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SPX 2018 Announces New Special Guests

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Small Press Expo has announced the first group of Special Guests for SPX 2018. The festival takes place on Saturday and Sunday, September 15-16, at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center and will have over 650 creators, 280 exhibitor tables and 22 programming slots to introduce attendees to the amazing world of independent and small press comics. Additional Special Guests will be announced shortly.

SPX 2018 will have the following creators as Special Guests to this year’s show:

Roz Chast

Roz Chast is a long time cartoonist for The New Yorker who wrote and illustrated the #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? from Bloomsbury. It won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent book is GOING INTO TOWN: A Love Letter to New York. She has published eight collections of her cartoons, illustrated several children’s books and received honorary doctorates from the Pratt Institute and Dartmouth College. Photo courtesy of Bill Hayes.

Derf

Derf is the author of My Friend Dahmer (Abrams Comicarts, 2012), the haunting account of his teenage friendship at Revere High School with the future serial killer. It has been hailed as one of the finest graphic novels in recent memory by Slate, The Plain Dealer, Publishers Weekly, USA Today, Kirkus Reviews, Le Monde, El Mundo, The Guardian and many more. The film adaptation of My Friend Dahmer premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and played in cinemas in the US and abroad throughout 2017 and 2018.

SPX is honored to show a screening of My Friend Dahmer, after which Derf will talk about the book and movie.

Ellen Forney

Ellen Forney authored her 2012 graphic memoir, Marbles for which she was the 2012 recipient of The Stranger Genius Award for Literature as well as the winner of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 2013 Gradiva Award.

Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice from My Bipolar Life is the eagerly awaited companion book to Forney’s 2012 best-selling graphic memoir, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me.

Ron Wimberly

Ronald Wimberly is a cartoonist/designer. He’s worked with The New Yorker, Dargaud, DC, Marvel, Image, Darkhorse and many others. He’s exhibited his comics in New York, Tokyo, and Paris. Ronald was the 2016 Columbus Comics resident and two time resident cartoonist at Angoulême Maison des Auteurs.

Anders Nilsen

Anders Nilsen is the author of nine books including Big Questions, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, Poetry is Useless and the forthcoming Tongues. His work has appeared in Kramer’s Ergot, Mome, the New York Times and elsewhere and been translated widely overseas. Nilsen has garnered three Ignatz Awards and the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize.

Anders will be debuting the latest volume of his acclaimed series Tongues at SPX 2018.

Rina Ayuyang (Saturday Only)

Rina Ayuyang has been nominated for the Ignatz and Eisner Awards, and she was honored with a MoCCA Arts Festival Awards of Excellencez Silver Medal. Her comics have appeared in Mutha Magazine and The Comics Journal. She is also the publisher of the micro-comics imprint Yam Books. Her first book was Whirlwind Wonderland.

Rina Ayuyang’s latest from Drawn & Quarterly, Blame This on the Boogie, is the true story of how Hollywood musicals got one person through school, depression, and the challenges of parenthood.

Joshua Cotter

Joshua W. Cotter is the author of Skyscrapers of the Midwest, Driven by Lemons and the Nod Away series. He lives in rural northwest Missouri with his wife, children, cats and an acute sense of impending mortality. They keep him making comics.

Joshua will be at SPX 2018 to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the release of Skyscrapers of the Midwest from Adhouse Books.

Lawrence Lindell

Lawrence Lindell is a cartoonist, author and teacher from California. He created From Black Boy With Love, Hey, People of Color, Couldn’t Afford Therapy, So I Made This and the webcomic The Section. When he’s not drawing/writing comics, he is usually buying/reading them.

Small Press Expo (SPX) is the preeminent showcase for the exhibition of independent comics, graphic novels, and alternative political cartoons. SPX is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit that brings together more than 650 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. The expo includes a series of panel discussions and interviews with this year’s guests.

The Ignatz Award is a festival prize held every year at SPX recognizing outstanding achievement in comics and cartooning, with the winners chosen by attendees at the show.

As in previous years, profits from the SPX will go to support the SPX Graphic Novel Gift Program, which funds graphic novel purchases for 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.

SPX 2015 Announces Special Guests Derf, Jessica Abel and Ted Rall

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spx-logo-240SPX has announced Derf, Jessica Abel (Saturday only) and Ted Rall as guests at SPX 2015. This is in addition to the previously announced guests Kate Beaton, Luke Pearson, Noelle Stevenson, Michael DeForge, Gemma Correll, Noah Van Sciver, Matt Bors, Lilli Carré, Theo Ellsworth, C. Spike Trotman, Jennifer Hayden, Stuart Immonen, Scott McCloud, Bill Griffith and Kathryn Immonen.

SPX 2015 takes place on Saturday and Sunday, September 19-20, and will have over 650 creators, 280 exhibitor tables and 22 programming slots to entertain, enlighten and introduce attendees to the amazing world of independent and small press comics.

Making its debut at SPX will be the latest autobiographical graphic novel by Derf, Trashed from Abrams Books. Derf’s squiggly, wonderfully exaggerated cartoon style is used to tell the story of what it was like to be a twenty-something garbage man, replete with all the losers and idiosyncratic townsfolk he had to deal with while collecting the trash. His previous graphic novel My Friend Dahmer won the Prix Révélation at Angoulême in 2014, and was listed as one of Time Magazine’s Top 5 Non-Fiction books of 2012. Derf’s long running alt-weekly strip, The City, which he ended in 2014 after 25 years, led him to win the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.

Merging the worlds of comics and verbal podcasts/radio, Jessica Abel interviewed the creators of such shows as This American Life, Radiolab and Snap Judgement, for her latest book, Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio from Broadway Books. The book uses the visual world of comics to uncover the narrative techniques now being used by the best journalists and storytellers in the world of podcasts and radio. Ms. Abel is a long time teacher of comics, having written two well-known and often used books on the subject, Mastering Comics and Drawing Words & Pictures. Her graphic novel, La Perdida, won two Harvey Awards and was Comic of the Year at Time Magazine. Ms. Abel will only be at SPX on Saturday, September 19th.

An enfant terrible of the political cartoon world, Ted Rall’s latest work is appropriately about the enfant terrible of the surveillance world, Eric Snowden, who was interviewed extensively for this book. In his latest graphic novel, Snowden from Seven Stories Press, he talks about how Snowden and other whistleblowers revealed the full extent and impact of the surveillance being performed by the NSA and other government agencies. Mr. Rall is a long time political cartoonist, comic’s journalist and writer, having won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice, as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Cartooning.

Small Press Expo (SPX) is the preeminent showcase for the exhibition of independent comics, graphic novels, and alternative political cartoons. SPX is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit that brings together more than 650 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. The expo includes a series of panel discussions and interviews with this year’s guests.

The Ignatz Award is a festival prize held every year at SPX recognizing outstanding achievement in comics and cartooning, with the winners chosen by attendees at the show.

As in previous years, profits from the SPX will go to support the SPX Graphic Novel Gift Program, which funds graphic novel purchases for 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.

Small Press Expo 2014: Keith Knight, Shannon Wheeler and Derf are Guests

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spx-logo-240This year marks the 20th Anniversary of SPX, which will be held September 13 and 14, 2014 at the North Bethesda Marriott Hotel & Conference Center. For their 20th birthday, they have announced Keith Knight, Shannon Wheeler and Derf as special guests.

Keith, Shannon and Derf join the previously announced alt-weekly guests Jules Feiffer, Lynda Barry, James Sturm, Charles Burns, Jen Sorensen, Tom Tomorrow, and Ben Katchor, as well as SPX first-timers Brandon Graham, Emily Carroll, Drew Friedman and Mimi Pond.

Keith Knight is the creator behind the long running alt-weekly comics Th(ink) and The K Chronicles, the latter of which won the esteemed Harvey Kurtzman Award as well as multiple Glyph Awards. His syndicated strip, The Knight Life, runs in such esteemed newspapers as the Washington Post. Keith’s will debut his latest book, which is a collection of Knight Life strips titled Knight Takes Queen. He is currently working on a graphic novel about his days as a Michael Jackson impersonator.

Shannon Wheeler has posted comics online since 1995, amongst them the alt-weekly favorite, Too Much Coffee Man that he began drawing in 1990. He is a contributor to The New Yorker, leading Shannon to publish I Thought You Would Be Funnier, a collection of cartoons rejected by that magazine. His latest book, God Is Disappointed In You, is a collaboration with Mark Russell that is a humorous attempt to retell the Bible in modern terms that has just released an audiobook version read by Dr. Venture/James Urbaniak.

Derf is the author behind the autobiographical graphic novel best seller My Friend Dahmer. His alt-weekly series The City recently completed its over 20 year run. Derf will be at SPX to debut his latest compilation, True Stories Volume One. Derf has been nomi9nated for numerous Eisner and Kurtzman Awards, as well as being the recipient of the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards.