![_Ingleside Heights Bathroom Drug Cook Busted, Maybe More Boring Than Expected [Updated]](http://sfist.com/assets_c/2012/02/cisneros_bathroomexplosion-thumb-250x250-693209.jpg)
SFist Goes to the Alternative Press Expo
by Amy Crocker
For all the off-color topics explored in the comics at the Alternative Press Expo, the convention itself was downright professional. Maybe it was the dark wood paneled walls of The Concourse Exhibition Center that subdued the crowd, but there was nothing of the costumed mayhem of San Diego Comic Con. Attendees approached tables with a very serious devotion to the subject matter.
APE is a rare chance for independent artists to emerge from behind their webcomics and try to build an audience, or, cross fingers, make money. The majority of exhibitors were self-published and self-promoted. Their wares ranged from posters to stapled booklets to hard covers. Tables often had free candy, free postcards, booklets for 50 cents - anything to get the customer to linger.
Jesse Baggs, (www.hardpressedink.com) advertised that he would draw anything for a dollar. I asked for a San Francisco superhero. He came back with “Trans-America Man,” a variation on one of his hipster characters. It works, he explained, because hipsters and superheroes both wear tight clothing. Then in true marketer fashion, he turned the conversation to his stapled together booklet, “How Hipsters are like Superheroes.” In the panel discussions on webcomics and independent cartooning, artists such as Shannon Wheeler, Stephen Notley and Miriam Libnicki advised the note-taking crowd to keep a day job. Webcomics are not lucrative, they explained, and suggested making print collections of previous online work in order to monetize.
For most exhibitors at APE, cartooning is an expensive hobby, not a career. Jiminez Lai, is a professor of architecture at University of Illinois at Chicago. Lai was at APE to promote his “extreme architecture” stories. In “Babel,” he imagines a skyscraper 12 kilometers tall, limited in height only by the stratosphere (or “until you can’t breathe,” he explained.) Is that building possible? No, but that was the point. “I’m in the academic context all the time, I don’t want [the books] to be academic,” Lai said.
The perception of what makes a comic is certainly evolving away from superheroes and imaginary planets. But as in any good comic convention, if you looked hard enough, you could find the sci-fi enthusiasts of lore. Darrell May (http://www.strangercomics.com/asunda/untamed.php) was showing the first installment of “The Untamed,” a 32-page, full color tale of revenge and purgatory that introduces the setting for a bigger series to come. “It’s The Hobbit to my Lord of the Rings,” May said.
APE today is supposedly what Comic Con was like thirty years ago - a simple place for comic artists to show their wares. And while a little spectacle could go a long way, for the sake of these independent artists, let’s hope it stays so serious.