Broken Frontier

The Small Press Expo, held this past weekend in Bethsda, MD, might very well be my last show for this year. And if so, it was a great way to go out.

SPX has consistently been one of the best small press shows around for many years now. The first year I exhibited was 2006 when I debuted the first issue of Adrenaline. People who knew of the show told me beforehand that it would be a mistake because my comic was too “slick” and mainstream-looking, that I would be shunned by the arthouse crowd. But this wasn’t the case; I sold a lot of copies of Adrenaline #1, just as this year I did really well selling the trade paperback.

Incidentally, something that I learned from this show that worked really well for me was putting together a combination set. Rather than just selling my tpb for $15.95, I gave customers the option of getting it with a sketch or a poster for $20.00. I had a 90% success rate with this deal. It was a great way to bump the price up a bit while giving the consumer something of value. Each extra $4.00 wasn’t much more for them, but it really added up for me. I would recommend this for exhibitors: make it easier for customers to spend more if they are so inclined. You don’t want to give back change if you don’t have to.

So employing this strategy worked well for me and I was happy with the amount of sales at the show. They weren’t amazing, but admittedly, my work isn’t a perfect fit for this show. What I’ve found from the shows this summer is that I seem to have sold about the same amount of books at every show I’ve been to. It doesn’t seem to matter how large or small the crowd is, whether it’s a large media or small press show, or how many days it is.

I don’t know what this means other than that I should probably concentrate on the shows that are cheaper and easier for me to get to since the more expensive ones don’t yield higher returns. But I do like the fact that my work seems to be universally accepted (though again, never really hitting it big) at all the different shows. I can attend SPX as easily as Wizard World Philly, or more specific shows like the East Coast Black Age of Comic Con and the Asian American Comic Con, or even the Brooklyn Book Fair. That’s got to count for something.

But back to SPX, my enjoyment of it wasn’t just about selling. The show has a great feel to it. Everyone from the organizers to the exhibitors to the attendees are really there to support independent creators and to encourage using the comic medium in new ways.

And the comics this year were particularly good. I’ve never seen a more impressive array of comics taking on unusual subject matters or approaching comic storytelling in such a unique way. The creators at these shows really have taken it upon themselves to stretch the possibilities of how the comic form can be used.

One of my favorite examples of this was Ken Wong’s origami comics. Ken has utilized the reader’s physical interaction with the printed comic to have them fold and unfold the paper it’s printed on as they read. The best of these is his Pandora’s Box comic which comes in the shape of a box and requires the reader to unfold (open) the box as they read, and then hopefully fold it up again as they finish.

Another book whose format really caught my attention was Joshua Cotter’s Driven by Lemons. This book is designed just like a blank sketchbook you might buy at an art supply store, only with a sturdier cover and spine to hold it together better. As a matter of fact, it’s made to look just like Joshua’s sketchbook in which he originally created the story.

Joshua’s process for Driven by Lemons was to create the story in a stream of consciousness, drawing one page after another, not planning it out or revising afterwards. The final result is a simultaneous blend of stream of thought originality and an amazingly coherent story.

I would highly recommend checking out both of these books, but I am by no means claiming that these are the only ones worth checking out from SPX or even necessarily the best. I didn’t have time to take in as much as I would have liked, since I was mostly working behind my table, selling and doing sketches.

But now it’s time to take a break from that, get back to work on my comics and get some things ready for next year in time for April 2010’s MOCCA. 

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Tyler Chin-Tanner started his own publishing company, A Wave Blue World, and writes and draws layouts for Adrenaline, its flagship series.
© 2009 Tyler Chin-Tanner.  All rights reserved.
Email: tyler@awaveblueworld.com
www.awaveblueworld.com