Small Press Expo Announces Dash Shaw, Bill Campbell, Bizhan Khodabendeh and Joe Kessler as Special Guests for SPX 2021
Small Press Expo has announced the final group of Special Guests for SPX 2021. The virtual festival takes place on Saturday September 18 with live and pre-recorded programming about the amazing world of independent and small press comics, as well as a livestream of the annual Ignatz Awards.
SPX 2021 is honored to have the following creators as Special Guests to this year’s show:
Dash Shaw
Dash Shaw’s latest, Discipline from the New York Review Books, takes place during the Civil War, when many Quakers were caught between their fervent support of abolition, a desire to preserve the Union, and their long-standing commitment to pacifism. When Charles Cox, a young Quaker from Indiana, slips out early one morning to enlist in the Union Army, he scandalizes his family and his community.
Discipline is told largely through the letters exchanged between the Cox siblings—incorporating material from an actual Quaker and soldier journals of the era—and drawn in a style that combines modern graphic storytelling with the Civil War–era battlefield illustrations of the likes of Thomas Nast and Winslow Homer. The result is a powerful consideration of faith, justice, and violence, and an American comics masterpiece.
Photo courtesy Joanna Morrissey
Bill Campbell
Bill Campbell’s author of The Day The Klan Came To Town from PM Press, which is a fictionalized, graphic retelling of a KKK riot that occurred in Bill’s hometown of Carnegie, PA in 1923, at the height of the power of the KKK in America, and the community resistance to it as seen through the eyes of Primo Salerno, a Sicilian immigrant.
Bizhan Khodabandeh
Bizhan Khodabendeh is the illustrator of The Day the Klan Came to Town, a fictionalized, graphic retelling of a KKK riot that occurred in Carnegie, PA in 1923 and the resistance to it.
Joe Kessler
Joe Kessler’s Windowpane from London-based Breakdown Press, is a one-man-anthology of critically acclaimed narrative and experimental comics by London based artist, Joe Kessler. The book contains new work, along with reprints of Windowpane 3 and Windowpane 4.
