#cakechicago2015

CAKE (Chicago Alternative Comics Expo) was at the Center on Halsted over the weekend. I was there for several hours midday on Saturday, and briefly again on Sunday afternoon.

This was, unlikely as it may sound, my first small-press comics show. (I haven’t been to a comics show of any kind since San Diego fifteen years ago. Oh, I guess I wandered the Phoenix Con for an hour or so with Dave​ a few years back, but I didn’t see a single comic book there.) 

Since I’ve spent the last several years in a comics headspace dominated by European comics of the 50s through the 80s, it was great to just walk the tables and get a sort of immediate crash course on the dominant aesthetics and various kinds of scenes brewing in the self-publishing and micropublishing worlds of Midwestern and Midwestern-accessible comics. 

It was a goddamn delight to see Jillian Tamaki the rockstar of the event -- I saw people walking by Gilbert Hernandez on the floor without a second glance, but Jillian’s table was mobbed every time she was there, and seemed to do good business even when she wasn’t.

The material I bought was split pretty evenly between work I’d known about in advance and had been meaning to check out at some point (for much of which I have Comics and Cola to thank), and stuff I found out about for the first time by looking at it on a table in front of me. I’ll probably do another post about everything I bought; I wolfed most of it down the other night, happier to be encountering new work than I have been in a very long time.

Only person in the room who knew me already: Ian McDuffie.

Least-awkward interaction with a creator from whom I bought something: Eleanor Davis.

Conversation I was most secretly thrilled to be roped into: Tom Spurgeon and Kevin Huizenga talking about towels.