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Olympia Comics Festival
June 15th, 2009 09:56 amI finally checked out the Olympia Comics Festival Saturday. It was small and only featured independent creators, which was nice. They ran the gamut in skill and professionalism, and got me thinking about comics as an art form and industry again. Not thinking much that was new, however. It still boils down to one problem: Comcis does a terrible job of presenting itself!
You can see it at all levels. The Danger Room (the shop which kick started the festival) is a fantastic store in terms of selection, customer service, and knowledge. From the outside is looks run down, skeazy, and permanently closed. Good luck enticing people new to the media with that.
The artist tables were at the Vault, one of the shadier clubs in downtown Oly. It's a horrid place for any kind of visual art expo - the space is oddly laid out for it, there isn't a big friendly encouraging entrance, and there's no LIGHT.
I did get to run into old WWU classmates, one of whom remembered my art, which was a huge suprise. Also drew a panel in the comic jam, photos of which are supposed to be online eventually. The best part of the day, though, was catching up with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fenmere, who was down from B'ham to check out the con. That was rockin! Hope I didn't cramp his networkin' style too much -- I know it can get difficult to do your schtick with an extra audience, so I tried to always have my nose in someone's work.
Speaking of which, lets go back to the wide-ranging quality of the work. Fenmere wrote an excellent post about it, so I won't go over that, but here's something he didn't call out:
Little things make the difference in production.
My new pet peeve: self produced books which haven't had their pages trimmed. For the unfamiliar: You decide to make a book, so your print off several spreads, fold them, and put them one within the other to make your book! Great, right? Except that the center pages stick out at least an 1/8 of an inch beyond the outer pages; frequently more. This problem is solved by triming with a guillotine paper cutter, and you can hire the copy-lackies at kinkos to do it for a buck a cut. Three cuts. Should be able to do a stack of fifty lil' books at one go without a problem, and it makes a world of difference in the apparent professionalism of your product.
The other thing I noticed is totally personal to me -- there's an art style* which has only one line weight and lots and lots and LOTS of scratches and scribbles. I tend to find it in the very self-conciously indie or subculture comics most often, and I'm sure there's GREAT narative work done with it...but I can't read it. It makes my head uncomfortable. It's just too much visual work for me to bother getting to the meaning. I finaly have to acknowledge that I'll just never, ever want to read those.
I will want to read DAR, though. Fenmere introduced me to it, and I'm enjoyin' it!
You can see it at all levels. The Danger Room (the shop which kick started the festival) is a fantastic store in terms of selection, customer service, and knowledge. From the outside is looks run down, skeazy, and permanently closed. Good luck enticing people new to the media with that.
The artist tables were at the Vault, one of the shadier clubs in downtown Oly. It's a horrid place for any kind of visual art expo - the space is oddly laid out for it, there isn't a big friendly encouraging entrance, and there's no LIGHT.
I did get to run into old WWU classmates, one of whom remembered my art, which was a huge suprise. Also drew a panel in the comic jam, photos of which are supposed to be online eventually. The best part of the day, though, was catching up with
fenmere, who was down from B'ham to check out the con. That was rockin! Hope I didn't cramp his networkin' style too much -- I know it can get difficult to do your schtick with an extra audience, so I tried to always have my nose in someone's work.Speaking of which, lets go back to the wide-ranging quality of the work. Fenmere wrote an excellent post about it, so I won't go over that, but here's something he didn't call out:
Little things make the difference in production.
My new pet peeve: self produced books which haven't had their pages trimmed. For the unfamiliar: You decide to make a book, so your print off several spreads, fold them, and put them one within the other to make your book! Great, right? Except that the center pages stick out at least an 1/8 of an inch beyond the outer pages; frequently more. This problem is solved by triming with a guillotine paper cutter, and you can hire the copy-lackies at kinkos to do it for a buck a cut. Three cuts. Should be able to do a stack of fifty lil' books at one go without a problem, and it makes a world of difference in the apparent professionalism of your product.
The other thing I noticed is totally personal to me -- there's an art style* which has only one line weight and lots and lots and LOTS of scratches and scribbles. I tend to find it in the very self-conciously indie or subculture comics most often, and I'm sure there's GREAT narative work done with it...but I can't read it. It makes my head uncomfortable. It's just too much visual work for me to bother getting to the meaning. I finaly have to acknowledge that I'll just never, ever want to read those.
I will want to read DAR, though. Fenmere introduced me to it, and I'm enjoyin' it!
