The city’s web comic hipsters were thrilled recently from a visit by Joey Comeau, the queer gent behind the text of web phenomenon A Softer World and author of the newly-released experimental novel Overqualified.

Reading Frenzy was packed solid with girls rocking librarian-chic knee-length skirts and men in t-shirts referencing obscure web comics for Comeau’s first visit to the Rose City. He comes just in time — his novel Overqualified is selling briskly here in town, and captures a sort of surreal ennui that resonates well with folks who live with rain nine months out of the year. A story about the death of a brother and the sibling who has to live on with his memory, Overqualified is written entirely through cover letters that Comeau actually sent to American companies seeking employment.

Comeau is openly into both boys and girls, but just as openly rejects the term “bisexual.” He explains in an interview with Canada’s Xtra! magazine:

“[The term "bisexual"] is not descriptive or useful. It always gives me images of people with bad goatees who wear capes and stuff. I’m just queer.”

Read more after the jump…

In a reading from his earlier novel Lockpick Pornography, Comeau told a hilarious tale of angry queer activists doing direct action at a Canadian shopping mall by harassing a mother holding a baby and confronting a McDonald’s manager with the assertion that the Coca-Cola was turning their customers gay. Comeau smirked and dismissed these Act Up-inspired direct actions, questioning, “This doesn’t really help the movement, does it?”

In a surprising turn, the real star of the evening was up-and-coming novelist Zach Van de Zande, who read from his novel Apathy and Paying Rent. The capacity crowd was hushed into silence by the humor and vitriol of Van de Zande’s prose as he shared short vignettes about love affairs, alienation and a dead girl on his car hood.

“What generation are we?” he asked the crowd — “We’re the ones who hate the kids these days while we’re the kids these days.” Based on a fictional mix tape featuring such Portland favorites as The Thermals and Defiance, Ohio, Apathy and Paying Rent resonates with a generation equally conversant in hipper-than-thou posturing and the underlying anxieties lying painfully beneath the surface of urban life.

Joey Comeau’s new novel Overqualified, as well as his other works Lockpick Pornography, It’s Too Late to Say I’m Sorry, and the comic collection Truth and Beauty Bombs are available now at Reading Frenzy. Zach Van de Zande’s Apathy and Paying Rent will be released on November 1 and will also be available at Reading Frenzy.

All photos by Nick Mattos.