Small Press Expo has announced more International 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 is honored to have the following creators as International Special Guests to this year’s show:

Julie Doucet

Julie Doucet was born near Montreal in 1965 and is best known for her frank, funny, and sometimes shocking comic book series Dirty Plotte, which changed the landscape of alternative cartooning. In the 1990s, Doucet moved between New York, Seattle, Berlin, and Montreal, publishing the graphic novels My New York Diary, Lift Your Leg, My Fish is Dead!, My Most Secret Desire, and The Madame Paul Affair. In 2000, she quit comics to concentrate on other art forms. From these experiments emerged the collection of engravings and prints Long Time Relationship; her one-year visual journal, 365 Days; and sassy collages from fumetto comics, Carpet Sweeper Tales. Her post-comics artwork includes silkscreened artist’s books, text-based collages, sculpture, and animation films.

Julie Doucet arrived in comics in the 1990s as a fully formed cartoonist. The Complete Dirty Plotte collects the revolutionary and medium-defining comics of a legendary cartoonist.

Emma Ríos

Emma Ríos is a cartoonist based in Spain. She shifted her focus to a mix of both architecture and work with small press publishers until she started working on comics full-time in 2007. Having worked for BOOM! Studios and for Marvel Entertainment (Doctor Strange, Amazing Spider-man), she returned to creator-owned comics in 2013, thanks to Image Comics; where she recently published I.D., a solo graphic novel. She currently co-creates Pretty Deadly with Kelly Sue DeConnick and Mirror with Hwei Lim.

Max de Radiguès

Max de Radiguès (b. 1982) is a cartoonist from Belgium who also runs the publishing house L’Employé du Moi. His previous work has been translated in English by Conundrum and One Percent Press. His books in English include Moose, Weegee (with Wauter Mannaert), and Bastard. He lives in Brussels.

In his Fantagraphics debut, Bastard traces the deadly escape of May and Eugene as they crisscross the United States, encountering mysterious truckers, ambitious bandits, and senior citizens living off the grid in the Southwest. Both bloody and tender, de Radiguès focuses on the familial relationship as much as the exhilarating plot elements, and his clear-lined style adds depth to the brutality as well as the moments of maternal love.

Liv Strömquist

Liv Strömquist was born in Sweden and lives in Malmö. She is a radio host with a degree in political science. An activist, her left-leaning, award-winning comics have been published in zines and magazines. Her feminist graphic novel Fruit of Knowledge has sold 40,000 copies in Sweden and has since been published worldwide.

From Adam and Eve to pussy hats, people have punished, praised, pathologized, and politicized vulvas, vaginas, clitorises, and menstruation. In her feminist graphic novel, Fruit of Knowledge, Swedish cartoonist Liv Strömquist calls out how genitalia-obsessed men have stigmatized women’s bodies, denied their sexuality, created a dubious gender binary, and much more. Her biting, informed commentary explores history and taboos from the darkest chapters (the Salem witch trials) to the lightest (when menstrual blood was used as a love potion).

Jérémie Royer

Jérémie Royer is a French illustrator and designer. He grew up in Nice surrounded by the sea and the mountains. After studying art there for 2 years, he specialised in comic book art and illustration at the École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc in Brussels and is now based in Brussels.

Audubon, On the Wings of the World by Fabien Grolleau and Jérémie Royer is about John James Audubon’s epic ornithological quest across America, with nothing but his artist’s materials, an assistant, a gun and an all-consuming passion for birds.

Fiona Smyth

Fiona Smyth is a Toronto based painter, educator, illustrator, and cartoonist. Her feminist artwork has exhibited internationally. Fiona collaborated with writer and sex educator Cory Silverberg on the kids’ series What Makes A Baby in 2013, and Sex Is A Funny Word in 2015, published by Seven Stories Press.

Somnambulance collects a career in comics from 1983-2017 by a joyous, feminist contemporary of Julie Doucet, Seth and Chester Brown. A comics collection by Canadian cartoonist, painter, and illustrator Fiona Smyth. Over thirty years of comics that feature Fiona’s world of sexy ladies, precocious girls, and vindictive goddesses is revealed in all its feminist glory. This is recommended reading for sleepwalkers on a female planet.

Kelly Kwang

Kelly Kwang is an illustrator and cartoonist who spends half her time in Toronto and the other half on the net. She is the proud founder of the Space Youth Cadets, and the (also proud) co-founder and lead artist of a budding games studio known as Gloam Collective.

Her current project, don’t tell me not to worry, i’ll worry all i want will be published by Czap Books this coming year.