Continuing the history of StarWarp Concepts, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
With this weekend being the 2023 edition of the Small Press Expo—an alternative-comics convention held in Bethesda, Maryland, that started out in 1994 with a few handfuls of small-pressers and continues to grow ever larger with each passing year—I was going through my files the other day, and realized I’d held on to the exhibitor badges from the last few SPXs I’d attended. Thought you might be interested in taking a look at them.
I don’t remember if there were exhibitor badges at the 1995 show I previously told you about, but I started hanging on to them in 1998.
As you’d expect, there wasn’t an SPX for 2001, as it was canceled following the 9/11 tragedies (it would have been held three days later, so…). It was back in full force for 2002, however, and as a New Yorker I appreciated the words of sympathy and encouragement I received from small-press fans; I’d gotten similar responses at San Diego Comic-Con just a couple months earlier.
The shows were never moneymakers for me—I think I recouped the table expense (but not the travel and hotel costs) once in a decade of attending—but it was always a fun weekend, hanging out with my friend Richard C. White and other fellow small-pressers, getting commissioned for sketches, and talking up Lorelei and my other comics work.
Eventually, though, it became clear there was no longer a place for The ’Warp—or me—at SPX when I showed up in 2004. My comics were met with growing disinterest, for two reasons I’d never expected to hear, certainly not at a show that up to that point had been dedicated to encouraging the visions of all creators, from photocopiers to medium-sized publishers:
First, my style was too mainstream for an indie audience now more interested in semiautobiographical comics about self-absorbed creators who whined about unrequited love and their torturously boring lives.
Second, and most suprisingly, it was too well drawn.
Seriously. And this is me we’re talking about, remember, the guy whose style is like a weird combination of Archie Comics and Frank Thorne’s Red Sonja. Sure, my art might have been a little better than your average small-presser’s—but too mainstream and too well drawn? Besides, when had drawing well become a sin in indie comics?
Turned out I wasn’t the only one facing this problem. A writer/artist across the aisle, who was a full-time storyboard artist when he wasn’t using his free time to work on his self-published space opera comic, was also encountering attendees who turned up their noses at his incredible art. I asked him why he was getting that reaction.
He shrugged. “I don’t know—’cause I use a T-square to make my panel borders straight?”
Well, maybe I’d overstayed my welcome. One of the showrunners had jokingly remarked at the start of the 2004 event that Batton Lash—creator/writer/artist of the series Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre, and writer of the amusing crossover comic Archie Meets the Punisher—and I were the only exhibitors left from the first SPX lineup, ten years before. The negative response I got from SPX ’04 might have been a clear indication as to why other old-time exhibitors had stopped attending.
It was time to move on…
Stay tuned for further Convention Memories!
