the temptation was
real and I have some regrets over being ethically responsible.) I ended up
handling some organizational aspects of the project this year too, and it definitely took time
and attention and more than a little bit of support to pull it off.
This year’s theme was “CAUSE-PLAY” and guests were
invited to show up dressed in costume. It’s a theme that was previously used
for another event, and it seemed like a natural fit for KA-BLAM! this year.
Most of the thematic elements were then designed around popular media
characters, especially comics and cartoon characters. Our event poster had some
fun riffing on this, but once the big day arrived, a lot of the folks who
dressed up put flair and creativity into their costumes. It was a great call to
include this, and I hope we revisit the costume-party theme again.
