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arecomicsevengood · 8 months

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TRIP REPORT: SPX 2023

I went down to the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland this past Sunday. While I lived in Baltimore for a number of years, and it was essentially a local show, this is the first time I've been since moving to Philly in 2019. It took a year (or two?) off on account of COVID. I don't have much to say about the show itself, I enjoyed walking around talking to people, I probably didn't see all the stuff I would've liked, I'm not really in a good place to judge trends. I missed some people I would've liked to have met, like Drew Lerman, who left before I got there. He won an Ignatz though, and good for him. I do believe that the thing about SPX and the Ignatzes is that everyone essentially occupies very different spheres of interest and sets of influences. As I walked around, seeing little cards on people's comics saying they were nominated for an Ignatz, I would ask them if they had heard of or were familiar with the thing that won, they almost never were.

At the one panel discussion I attended, about drawing detailed backgrounds as a way of of establishing worldbuilding, Rosemary Valero-O'Connell cited Taiyo Matsumoto's approach as an influence, and as I sat in the audience thinking "Yes! Let's talk more about that!" everyone else on stage, quite reasonably, talked about their own influences instead - which for Daria Tessler, who I came to see, included Mark Beyer and Jim Woodring. The panel was generally good and interesting, and it's not meant as a slight to the moderator Rob Clough to point out that the best questions came during the Q+A from the audience. One member asked the question, how do you handle tonal shifts when you are using detailed visuals for plot purposes, and everyone agreed that that at emotional climaxes or at moments of more interiority they reduce the level of background detail.

Daria Tessler was the artist I was most excited to meet of anyone at the fest. Since my local shop, Partners And Son, is on top of it, I had already read her newest comic, volume 2 of Cagelessness, which absolutely rules, and so I had to shell out the big bucks for a copy of her fully-silkscreened book Dust, that uses multi-color collages as a backdrop for the cowboy characters who, in Cagelessness, move through ornately designed drawn worlds. Her work is beautiful, another high point of the panel discussion was her talking about how Marc Bell calls the tiny details cluttering up the backgrounds of his comics "chicken fat," and while Clough cited the term as originating from Will Elder, Tessler described chicken fat as "what you put in the soup to make it taste better, if you're not vegan," perfectly capturing what makes these artists work such a delicious meal for the eyes.

A similar "I already have all of these" experience was behind my purchase of Tales Of Old Snake Creek, by Drew Lerman, which collects his anthology contributions from recent years and adds watercolor to them. I love these comics in their original formats but I'm not going to say no to the convenience of this, which is also printed at a size larger than the digests in which some things ran.

Shout-out to Bread Tarleton, who pointed out to me the Paradise Systems table, where everything looked good and lavish, but what I picked up was Cry by Yan Cong. I believe Paradise Systems to be a reprinter of self-published comics from China. Cry features cartoony figures in a charcoal textured world, and follows a man having a sexual experience with a prostitute with a weird visual punchline.

Adam Szym directed me to the Strangers Fanzine table, where I picked up Shony Glassware 2 by Manning Coe, which is in some ways probably the sort of zine a lot of people go to SPX to get. Pretty funny stuff, maybe Ben Jones influenced, by a 26-year-old who lives in Osaka. Drawing himself in a Beat Happening shirt but with a bio where he talks about listening to 100 Gecs, there is a definite vibe at work here and while I don't remember the price point of this one I feel like it had to be cheap because it's that kind of comic. If you're ordering the new printing of Bhanu Pratap's Dear Mother from Strangers and want something else that's not too genre-y make sure you throw this in there.

Adam Szym's Their Use Continues is a horror short about the current trend towards reviving dead actors as CGI phantoms in movies currently in the news. Feels nice and relevant, I think I would've liked this to be a little bit bigger (it's printed digest size) and hi-res. Adam uses some digital collage elements for backgrounds and borders that I mostly felt was making the book smaller and fuzzier still.

I nonetheless liked it better than another horror comic I picked up, issue 1 ofJenna Cha and Lonnie Nadler's The Sickness, published by Uncivilized. Both people are more mainstream-comics, which I think is fine, but this does something I really associate with the dumbest kind of attitude that can be present in horror stuff, the kind of tonal miscalculation the comics I like avoid: Presenting a mid-century American setting where characters nonetheless are using a high degree of vulgar language, of a sort that would be stylized and off-putting if it were depicting the modern era but really just completely pulls me out of something set in the past. The second printing changes the color palette on the cover in a way that makes the drawing better, but this is not the sort of thing I would recommend anyone track down, which is sad, because it's likely far more readily available than anything I liked.

Tim Lane's Happy Hour In America 1, from a few years ago, was available at the Fantagraphics table. Presumably because Tim was signing, but I never saw him. I haven't read the big books collecting his short stories, but I like his contributions to anthologies. He's a guy who can really draw, in a way that you don't often see at small press shows, or that feels more appreciated by a mainstream-comics crowd. If his stories aren't as psychotically involved on a plot level as Mack White, he's nonetheless interesting as like a Gen X'er talking about American masculinity and what animates it. I would gladly read it in single issue comics format, though I missed these the first time because it wasn't what I felt I was in the mood for.

Another thing I picked up as a half-off copy of David B's Incidents In The Night, volume 2, from Uncivilized. I think volume 1 did pretty well, and is now sold out, but now that that's unavailable, volume 2 is a harder sell. David B is one of those dudes, like Joann Sfar or Christophe Blain, that got the big bookstore push like fifteen years ago but now no one wants to put out their books in the U.S. David B is also a guy, like GIpi, who had a comic put out by the Ignatz line Fantagraphics had. I bought issue 1 of Babel at the time and didn't care for it, and would've told you I didn't iike David B's work. But lately I've been tracking down books in the Ignatz line I skipped the first time (along with the First Second books of Gipi and Sfar from roughly the same time) and enjoying them, and this fits into that trend as well. A pretty involving plot, involving booksellers, the occult, criminal organizations. I both want to track down a copy of volume 1 and am frustrated that the volume 3 advertised at the end of this book was never translated into English.

Yasmeen Abediford's Death Bloom won an Ignatz, for best minicomic. All of the Ignatz awards are really ill-defined categories, and this is one is a $25 risograph thing, which to me seems like it should exist in a different category than cheapo xerox stuff, but whatever. Anyway, I believe Abediford will also be in the new issue of Freak, which I have seen Instagram posts indicating contributors got an advance copy of but have yet to be for sale online. Abediford is from the Bay Area, but this book was printed by Lucky Pocket Press, based in Baltimore, but from people who either moved there or didn't have the press going until after I left there. They sold me the comic in a little printed bag, which included a family tree for their little mascot guy, citing the "onion peow guy" as "(father, deceased)" and "(comics legend)," which is interesting to me insofar as I don't think of any of the Peow stuff as being interesting to me, though I'm happy it found its audience and made a mark. I don't really get this one either but whatever, I'll reread it tos ee if my opinion changes.

I would also put the output of publisher Silver Sprocket in a similar category to Peow - Not for me, seems like it's for younger people, in a way that dominates SPX as it's currently constituted. I have the deepest sympathies for them not being able to dominate SPX this year though, due to a misplaced/inaccessible pallet of books that they didn't get until halfway through Sunday. They had flown out Leo Fox from England, to debut his new book Prokaryote Season. I had seen Fox's stuff on Twitter last year and thought it looked good/interesting, but was also frustrated by the fact that he had apparently released a comic that was only for sale for 24 hours - maybe a way to create demand so that people actually order a thing, but in an artificial scarcity kind of way I resent. Anyway, I bought one of his self-published things, My Body Unspooling, and yeah I think it looks really cool and interesting, though the approach taken, a sort of simple narrative about the notion of the self rather than something that seems interested in having characters interact is again the kind of trend I blanch at in work made by people younger than me. I nonetheless liked the comic, and thought it was cool, and am going to read his book soon.

I bought issue 9 of Mike Centeno's Futile from the Radiator Comics distro booth. It is explicitly labeled as No Previous Readin' Necessary, so while there were two older issues of Futile at the table, printed at smaller dimensions, I didn't pick them up. This was cool, a mostly black and white (but with pages in the middle in color) comic about a musician taking mushrooms . It looks great on a flipthrough, though Audra Stang, working the table, tried to close the center-spread of my flipthrough so that the burst into full-color I was admiring didn't spoil the story's progression and surprises. Format and cartooning kinda reminded me of Nate Doyle's series Crooked Teeth. (Nate had a larger-formatted barbarian fantasy comic available from Strangers Fanzine, which I passed on.)

I also bought Beth Heinly's Girls Named Meghan from her, though Heinly is Philly-based and I've had plenty of chances to pick it up before. It's a memoir of her teenage years, growing up in Delaware County, which is where I went to high school, and the friendships she had that veered into rebellion and her apprehensions about being around people more "troubled" than she was. It is basically black and white but there's little red-pencil edits throughout, like maybe the wrong PDF was sent to the printer or something, sourced from a file where she was noting what she wanted to fix. I don't think of the other copies I have seen were like this though. Again, I think this is the sort of self-published autobio thing that many people go to SPX to find. I can see the places there this could be stronger or more impactful but there is still a fine sense for who all the characters were, and what the era was like.

I got a few other things but this is all I have read so far, at this moment when I felt like writing. Andrew White gave me a copy of the new Yearly, and a name I recognized from his writing for The Comics Journal, Henry Chamberlain, gave me a copy of his book George's Run, a biography of a Twilight Zone writer published by Rutgers University Press. I also got issue 3 of a comic called Cat Scratch Fever by a woman named Emily Zullo, and Soumya Dhulekar's Flash Valley. Both of these are in the classic digest sized minicomic format with black and white throughout, though Dhulekar opted for a a cardstock cover. This is the sort of thing I am most happy to buy from a stranger at a show and basically not even care about the quality as long as the price is right, though of course the price for both of these is higher than it used to be. I also bought and haven't yet read Leo Fox's Prokaryote Season, the theoretical "book of the show," although another contender for that title, the collection of Liam Cobb comics, What Awaits Them, looked great but I will pick it up when it comes into my local shop.

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