It’s a holiday today here at GP HQ but we’re still going to be delivering some news throughout the day. It never stops! Still, what geeky things did you all do over the weekend? Sound off in the comments below! While you think about that, here’s some news and reviews from around the web you might have missed.
Small Press Expo (SPX) is proud to announce it is again a sponsor of the Library of Congress National Book Festival. As a part of this sponsorship, SPX is bringing Keith Knight, Miss Lasko-Gross and Diane Noomin to the National Book Festival.
Keith Knight is a musician and cartoonist. His works include The K Chronicles, (Th)ink and The Knight Life series. He has received the Comic-Con Inkpot Award for career achievement, multiple Glyph Awards for best comic strip and the Harvey Kurtzman Award for best syndicated comic strip. His art has appeared in various publications worldwide, including The Washington Post, Daily KOS, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, Ebony, ESPN the Magazine, L.A. Weekly, MAD Magazine and the Funny Times. The first collection of his Knight Life strip is The Knight Life: Chivalry Ain’t Dead (Grand Central).
Miss Lasko-Gross is a comics artist and author known for her semiautobiographical graphic novels Escape from Special and A Mess of Everything. Her first graphic novel was nominated for YALSA’s Great Graphic Novel award, and A Mess of Everything was named by Booklist among the top 10 graphic novels of 2009. Lasko-Gross has contributed to and worked on a variety of comics and collections. Her latest graphic novel, Henni (Z2 Comics), features a girl with cat-like ears and a tail who questions the religious rules of her community.
Diane Noomin is a comics artist best known as the creator of Didi Glitz. She is one of the original contributors to Wimmen’s Comix and is the editor of the anthology series Twisted Sisters. Her work has appeared in many books, magazines and underground comic publications, including Weirdo, Young Lust, Short Order, Arcade, El Perfecto, True Glitz, Aftershock, Real Girl, Lemme Outta Here, Mind Riot, Titters, Dangerous Drawings, The Comics Journal/Special Editions, The New Comics Anthology, The Nose and The Nation. Noomin has received an Inkpot Award and been nominated for Harvey and Eisner awards. Her book Glitz-2-Go (Fantagraphics) is the first collection of more than 40 years of Didi Glitz comics.
The primary goal of this sponsorship is to bring creators from the indie comics community to the National Book Festival to provide greater exposure for them and their works to the diverse audience that attends this prestigious festival.
The National Book Festival takes place Saturday, September 5, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C.
Keith Knight will be in the Graphic Novel Pavilion, signing his books from 6:00PM-7:00PM, and from 7:15PM – 8:05PM will be on a panel with his fellow cartoonists Lalo Alcaraz and Scott Stantis.
Miss Lasko-Gross and Diane Noomin will be in the Graphic Novel Pavilion signing books from 6:00PM-7:00PM, and will be on a panel with Trina Robbins from 8:10PM-8:55PM.
The National Book Festival is a fantastic convention in Washington, DC that began in 2001. Over the 15 years, it has welcomed numerous guests including some of the top comic/graphic novel creators.
This year is certainly an interesting group, and includes many award winning creators. The convention usually includes panels followed by signings, as well as a large book store. This year’s National Book Festival takes place Saturday, September 5, 2015 from 10am to 10pm at the Washington Convention Center. It’s free to the public.
Scott Edelman has posted the entire The Secret History of Women in Comics panel from this year’s Small Press Expo. For my second year, I still didn’t make it to panels, maybe next year… The panel featured Jessica Abel, Robyn Chapman, Alexa Dickman and Diane Noomin.
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.
Bethesda, Maryland; August 11, 2010 – The Small Press Expo (SPX), the preeminent showcase for the exhibition of independent comics, graphic novels and alternative political cartoons, is pleased to announce its slate of programming for SPX 2011. SPX is proud to have earned a reputation for offering some of the most insightful, stimulating public interviews and panel discussions in comics today, assembled by comics educator and curator Bill Kartalopoulos.
Audiences at this year’s festival will have the opportunity to enjoy spotlight presentations and question-and-answer sessions with many of SPX’s headline guests, including Chester Brown, Roz Chast, Anders Nilsen, Diane Noomin, Johnny Ryan, Alex Robinson, Ann Telnaes, Craig Thompson, and Jim Woodring.
This year’s programming will also include a number of thoughtful panel discussions such as:
– “Inside The New Yorker,” featuring Roz Chast and Kate Beaton in conversation.
– “Narrative Logic: Surreal and Obscure,” with Marc Bell, Matthew Thurber, and Jim Woodring.
– “The Secret History of Women in Comics” with Jessica Abel, Diane Noomin and others, moderated by Heidi MacDonald.
– “Comics in the Library,” a round-table discussion with Sara Duke from the Library of Congress, Charles Brownstein, and representatives of two local library systems.
– “Navigating the Contemporary Publishing Landscape” with Mike Dawson, Meredith Gran and Julia Wertz.
– “Images of the Body” with Robyn Chapman, Jennifer Hayden, Gabby Schulz, and Jen Vaughn.
Additional programming events will include a slideshow presentation by Kim Thompson about the works of French comics giant Jacques Tardi and a hands-on cartooning workshop open to all attendees.
This year’s panels and spotlight sessions will be moderated by a bevy of critics, scholars, and other experts including Johanna Draper Carlson, Rob Clough, Craig Fischer, Martha H. Kennedy, Sean T. Collins, Joe McCulloch, and many more.
SPX Programming Coordinator Bill Kartalopoulos teaches classes about comics at Parsons The New School for Design. He also co-organizes the Brooklyn Comics Graphics Festival, reviews comics for Publishers Weekly, and has curated several comics-related exhibits including “Cartoon Polymaths” at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center. He recently assisted Art Spiegelman on the production of MetaMaus, a book and DVD about the making of Maus.
SPX will be held Saturday, September 11 from 11AM – 7PM and Sunday, September 12, noon – 6PM at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Convention Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Admission is $10 for a single day and $15 for both days.
Small Press Expo (SPX) is proud to announce it is again a sponsor of the 
The National Book Festival is a fantastic convention in Washington, DC that began in 2001. Over the 15 years, it has welcomed numerous guests including some of the top comic/graphic novel creators.
