* So! You’ve all read:

– My con report (check out the comment thread for Rob Clough and Xaviar Xerexes’ thoughts, too)

– Johanna Draper Carlson’s Critics Roundtable panel report

– the transcript of the New Action panel

– and listened to the recordings of the New Action and Critics Roundtable panels that I posted

Right? Good, now we’re all caught up.

* Very interesting: Sammy at Are You a Serious Comics Book Reader? appears to be the ideal audience for that New Action panel I did. You could tell this from the books he got at the show–Benjamin Marra’s Night Business is heavily touted–but also from his take on the panel itself:

At a place dominated by sad-ass comics about exes and your parents dying, it’s shocking to see comics creators that want to have fun, hopefully “indie” will start to mean “independent” again and not simply “everything but super heroes”.

But! The closest that panel came to an argument occurred when I asked the panel why they didn’t feel the need to visibly react against the “mainstream,” superhero-dominated action-adventure comic tradition, either in the negative way that the likes of Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware did, or really even in any way at all. While Shawn Cheng argued that the omnipresence of nerd genres in today’s culture obviated the need to comment on them for or against and Ben Marra stated that he loves superhero comics, albeit not contemporary ones, Frank Santoro literally pounded on the table while arguing that we shouldn’t be discussing superhero comics at all–it’s an instant turn-off to the new generation of comics readers, he said. So even if the sort of negativity directed toward superhero-style storytelling by the original altcomix generation is less prevalent than it once was, the newfound openness to superhero-style storytelling Sammy detects isn’t universal–in Frank’s case, at least, it’s more a sense that that genre shouldn’t be the lens through which we view what we’re doing, good, bad, or indifferent. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* In terms of con reports, I enjoyed Chris Mautner’s six observations, and Rob Clough’s interesting take on the proceedings, which included musings on the way that webcomics, college comics education programs, and the fall of straightforward indie-genre comics coupled with the rise of the “New Action” variation of same have all gone into shaping the show.

* Heidi MacDonald notes that attendance was up a whopping 19%. I’m glad to see I wasn’t hallucinating!

* In Heidi’s longer report, she (like Rob) summarizes several panels, as well as reflects on how the Team Comix generation of alternative comics creators has largely abandoned the show for New York City book deals and Act-I-Vate strips, leaving it in the hands of a different generation. But I would disagree with how she (and to an extent, Rob) characterizes that transition:

SPX (and MoCCA, but I haven’t been to APE or TCAF so I can’t say what the sitch is there) is now the province of the very young and aspirational, and their work is even more personal. As CCS, SVA, MCAD, SCAD, and other art schools turn out class after class of highly competent and well-informed art students, it’s become a bit more of a pageant, in some ways. Young cartoonists get their Xeric, put out a perfect book, spend a season or two as the deb of the year and then…some will go on, some will just become memories in the shoe box.

On a basic level I don’t get how they can be both more aspirational and more like pageant contestants ending up in the shoebox of history, but that’s not the main thing. It seems silly to say I have a philosophical difference with Heidi over this, but that’s the closest description I can come to regarding the primacy she frequently affords youth and ambition in terms of who and what matters in comics.

Here’s the thing: The core table presences at SPX are still Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, and Drawn & Quarterly, the former two of which were staffed this year by Gary Groth & Kim Thompson and Chris Staros respectively–veterans, to say the least. Meanwhile, PictureBox, Buenaventura, Bodega, Sparkplug, and AdHouse may seem like the new wave, but guys like Dan Nadel, Frank Santoro, Alvin Buenaventura, Randy Chang, Dylan Williams, and Chris Pitzer have all been fighting the good fight in the alt- and artcomix trenches for a long time now. At the Ignatzes, the big award-winner was Jordan Crane, who made his bones when I was picking up cheerleaders and just keeps getting better. Since I started going to SPX again with the move to the new hotel, my big discovery was Geoff Grogan’s Look Out!! Monsters–Geoff’s a lot of things, but he’d be the first to tell you that a young turk isn’t one of them. Frank Santoro and Dustin Harbin are in many ways two emblematic East Coast altcomix figures right now; neither of them is some fly-by-night college boy. And that’s even before we get to the the fact that the guests of honor this year were Gahan Wilson, Carol Lay, and John Porcellino.

Of course the place is stacked to the rafters with kids makin’ comics (many of whom are doing so online in a way that the old folks never dreamed of), and that youthful enthusiasm is part of the lifeblood of comics just like it is in any other art form. But I don’t think it’s necessary or desirable, or even accurate, to make a grand statement about how they’ve inherited the SPX earth, to contextualize things in terms of “Look out, us fogeys, the torch has been passed, the kids are coming up from behind.” Characterizing things that way is bad for fogeys and kids alike. It leads to regrettable phenomena like successful, talented cartoonists spending valuable panel time discussing a freaking Hi & Lois comic. Who cares what the Hi & Lois guy thinks about your awesome, popular comics? Unless you’re setting up a narrative of old guard versus new blood, what difference does it make? Do you, folks! It’s not a contest, it’s not a beat-the-clock situation, and where your work shows up or how old you were when you made it matters much, much, much, much, much less than whether or not it’s good. This should be truer at a small-press expo than anyplace else.

But if you’re talking about SPX primarily in terms of the social scene–who saw and was seen, who made the drive and who didn’t, who has the best hotel-room parties, who went on the karaoke expedition, who closed out the bar, who went to the award show where they gave out beer bottles–then it stand to reason you’re going to focus primarily on the youthful and strong-livered, rather than, oh I don’t know, dudes like me who literally collapsed from exhaustion on his hotel bed at the stroke of midnight-thirty, or all the folks with young kids. But that’s a distortion. Comics is an artform, not a hang.

This may even out some as the days pass, but I’ve read way more about the fact that the karaoke joint was closed than I have about what people thought about the books they got at the show, other than some perfunctory stabs at a “book of the show,” which is as much about Heidi’s “pageantry” concept as it is about art. I wish I saw more posts like Johanna’s panel report, or Chris Mautner or Rickey Purdin’s “here’s what I bought” write-ups–both of which are sort of awe-inspiring in just how much compelling stuff there was to purchase and read at that show–than photo parades of folks holding beers. I think that focus offers a distorted view of what SPX is, what SPX means, and why SPX matters. SPX and altcomix in general may be full of the young, but it’s not a young person’s game.

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