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Monday, April 10, 2006
APE Reactions, overall edition
The strength and weakness of APE is that it is a convention that appreciates the small things in life. While the stories from conventions such as San Diego Comic-Con, WonderCon and especially the New York Comic-Con are these growing crowds, many people remarked that APE felt less busy than last year. I really noticed this at the panels I went to. On Sunday I attended two interesting artist spotlights with very small crowds for both of them. If Raina Talgameier’s family wasn’t there the audience would barely reach double digits. Alex Robinson and Edward Champion had a thought-provoking and revealing discussion about Tricked and Box Office Poison. I was thankful to hear Champion will post the discussion as a podcast because it would be a shame if only fifteen people heard what these two talked about.
I can’t get too worried about programming attendance at APE, though. No matter what specific reason someone attended the show and what they ended doing and not doing, they most likely walked away with seeing and hopefully reading something they’ve never seen before. What’s more it was probably something they never would have seen or read if they didn’t take some time out of their weekend to get to the Concourse in San Francisco. I had a real positive feeling about comics the entire time I was there because so many tables were filled with artists at the most optimistic point of their careers. Hundreds of tables had comics placed upon them that were made solely because these people chose the comics medium, without any responsibilities to a publisher or an editor. I’ll grant you that more than a few of these comics could have used a good editor but no matter the surface quality of these self-published comics there’s still the appealing notion of the passion and sacrifice that went into them.
The first person I saw at the con was Comic Relief’s Rory Root. He told me that the old saying for APE was that as soon as you walked in you saw all your friends. That’s how it felt for me at times. People that I saw every Wednesday buying new comics or even people I knew from school and didn’t even know were into comics were manning tables and selling books with all their hopes up. It was a nice flipside to the usual social atmosphere of conventions, where you have to immediately start shaking hands and make connections with people you probably only knew through the internet, if that. I still had to be as much as a comics professional as a comics fan at the con, something I don’t mind at all, but it was nice that the welcoming spirit of APE brought another dimension to meeting up with exhibitors.
The tables in the middle of the floor may have been for name publishers and established talent but that welcoming feel of APE still shone through. It was great talking to Jeffery Brown and Rene French at the Top Shelf both for a while, especially when they were more than pleased to show off their Wolverine action figures (Which apparently come with a billion points of articulation). It’s a treat to talk to Brown about comics, he’s got a real great sense of both his own work and the medium. I got to thank Eric Reynolds for all his fine service he’s been doing for Fantagraphics fans. He really sells those books in a way that’s not pushy, just complimentary to the already great work the company regularly publishes. Chris Pitzer at AdHouse is a great conversationlist as well. Talking to him about some of our mutually favorite cartoonists, Kevin Huizenga and Sammy Harkham, amongst others, was fun. Coming back to the AdHouse table and getting Process Recess signed by James Jean was even more fun. The little sketch was he did inside the book was done in less than two minutes and for me, a total stranger as far as he’s concerned. Yet it’s still completely beautiful.
After most cons I feel almost broken because of the stress but after APE I felt more excited about comics than I’ve felt in a long while. I saw a lot of the medium’s possibilities and appeal that I tend to forget about when I’m in the middle of tracking down stories or making those valued connections. I was glad I could take a breather, attend a con purely because I wanted to and just soak up what was happening. It was certainly worth it.
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