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SPX 2011: Justice, American style

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SPX 2011 animal posterSaturday, September 10, I attended my 14th consecutive Small Press Expo in North Bethesda, Maryland. As you’ll know if you read my post on last year’s Expo, this is North America’s premiere independent cartooning and comic arts festival. I haven’t missed an SPX since I first went in 1997, and it’s the only comic book convention I attend every year. This year, the hall was packed, with the SPX organizers reporting attendance up 10-15 percent from the 3,000 attendees and exhibitors who participated in 2010.

Although the selection of work was as varied as ever, a definite pattern emerged in my purchases, like it did last year when I bought animal rights-themed books including Adam Hines’ epic and amazing Duncan the Wonder Dog and an anthology by fellow vegan J.T. Yost featuring stories on vivisection, the abuse of elephants in circuses, and factory farming. This year, the dominant theme was America’s never-ending struggle between the inalienable rights of the individual and the coercive force used by the State to preserve its own interests.

CBLDF Uncle Sam "Defend Speech" T-ShirtFree speech
As I explained in last year’s post, a prominent presence at every SPX is the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund table. The CBLDF is a non-profit organization that defends the First Amendment rights of comic book creators, publishers, and store owners. The SPX is one of the CBLDF’s biggest annual fund-raising events, where the organization sells autographed graphic novels, posters and other merchandise to support its work. One of the items that caught my eye on this year’s CBLDF table was  a “Defend Speech” T-Shirt bearing the ominous image of a mouthless Uncle Sam drawn by talented comic book artist John Cassaday. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fit it in my budget because of the other purchases I’d already made.

SPX 2011 Seamus Heffernan

Seamus Heffernan displaying his Xeric Award-winning work at the 2011 Small Press Expo.

Give me liberty
Last year, the main focus of my independent comic quest was the Xeric Foundation grant-winning book, Duncan the Wonder Dog. This year, I had my sights set on another Xeric winner, the first installment in Seamus Heffernan‘s Freedom, a revisionist take on the American Revolution. Beginning in the year 1779, Freedom is set in an alternative history where the patriots lost to the British and now live under truly colonial occupation. The defiant Sons of Liberty continue to wage an insurgency war against their red-coated occupiers, using gunpowder kegs as improvised explosive devices and leaving Boston looking like a bombed out 18th century Fallujah.

The story follows a teen-aged Massachusetts boy named Adam Farr, who goes to Boston to apprentice with a Tory merchant and has a near fatal encounter with violent British soldiers at a crowded checkpoint going into the city. This scene (reminiscent of the Israeli border crossings Joe Sacco depicted in Palestine), also reveals that the innocuous-sounding title of this first chapter actually refers to a pivotal point in Adam’s life, leading to a series of events that sweeps him up into the dangerous world of the Sons of Liberty. The quill and ink art style and broadsheet-proportioned paper make the comic look like an artifact of the unreal time in which the story is set, as though it could have been written by Tom Paine and printed by Ben Franklin. I’m anxiously awaiting future installments in the series. (In addition to the book, I bought a poster of the menacing anthropomorphic mascot of the patriot cause, the Liberty Eagle, brandishing a bloody saber in one feathered hand and King George’s severed head in the other.)

Freed Man by Peter Quatch

Copyright Peter Quach.

Another comic I got at SPX dealing with the aftermath of an armed conflict on American soil is Freed Man by Peter Quach. This story is set after the Civil War and focuses on the quest of former slave Charlie Moses to track down a group of white men in Texas who lynched his wife for claiming her emancipation. The question Moses wrestles with is whether he will ever truly be free as long as he keeps himself bound in self-forged chains of hatred and obsession with vengeance that continue to make his only  hope for happiness dependent on others.

American Terrorist

Copyright, A Wave Blue World Publishing.

Don’t tread on me
One of the books I was most excited about at the Expo hasn’t even been released yet. The graphic novel  American Terrorist, by married writers Tyler and Wendy Chin-Tanner and artists Andy MacDonald and Matt Wilson, wont make its debut until the New York Comic Con October 13-16, but publisher A Wave Blue World did have copies of the American Terrorist Sketchbook for sale at SPX to whet my appetite. It’s the story of four people—an investigative journalist, public school teacher, civil rights lawyer, and EPA scientist—inciting a 21st century popular uprising. No less fed up with government abuse of power than current Tea Party rabble-rousers, from the publisher’s description, I get the sense that these revolutionaries are motivated by very different ideals:

A war has been waged against the American people. It’s a covert war, one that those in power hope will go unnoticed, but day by day, homes, pensions, health care coverage, quality of life, and civil liberties are taken away, while the gap between the haves and the have-nots grows wider and wider.

With no way out, four activists become fugitives from the law and go on the offensive against corruption and injustice. They share their story with the nation using social media to inspire their followers to rise up and reclaim their country.

I’ll be interested to learn more about the goals and strategies this group has for restoring our nation, but I was pleasantly surprised by one preview page in particular that showed the Internet headline, “Factory Farmers Get Taste of Their Own Medicine.”

Any Empire by Nate Powell

Copyright, Nate Powell.

I bought Any Empire, by Eisner Award-winning creator Nate Powell, based almost entirely on the description on the back cover by publisher Top  Shelf Productions:

Any Empire, is a vivid examination of war and violence, and their trickle-down effects on middle America. First, a group of small-town kids find themselves bound together by geography, boredom, and a string of mysterious turtle mutilations. Years later, with Army tanks rolling through the streets of their hometown, these young adults are forced to confront painful questions of privilege, duty, betrayal, and courage.

In hardback and more than 300 pages long, Any Empire was the most impressive and ambitious work I purchased at this year’s Expo.  In some ways, it was also the most emotionally engaging and beautifully illustrated, and its largely wordless story the most enigmatic. I’ll probably have to read it again to fully process it but, thinking about it as I write this, it occurs to me that unlike the other comics I’ve mentioned, this one doesn’t focus so much on the evils that governments do as it does on the way every day American life can condition citizens to carry out those evils on their government’s behalf. In this case, it shows how kids playing soldier can grow up to become actual soldiers unquestioningly following orders to occupy not a foreign nation, but their own hometown. One of my main reasons for wanting to read the story was the turtle mutilations, which speak to the way childhood acts of animal cruelty are often predictors of future violence toward humans (the subject of the Superman for the Animals comic book I worked on, as well as an article I wrote for Animal Guardian magazine).

As usual, this and the other works I saw and bought at the Small Press Expo restored my enthusiasm for the diversity of expression, both in terms of style and subject matter, that have kept me reading “comic books” for more than 40 years.

9-11 Emergency ReliefI didn’t attend the second day of the SPX this year, which marked not only the 10th anniversary of 9/11, but the anniversary of the only time in the Expo’s history that the event was ever canceled. In 2001, the Small Press Expo was scheduled to take place just four days after the terrorist attacks, and due to restrictions on travel and the nation’s state of shock and grief, the Expo was called off that year (otherwise, this would have been my 15th SPX). Many comic book anthologies came out in the aftermath of 9/11 to raise funds for various victim support charities, but the one that featured the highest concentration of contributions from SPX attendees was 9-11: Emergency Relief from Alternative Comics. In fact, the stories contributed by Jessica Abel, Eric Thériault and Nick Abadzis actually mention their plans to attend the Expo that year.

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