For Indie Comics, The Return Of Small Press Shows Is A Big Deal

The big entertainment-oriented pop culture conventions may be the most visible manifestation of comics fandom, but fans and creators of literary, artistic and independent comics prefer the more intimate environment of festivals and small press shows. When the pandemic put these events on ice in 2020, that side of the industry lost a valuable forum for discovering new voices. This fall, the smaller shows around the country came roaring back, and not a moment too soon.

“Artists need these festivals to commune with one another and with fans, for their mental health,” said Kelly Froh, Executive Director and cofounder of Short Run, a long-running independent comics festival taking place November 5 in Seattle. Froh said the event, which drew 4200 in its last in-person edition in 2019, is a showcase for artists making unique, self-published or small press comics in unusual formats and noncommercial styles.

“We want weird stuff,” she said. “We want those artists to have a place where they can connect to their scene. And we want to show artists and fans of independent comics what a great town Seattle is for this kind of material.”

Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC) is another nonprofit festival designed around its burgeoning regional comics community. “My wife and I traveled all over the world doing conventions,” said CXC co-founder Jeff Smith, creator of the beloved comics series Bone. “We saw that in Europe, they would have festivals that took place all over town, so attendees could really get a flavor of the city. We wanted to bring that style of festival here to Columbus, so we coordinated with the local arts institutions to build a comics-focused event.”

CXC, which launched in 2015, held its first in-person event in October after two years doing programming via videoconference. “We saw a 24% increase in attendance over 2019,” said CXC Executive Director Jay Kalagayan. “We’re re-establishing ourselves and we had record audiences attend the panels.”

Bethesda, Maryland’s Small Press Expo (SPX) is the longest continuously-running small press comics show in the United States, dating from 1994. SPX has become an international destination for comics creators and a regional show that draws attendees from across the mid-Atlantic states. Though SPX is definitely about the community, it also has a hidden business dimension: media attention, albeit from a different corner of the industry than the streamers and film producers looking to find new franchise content.

“Animation studios have been coming to SPX for years looking for new talent and fresh voices,” said SPX showrunner Warren Bernard. “Lisa Hanawalt (Bojack Horseman, Tuca & Bertie), ND Stephenson (She-Ra, Nimona), Keith Knight (K-Chronicles, Woke), they’re all from the alternative comics world. They’re SPX people.”

SPX also returned to in-person from COVID-induced hibernation in September, albeit at a slightly reduced scale (500 exhibitors, down from the usual 600, and a total attendance estimated at 3500). Bernard said the attendees made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in numbers. “Everyone was delighted to be back,” he said.

Shows like CXC, Short Run and SPX are oriented around original, creator-owned material, not corporate-owned superheroes. You won’t see cosplayers, celebrity autograph-seekers, or collectors rummaging through boxes of pricy back issues – all staples of mainstream comic conventions. Where the two overlap, though, is around the basic unit on which the industry is based: the comic book or graphic novel publication itself. And that’s drawing another player into the mix: book festivals.

“Literary festivals are getting better at integrating comics, not just as a segment of the programming, but as a distinct part of what the festival has to offer,” said Joan Hilty, co-chair of the graphic committee for the popular Brooklyn Book Festival in New York. The event, which also features fiction, non-fiction, and younger reader tracks, reserves several of its top panel slots for comics, including one for this year’s featured guest, Ducks author Kate Beaton.

Even libraries are getting into the act. This weekend, the Las Vegas public library is hosting a one-day festival (where, disclosure, I am a guest) oriented around education, all-ages material, and comics, graphic novels and manga of all kinds.

In an age when more comics are sold in book stores than comic stores, and when major publishers like Penguin Random House, Abrams and Simon & Shuster feature high profile graphic novel imprints, the synthesis only makes sense.

“Comics draw crowds,” observed Hilty, who also works with the Miami Book Fair taking place later this month. “That’s great for literary and nonfiction authors too, especially since the big comic cons are increasingly less about publishing than entertainment and gaming these days.”

Independent comics need environments focused exclusively on their medium and their creators because of the unique role these comics play in the art world. As an instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Hilty says she’s seen the focus of emerging artists become a lot more broad based in the past decade. “They want to do comics, but they also want to do illustration, animation and more innovative work.”

The “weird” comics that Froh tries to bring to Short Run are exactly the kinds of boundary-crossing, challenging work that keeps our culture fresh and exciting. The generations of aspiring alternative comix folks who started out at SPX (and still return, decades later) havegraduated into New Yorker cartoonists, art directors, animators, fine artists with gallery exhibitions and award winning graphic novelists. Even the vast majority who don’t make it that far in their careers still value the creative rewards of producing original work and delighting a circle of fans who share their off-kilter aesthetics and counterculture values.

“People wait for this day, to be around people of the same lifestyle and mindset, to celebrate our community,” said Froh. “Making these events is a labor of love, but it’s worth it for the positive vibes, to have a day that’s joyous.”