I wandered into Fallout Records while walking aimlessly around Seattle at some point during my first few weeks in town. It was the first store I’d been to where I could find a copy of Lowlife without having to dig around behind copies of some Batman comic; or where I could center in on something weird like a Halo Benders CD without having to dig through piles of corporate rock CDs. At Fallout, I found Hutch Owen’s Working Hard, Underwater, Jim Woodring‘s micro-comics, Dishwasher, Cometbus, King Cat Comics, Doris, and Canadian poetry comics printed on brown grocery bag paper. I was a cynical 18 year old printed-media-junky from rural Eastern Washington, so Fallout was simultaneously both a godsend and exactly the kind of thing I’d expected to find in Seattle. I figured that there were probably a dozen places like it around town that I didn’t know about. (Of course there are no other places like Fallout because every other place like Fallout is unique, if that makes any sense.) Today there’s Fallout, Confounded Books, and Left Bank Books (of course there are other great bookstores and record stores in Seattle, but not a lot of specialized coverage of small press things). Next week there will just be Confounded Books and Left Bank Books.