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September 6-8, 2002 Note: The past two convention journals were born of an uneasy alliance with cartoonist Steve Lieber. This one would have been too, but for a last-minute freelance job that required his talents. So as Lieber abandons me for his one true friend, Dollar Bill, I offer this solo attempt to paint a picture of SPX from the point of view of a new self-publisher. Friday
Wiped out from my red-eye flight, I plan to go unconscious most of the day, but the Bethesda Holiday Inn has the evil practice of piping bacon smell into your room in the morning. So I go down to the buffet, then back up to sleep. I wake up in time to greet my roomies: Jim Ottaviani, science-comics publisher of GT-Labs (featuring cartoonists like me), and Cynicalman creator Matt Feazell. Matt was a pioneer of mini-comics-- I like to imagine him walking into one of the first self-service copy places in 1980 and seeing a photocopier, stapler, sleepy-eyed college student, the pen in his hand-- and making the connections: these things could make comics! Everyone has a jolly laugh at me for flying into BWI, and how coming into Dulles would have put me a close train ride to the hotel. This will happen to me all weekend, people telling me how to do it next year. But next year the show actually will be in Baltimore, so there. Fat lotta good . . .
I descend the circular steps into the world of SPX, and 4-star Sequential Tart General Karon Flage is there to tell me what's what and where to go. She has the whole thing well under control and everybody's happy. And well they should be- SPX has the one thing that most shows in America don't . . . a cash bar.
 Intrigues at the bar. Ran into John Hitchcock again, proprietor of Parts Unknown in Greensboro, NC. John has recently pulled off a real coup: he's been sending copies of Alex Toth's old stories to Toth himself, who's providing "director's commentary" on these classics. It's pretty fascinating, go check one out. I'm really mad that I can't make it out to the homeland for his show next month, full of heavy hitters like Al Williamson. At least I can put up a web ad for it-- distribute away. I chat with the talented Lee or Leland ( Depending on whether he's imbibed his Mr. Hyde formula) Purvis, and mess up all the orderly PackRabbit Press work on his table. We have a good laugh at Lieber's expense and talk about the time Lee spent in Long Beach. Had I known, I could have visited him. But that's the kind of info that only "Leland" shares when he appears...
Carla Speed McNeil and her Light Speed Press were responsible for the nifty name tag/passes that hung around our necks by a thread rather than poking big holes in our clothes. I meant to scan one in to show you, but I can't find it. Look closely at the pictures. Mine said "New Hire". Cartoonist Sean Bieri has new work, which always means happiness. Steve has been passing on Sean's work to me for years, and I'm always shocked that he's not nationally famous. I've laughed myself sick over this guy's comics. A look through his sketchbook is even more amazing--studies of people and objects around him, and complete one panel gags that are printworthy, like a whole series of Antiques Roadshow gags. How many cartoonists are actually funny in their sketchbook? Man. I could babble on, but we work in a visual medium. So take a look at the real deal...
People are starting to penetrate the room, so I finally go sit down. At the next table over, Denis Kitchen is selling some old Kitchen Sink backstock, and he's still got some good stuff. I feel a bit sad thinking about his company going to oblivion-- it was one of my all-time favorite publishers. But Kitchen seems to be quite happy. He's got a big "Krupp" sign behind his head, the name he used first when getting started 30-odd years ago. Everybody is extremely thin and wears big black-frame glasses. I sit down and start psyching myself up to bring people over and show them my book, and to my surprise they come up without coaxing. They actively draw more info on my book out of me than I was offering! It's unbelievable after a summer of large convention centers. Everyone is interested in what we're doing and seeking out new material! I keep asking everyone where they buy their comics and I keep hearing "Big Planet!" and "Closet of Comics!" People keep asking me if my company name is Beast, because that's what I have on the Roughcut. I explain that I abandoned that name because alphabetically it would have put me amongst a bunch of pornish material in the order catalogue (thanks to Lincoln at ACME Comics for the advice!). OCTOPUS gets me safely out of there and near companies like NBM and Oni, where hopefully I'll find sympathetic shoppers in November.
Sequential Tarts are roving the place like a Clockwork Orange gang, having sport with whomever it amuses them to do so. The show blurs into everyone hanging around downstairs, wishing they had more drink coupons. I go up to the little portable bar, where Eddie Campbell is ordering enough drinks for a small army. He shoots me a glare-- I must have gotten too close to one of the drinks. Whew. Close one. Somebody introduces me to someone else, and I can stay awake no more. To the room. Saturday Saturday morning I went down to the breakfast buffet, and was joined by NBM publisher Terry Nantier. Terry is much happier than I've seen him in past years, thanks to the fact that he's been publishing graphic novels for years, and the reading world is finally starting to catch up to him. I could tell I was not the first thousandth person to ask him when Vittorio Giardino was going to finish A Jew in Communist Prague. Apparently the author has more Max Friedman adventures to get out of his system before he returns to Prague. Meanwhile NBM will be bringing us more Euro-talent, and also some break-in work by students at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Finishing his coffee, Terry strides off with optimism towards the Versailles room, leaving me stuck with the check.
Once inside I see that my tablemate has made it in. I was just kidding about Terry leaving me with the check, he didn't. I'm sharing space with Andrew Zaben, who's brought his latest book, Tuesday and Thursday, carried by Fantagraphics. Andrew barely gets two words out before you want to ask him what part of New York he's from, and appropriately the city is pervasive in his work. His hook line to passers-by is "It's a story about three Buckies," which makes Big Apple residents grin and take a look. People from other cities look confused and go see what Denis Kitchen has going on. Andrew was super-nice, I got lucky with that pairing. <(Addendum: I finally actually read his book and now realize he was saying "bookies". Damn New York accents. ) I get to meet shop owners I've only talked to online, like David Mahlin of Comictown in Ohio. Or Comictown III, he's got three stores, so it's one of those. The important thing is that he brought his wife, which everyone should do. First, get a wife. And I meet the folks from Green Brain in Dearborn, Michigan. That's a really hard to forget name, and I congratulate them on it. Diamond's Jim Kuhoric, who you may remember me meeting earlier this year in Philadelphia, comes by and kindly offers to save me a Fed-Ex bill and take the black-and-whites of The Interman back to the office with him. Now that's the way to do business. We talk a little bit about promotion ideas, and he saunters off with two more pounds in his bag than he had before (a whole dummy book of one-sided copies doesn't exactly levitate). Mission accomplished there, now I just have to finish my cover when I get back home to make the November Previews guide. Postscript: Finished! Cover is at the end of the con report. I'm sketching and thinking deep thoughts like "do they still make Cheerwine?" when Andrew Wheeler of the wildly popular British-based site Ninth Art introduces himself. He congratulates me on bothering to make my male lead good-looking, which it seems few guy artists do. I understand of course, ugly fellows are just really fun to draw. I go on a rant about wondering why cartoonists would want to possibly exclude women or gays as readers, at which point Andrew realizes he can essentially obligate me into drawing a beefcake sketch in his book. Admiring how well I got suckered, I do a shirtless Van in his book which I'm pretty happy with. He says he'll send me a scan, but nothing's turned up in my email yet. The Devil, that one.
At 2:00 I attend an "Introduce Your Work" panel hosted by Heidi MacDonald. The turnout isn't so big, so Heidi puts us in a "magic circle" to talk up our books. Since I was so eager to sign up Friday, I have to go first. I'm so lousy at this sort of thing, I bumble my way through a synopsis. I took some pictures of the whole thing, but I'm going to put them up at Super Lime. We go around the room, and some folks have really interesting work. One guy had a neat concept about the Dead Sea Scrolls. A cool couple showed their quarterly book for young readers called Moo-Cow Fan Club that's like an intellectual version of Highlights. They gave me a copy of their all-pirate issue. Very Gallant of them. Another guy had a comic for kids that had some good stuff in it, but I didn't have any cash on me, and he was maintaining a death-grip on his copies. So sorry, I don't remember the name of it, thus you don't get a plug. Very Goofus. Probably the strangest thing was a woman who brought her hardcore porn comic --- and her retiree mother. This makes the room uncomfortable for a few minutes. And in one of those confusing dichotomies, she speaks eloquently and clearly about her work, how she did it, inspiration, and then when I open a copy, it looks a fifth-grader with a sprained wrist drew it in the dark. It stymies the mind. Later I end up sketching a character I thought no one remembered, Solitaire. A nice guy named Perry brings up everything I ever drew for Malibu Comics almost ten years ago, and I do the typical thing of making him wait there while I look through the books and sprint down memory lane. A large group of us made the staggering 30 ft. walk to the Texmex place next door for dinner. And though he wasn't sitting at the host position, the clear toastmaster/raconteur for our meal was biologist/cartoonist Dr. Jay Hosler. He's no dilletante; his cartooning is excellent as you can see in his acclaimed Clan Apis and current work Sandwalk Adventures. Sandwalk follows a dialogue between Charles Darwin and two follicle mites who live in his eyebrow and believe he's God. But since we all understood Natural Selection thoroughly, everyone at the table grilled Dr. Jay about bees. Which he answered thoroughly. He explained to me the evolved response to tree fires that makes the bees docile when beekeepers use their little tinder-smokers on them. Artbomb founder Peter Rose finally shows, having torn himself away from the likes of Bob Schreck and Frank Miller. Just in case someone was about to think graphic novels aren't the road to public acceptance of comics, Rose is there to put them straight. Everyone's having fun at the Ignatz awards. James Kochalka's Sketchbook Diaries is rolling over everything else like a juggernaut-- or so I think, it's hard to hear the sound system in the back of the room. Sadly one of my favorites, David Hahn's Private Beach gets passed. But it's being looked at for other media, so I don't feel too bad for him. Some transvestite mistakes my "Is that a . . .?"-look for one of interest, and keeps hovering around for a few minutes. So I finally offer my "beat it, I don't play the Cryin' Game" glare as incentive to leave. Trannies annoy me, I guess because they're trying to trick ya. Chris Staros speaks very clearly, so while he's up there I get what's going on. He's essentially giving the thumbs up to the industry and graphic novels, which tomorrow I'll hear Steve Schanes of Diamond do as well. I have no earthly what the hell Frank Miller is saying. Something about the CBLDF. Hiphop cartoonist Jamar Nicholas introduces me to artist Mike Norton, who's much taller than he looks on his website. Though drawing himself as Kong should have given me a clue. It's good to speak Southern again, and Mike straightens me out on the differences between Memphis and Nashville. Karon and Greg McElhatton grow wildly popular whenever they produce free drink coupons. Heidi is wearing a feather boa, and once I realize she's standing near Jason Little, the photo op is too mighty to resist. Don't confuse Shutterbug creator Jason with other indy antiquarians in spats and bowtie. He's always the one with the straw boater hat. And shorter than he looks on his website.
Later I'm looking through Carla's copy of Castaways by Rob Vollmar and Pablo Callejo, a Depression-era tale of a white kid and black man riding the rails through the worst of society. I was wondering if the writer had to make an effort to not think about Huckleberry Finn while working on this, and twenty minutes later I meet him and can ask him in person. "Yeah, that was tricky!" Vollmar says having a European artist who wasn't familiar with the section of the U.S. he was setting the book in worked well to making the story more universal. I look forward to actually reading the book when I get home, then remember that that wasn't my copy.
Sunday I'm not even remotely wiped out. I'm actually ending a convention feeling better than when I started. I credit the plush chairs we were given at our tables, and the lack of people screaming over intercoms. Thanks to Jim O, I meet Fred the Clown cartoonist Roger Langridge at breakfast. And thanks to our capitalist society, I'm able to purchase a page of art from him later. Ridiculously affordable for such top-level work, but I won't tell how much in case he decides to finally adjust his prices to what he should be getting. The page I bought had two complete cartoons, but I'll just show the one that puts Fred in probably the most widely known comics ad in the world. Later I'm sitting at the panel where Steve Schanes of Diamond gives us a "State of the Industry" address. He reminds us that bookstores want ISBN's on those GN's and TPB's, and of course UPC's. He says that the bookstore world is very interested in the graphic novel now, and they want to see more than just capes in them. Sounds good to me. He dismisses us.
Running out of time. Curse flying west. I hoof it over to the nearby Big Planet store and drop off some Interman posters that I told Big-Planet Greg I'd be bringing by. (Speaking of the state of the industry, Big Planet owner Joel Pollack was recently interviewed in an NPR story on the comics industry. Scroll down to the "Comic Books" real audio link and listen, it's an informative piece. You can forward it to non-comics friends and get them up to speed.) Then by dumb luck, Rich Henn who does Timespell is about to pull out of a parking space, and lets me bum a ride over to the ball field. This part is really painful- it's gorgeous weather, everyone's hanging out on the grass in the shade like a bunch of hippies, and there's really good food and drink for all-- and I can only stay fifteen minutes. I really wanted to play in the softball game, too. Later I'll find out the cartoonists lost to Diamond. My fault. Poor Speed has promised me a lift to the airport (which you'll remember is many miles away, but will be the right one next year), and she tears herself away to make sure I catch my flight. It's all very sad. Except that I get even more good publishing advice on the car ride. Not too shabby. Relive the convention season summer! Previous con reports . . . Wizard World East, Philadelphia
Soliciting in November
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