Official Press Release

Everybody under The Big Tent: Small Press Expo welcomes diverse comics guests from the The New Yorker, ‘70s Comix Underground, and animated political cartooning.

Bethesda, Maryland; September 8, 2011 –  SPX boasts an exceptionally diverse exhibitor and guest list this year, featuring one of the long time top cartoonist working at The New Yorker, a vanguard editor/creator in Underground Comix, as well as a Pulitzer-Prize winning editorial cartoonist and animator.

Cartoonist Roz Chast has been one of the most versatile and talented cartoonists at The New Yorker since she became a staff cartoonist in 1979, a year after her first cartoon was published in the magazine. Respected for her talent as a writer and for her canny eye for finding the humor in trivial everyday things, she has published 10 collections of her work that appeared in The New Yorker. Ms. Chast has also illustrated other peoples books, as well as writing her own children’s books, her most recent one is titled Too Busy Marco.

As one of the original contributors to Wimmen’s Comix, the first series of comics drawn exclusively by women, Diane Noomin challenged the male-dominated landscape of ’60s underground cartooning and helped set the stage for the extraordinary diversity of voices in contemporary cartooning. Her character Didi Glitz was introduced in 1974 in the comic “Didi Glitz: She Chose Crime”,  and in 1976, Noomin founded the Twisted Sisters anthology series in collaboration with Aline Kominsky (now Crumb).

SPX is proud to have Ann Telnaes, one of only two women to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, as a guest at this year’s show. Telnaes started as a designer and worked for several years at Walt Disney Imagineering, later working for different companies across the world as an animator.  She turned to political cartooning where she won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, and a few years ago decided to combine her passions. She now does two to three animated cartoons a week for the Washington Post, which can be viewed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/telnaes.

Roz Chast, Diane Noomin and Ann Telnaes are but three of the over 120 women creators who will be at this years SPX, this list as well as links to most of their web sites is available at http://www.spxpo.com/exhibitors/women.

The SPX website also features a full list of exhibitors and guests at http://www.spxpo.com/exhibitors. Watch the site for expanded profiles of these Big Tent cartoonists.

About SPX

SPX is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit that brings together more than 300 artists and publishers to meet their readers, booksellers and distributors each year. Graphic novels, mini comics, and alternative comics will all be on display and for sale by their authors and illustrators, as well as a series of panel discussions and interviews with this year’s guests.

SPX has established the  first of its kind Small Press Expo Collection at The Library of Congress to preserve the works of  the creators  in the indie comics field who either exhibit or are a guest at SPX,  as well as the history of the SPX Festival istelf.

As in previous years, profits from the SPX will go to support the the SPX Graphic Novel Gift Program, which gifts graphic novels to public and academic libraries, as well as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), which protects the First Amendment rights of comic book readers and professionals. For more information on the CBLDF, go to their website at http://www.cbldf.org.

The hours for SPX 2011 are 11am–7pm Saturday, September 10, and 12–6pm Sunday, September 11. Admission is $10 for a single day or $15 for the weekend.

For more information on the Small Press Expo, please visit http://www.spxpo.com.