Small Press Expo, Day 2

[zvi]

Why I was late to SPX

I foolishly stayed up until 3 am this morning watching BuJo videos on Youtube. I don't even know why I'm so fucking fascinated. I am not going to do a Bullet Journal: the migrating and layout writing (and I mean the simple list layouts, not all the goddamn flowers and grids) is way more work than I'm interested in for a planner. I don't know, somehow it seems…¿soothing? That's not the right word, but I keep setting them up when I'm doing something that needs background noise. In any case, not going to bed until 3 meant I didn't get up until 10, so I didn't leave until 12, so I got to SPX around 1:30. That was fine because the first panel (I thought) I was interested in wasn't until 2:30, so I had lunch and then went to the panel.

The panel sucked. The moderator didn't have a clear concept of the topic, so the whole thing was pretty pointless.

The next panel I went to, on American Magical Girls comics, was much better. I ended up buying the comics of several panelists. I really liked what they had to say about Magical Girls being a genre which (a) avoids the Smurfette principal [there is only one girl in this story and her chief characteristic is being a girl] and (b) creates a space to celebrate femme behaviors and traditionally feminine skills like maintaining relationships. Also, Wendy Xu got in a fight with a little girl about whether or not horses are awesome. (Xu is against horses, the little girl was deeply pro. I feel like we should have all expected this fight.)

• Princess Love Pon
• Mooncakes
• Magical Girl Problems, Magical Girl Solutions
• Witchy (not by a panelist, recommended by one)

The last panel I went to was about erotic comics, and it was great. The panel was four women and one trans person talking about liking to make comics, erotica, and porn they want to see in the world.

One thing that I was only sort of expecting was that about half of the panelists didn't really find their own work erotic. It wasn't really clear to me if they just didn't explicit images in general erotic or not. Some of the panelists definitely did do it because they just like dirty pictures, but other panelists were definitely interested in the political implications of what they were doing, and specifically interested in queer and trans representation, and in making porn for women.

There was also a big connection for many of the panelists between their amateur work in fandom and the stuff they are producing now to sell. Some of the panelists brought up call out culture as something that was driving them into a creative vacuum (a space where you wouldn't get feedback and judgements) like secret Twitter accounts.

So, there was only about 30 minutes left to the floor when I ducked out of the panel a couple of minutes early. This is the haul I managed to accumulate: