SMALL PRESS EXPO: I have only the most scattered impressions, since I spent maybe three hours there. Later today I’ll review some of the comics I picked up. Here are reports from Sean Collins (d’oh! sorry we were so birdbrained and didn’t get in touch until you all had already left for the con), Unqualified Offerings and Polytropos.

Randomness:

1) UO said the indie-comics conventiongoers looked much like the people at non-indie-oriented comics cons. I suggested that this was probably a good thing.

2) Very cool to see the wide variety of art styles out there. This is probably old news to you! But not to me. There were comics that basically looked just like ol’ familiar zines, comics that looked like regular old Marvel/DC stuff, a whole raft of comics (which I liked at first, but am a bit overwhelmed by now) with that Daniel-Clowes-cover kind of washed-out-colors look (do you know the thing I mean?), and many, many comics that looked just like themselves.

3) Carla Speed McNeil was great fun. She confirmed two of my suspicions: a) Fine arts professors often have a truly demented bias against representative art; and b) She is a fan of Samuel Delany. Fun bit: “People send me things. One girl always sends me weird stuff–in a good way. Last time she sent me some emu feathers. Somebody sent me an eggshell… I’m thinking soon I’ll be able to build an emu from parts.” She is one of those rare people who come across as very smart in person, not just on paper.

4) Too many of the comics on display were basically one-liners. Puns. You come up with a pun and think you have a plot or a character. Like (I’m making this one up) “Haunted Mouse.” He’s a mouse… but he’s inhabited by ghostly fleas! Hilarity! I got very tired of wordplay-based comics ideas very fast. One or two are okay. (I didn’t look through “Frankenstein Mobster” but I could imagine forgiving its creator.) More than that, not so okay.

5) After the expo, UO and I had dinner with the engaging and acute Johanna Draper Carlson of Comics Worth Reading. UO and I semi-argued about the ethics/politics relationship in (mostly) Spider-Man, which he has come very very close to calling “commie.”

6) Then UO, Mrs. O, and I went to a party, where I met, among others, Eric Dixon, Jeremy Lott, and Jesse Walker. Walker’s got a wildly intriguing bookshelf. Themes include the Black Panthers, film criticism (as opposed to Books Where People Obsess About Movies, which are more to my own taste), science fiction (I recommended Declare), and anarchism. Also Italo Calvino. You can tell what I do at parties, no?