Small Press Expo 2023 Dispatch

News

• The first proper trailer for Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Walpurgisnacht Rising is finally here. The original television series aired back in 2011, and its movie sequel Rebellion came out ten years ago in 2013. My expectations aren’t high at this point, but Madoka Magica was a game-changer so of course I’m curious about this new film.
• Buichi Terasawa, creator of ultimate "dudes rock" manga Space Adventure Cobra, passed away at the age of 68.
• Reviews of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron have multiplied after its showing at TCAF. Impressions seem positive but deeply confused, which lines up with what I saw from Japanese critics.
• TYPE-MOON’s visual novel Witch on the Holy Night now has a release date on Steam: December 14, 2023. I’ve heard this game set a new bar for visual novels on its release in terms of aesthetics, although I don’t know much else about it. Wild to see TYPE-MOON in English, though!
• The first episode of the new Pokémon web series, Paldean Winds, aired last week. Pokémon has a fantastic track record when it comes to animation lately, so I reckon this is essential viewing (especially if you’re a die-hard Pokéfan like me.)
• The classic anime adaptation of historical romance Rose of Versailles is coming to the streaming service Retrocrush on September 15th! Excellent news. Bara wa bara wa…
• Mangasplaining is serializing Search and Destroy, a retelling of Osamu Tezuka’s classic Dororo by manga iconoclast Atsushi Kaneko. You can read the prologue and first chapter here.

Bookmarks

• Anime News Network translated a Newtype interview with Skip and Loafer director Kotomi Deai. Plenty of fun details, including the pain of drawing Japanese culture festivals…
• Also on Anime News Network, Andrew Osmond chatted with Jonathan Clements about the newest edition of his classic Anime: A History.
• For The Comics Journal, Austin Price wrote about the glories and contradictions of Saint Seiya.
• For Anime Feminist, Alexis Sara wrote about trans representation in yuri (girl’s love) comics and anime. (She recommends Double House, a 1998 comic by Nanae Haruno.)
• For Anime Herald, Audrey Di Martino wrote about the “big three” of horror anime: Shiki, When They Cry and Another. I don’t know if I buy the idea of a “big three,” but I do remember just how much the students at the English summer camp I taught in China adored Another. Don’t forget Mononoke, Serial Experiments Lain or Paranoia Agent, though!
• In non-anime news, Swapna Krishna wrote about Star Trek: The Animated Series. I’m including this for my readers who are currently enjoying Star Trek: Lower Decks. You know who you are.
• Amelie Doree profiled Shizuku, a legendary early visual novel with serious issues.
• Dave Cabera wrote about the Netflix One Piece live action series, or as he puts it “One Piece for normies.” Fairly positive write-up, though.
• At Tsundoku Diving, Baxter wrote about the “Evangelion Beyond” stage play. What is Evangelion? “It’s only a name.”
  

AMV of the Week

Here's "Kessoku Band x toe" by JL T4n.

This weekend I attended Small Press Expo, a yearly two-day independent comics convention based in a North Bethesda Marriott hotel. The nearby Metro station was called “White Flint” just a few years ago, until the Metro board voted to change the name. White Flint was a local mall that closed in 2015 and has spent the past almost-decade in redevelopment hell. (A stubborn Lord and Taylor stuck around until 2020.)  Even the name North Bethesda is slippery, with some claiming the area is just part of Rockville. It’s a liminal space, and so is Small Press Expo.

What comics do you imagine when you hear the words “small press?” Not superheroes, which still rule the roost in Hollywood despite this year’s box office failures. Not Japanese comics, which continue to pack the New York Times Bestseller List (or at least, Shonen Jump titles do.) You probably won’t find the likes of Batman, My Hero Academia or even Persepolis at Small Press Expo. Instead you’ll see former indie bad boys like Fantagraphics, convention circuit heroes like Peow and many who operate at an even smaller scale. Webcomics and zines are fair game, and regularly win the convention’s yearly Ignatz Awards.

If you’re a comics reader, though, you may know that Fantagraphics isn’t exactly a small press. They’re distributed by W.W. Norton, one of publishing’s Big Five. You could say the same of fellow Expo resident Drawn and Quarterly, which is distributed by Macmillian. Not to mention Nobrow, which is distributed by Penguin Random House. These publishers might be tiny compared to the likes of Marvel, but they represent the establishment within their particular scene. Fantagraphics even publishes The Comics Journal.

There are plenty of small publishers and artists at Small Press Expo that are not distributed by the Big Five. One of my favorites is Glacier Bay Books, which puts out indie manga by tiny artists that escape even the likes of fan translators in the United States. Another is Silver Sprocket, a comics publisher and record label I mainly know for putting out luxury print editions of webcomics like Mr. Boop and Matchmaker. Then there’s my friends, who have been selling their wares at Small Press Expo for years (not to mention buying comics from others.) This year one of them had a shrine to the already-immortal 2023 anime series Trigun Stampede.

The comics industry in the United States is very different now than it was when Small Press Expo was founded in 1994. Up and coming artists want middle grade and young adult comics deals, rather than gigs at Marvel or DC (for the most part.) Anime and manga are a big influence. Children’s animation grew into a golden goose that was mercilessly slaughtered by spiteful entertainment executives. Webcomics have centralized around platforms like Webtoon and Tapas, not always for the better. Many folks from marginalized backgrounds are still hard at work building a place for themselves within comics publishing, which (like much of the publishing industry) remains dominated by straight white people. Even once you're in, you never know if you'll be "the first sacrifice at the altar of marketability."

Now and then, "comics will break your heart." You know what comics didn’t break my heart?” The ones I bought from Small Press Expo this year! Here they are below.

1. Give Her Back to Me, by Hana Chatani. Published by Glacier Bay Books. A short comic about three generations of women and their memories of a mysterious mirror owned by their family. Saying anything more would ruin the surprise, but I was reminded of Moto Hagio's short comics collected in A Drunken Dream back in 2010. Considering how much I love Moto Hagio, that's high praise! Hatana has also been published by small press darling ShortBox.
2. Last Chance to Find Duke, by Shang Zhang. The last book published by PEOW. A charming tale of an etymologist searching the countryside for a rare cricket that makes a sound like jazz piano. There's a tinge of fantasy: scientists go by numbers rather than names, giant birds terrorize the forests and archaeologists excavate fragments of turtle shells the size of buildings. At its root, though, it's about something any academic or artist can understand: the challenge of pursuing your passions in a world ruled by money. I might write about this one in a future newsletter.
3. GLEEM, by Freddy Carasco. Published by PEOW. Three short stories set in a stylish science fiction world. More about vibes than character or plot,  but those vibes! The art reminded me of Taiyou Matsumoto's comics in its fusion of French and Japanese design sensibilities. It's animation-friendly but without ever falling prey to the "string of storyboards" aesthetic that plagues Webtoon and its competitors. Pure unadulterated comics.
4. The Chromatic Fantasy, by H.A. Published by Silver Sprocket. Trans man escapes nunnery, makes pact with devil, falls in love and then gets into trouble. I haven't had the chance to read this one yet, but picked it up on the strength of the excerpts I saw making the rounds on social media. Striking colors in this one, definitely looking forwards to it.
5. P.E.O.W. #2, by Jane Mai. Published by Peow (of course.) Jane Mai has drawn many weird little cursed comics. But her longest works to date (as far as I know) are the P.E.O.W. books, which detail her embarrassing adventures together with her colleagues at Peow as well as other indie cartoonists. P.E.O.W. #2 features the Covid lockdown, Junji Ito and the sequel to the sequel of Pond Smelt. These books are about as inside baseball as you can get, but I think they are very funny.
6. Sand: Of Wolf and Prey, by Alex Lupp and Erin Lisette. Both my podcast co-host and my high school classmate made this one! This is part of a larger universe Lupp is building about a planet of (you guessed it) sand. Since Lisette did the artwork, there are many cool creatures including Dune Dragons. You can find out more here.
7. Dream of Jupiter Soup, by Jade Feng Lee. This is about my friend Jade's dream including Jupiter and Alex's cat Sitri. Of course I had to buy it, or Sitri would likely tear me into little pieces the next time we meet...
8. Glaeolia, by Glacier Bay Books. A reprint of the first volume in Glacier Bay's award-winning alternative manga series. Loved the second and third volume, so can't wait for this one.

Finally, some notes from the panels I attended:

• At the panel "Horror of the Everyday," King Ray (Phonestoned) discussed how comics allow you to hide terrible things between panels so as to control what the audience sees at any given time. Julia Gfrorer (Vision) praised the intimacy of comics, and how physical books can sometimes become objects of horror for their own right for children.
• At the panel "Weird and Rare Manga That I Own," comics historian Ryan Holmberg discussed the popularity of Charlie Chaplin comics in 1920s Japan. An audience member asked him what he thought about manga fan translators preserving alternative manga like what was found in Garo; Holmberg's answer was that while the original physical issues of Garo are in dire need of preservation, the material itself is frequently reprinted in Japan. It's fascinating how certain comics can be as "mainstream" as a Fantagraphics publication in Japan, and yet so unknown in the United States that some fans are convinced they need to be saved from obscurity.
• At the panel "Fish-Out-Of-Water Science Fiction", Cosmoknights artist Hannah Templer dished on her love of Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Meanwhile, Casey Nowak expressed their fear of isolation as an infection vector for fascism in the United States. They also discussed the wonders of pattern recognition and its function in constructing identity: the difference between who you are inside, what you project and how others see you are all important.