Tag: CAFs

Whew the comics arts festival circuit news is flowing thick and fast; we're in the middle of application season and hearts and minds are turning to tabling. And the CAFs are answering back with news.

Some details on the logistics of the new venue for this year's MoCCA Festival have been announced. The show itself is moving to Center 548 on West 22nd Street, and programming will be held...

The Small Press Expo, to be held this year Sept. 19-20, isn't a fully curated show. About half the booths are grandfathered in, but the rest are open in a "lottery" that is nerve-wracking but ultimately fair. While curated shows like TCAF and CAB present a sleek line-up, it's good to have some element of the random for one premiere CAF. REgistration is open from February 1-15 and the rest of the process is laid out in an announcement. "What to expect when you're expecting to table."

Last fall, we here at The Beat teamed up with the awesome folks at The Devastator to put together a survey for convention exhibitors. With all the controversy over who is spending and what cons are con games, it seemed like time to seriously upgrade this survey. And you responded, with more than 100 people taking the survey, giving results on the top cons and CAFs that revealed average sales and average amount of satisfaction with each show. In case you've never heard of them, The Devastator is a humor/comic magazine based in LA that features sharp satire and art by founders Geoffrey Golden and Amanda Meadows as well as people from The Onion, the Daily Show, Adult Swim, Marvel and more. The result, as crunched by the Devastator's staff, has some eye-opening statistics. You can read the entire report right here, and see some of the Devastator team's own comments below, but here are a few of my own eye-openers:

Whitney Taylor continues to be my favorite investigative comics journalist—well, maybe investigative is too strong a word, but if "talking to a lot of people and painting a picture" is the criterion, Whit is it, as her report on Comic Arts Brooklyn shows. This was a strong show but one that experienced an unexpected glitch: a lot of people thought it was a two day show and didn't come to the exhibits on Saturday. This resulted in a smaller crowd and, for some, lower sales. On the day there was a lot of anxiety—it's like basing your business plan on Christmas sales and then there's a big blizzard the day of the big sale—but everyone seems to have survived intact. And yet, is a financial model this precarious one that is "sustainable"? I predict sustainable will be THE word of 2015, as a the last few days of posts here have been exploring. Taylor talks about the model with many publishers and creators and key behind the scenes people like publishing rep Tony Shenton, and while everyone is optimistic, there is no real consensus on whether things are working, improving or just providing a false illusion of hope:

I'm not going to give updates on this every time there's a post, but just to keep up with various developments, that indie comics show in San Francisco that a bunch of volunteers have...

SIMPSONS creator @mattgroening4 just popped into #thinktankgallery for the @ComicArtsLA event. Only 3 HOURS LEFT! pic.twitter.com/1AjbgP7VEy — Think Tank Gallery (@ThinkTankDTLA) December 6, 2014 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js ...or that's what I get from the social media reports, which are...

Speaking of CAFS, a couple of other newsy notes for the burgeoning crop of events next year,

TCAF—The Toronto Comic Arts Festival—is expanding with a holiday pop-up shop at the Toronto Reference Library, home of the yearly comic festival. The shop will kick off with an event for "Just The Tips" the Sex Criminals spin off book by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky this Wednesday, December 3rd at 6 pm. Home town hero Zdarsky will be present to sign.

And here's the official word on that new comic arts festival that people were alluding to at ICAF: Cartoon Crossroads Columbus or CXC, which will be a lot more than a CAF, really. The event will debut in 2015 as a two-day event (held October 2-3) and then grow into a four day festival in 2016. The show has a four person executive committee consisting of Cartoon Books' Jeff Smith and Vijaya Iyer, Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon and Billy Ireland Library founder Lucy Caswell. Smith is the Artistic Director, while Spurgeon will be the Festival Director. Can you say heavy hitters?

It's been a long, long year of cons, with new ones springing up every where. The CAF season is winding up with Comic Arts LA on December 6th. A nice posted by Sophia Foster-Dimino...

The Beat took pictures at CAB 2014! Some of them are Hipstamatic. Live with it. This was a good show, as usual. I came back with a bag full of books and immediately started...