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I hvae done a really awful job of reporting on the goings on at CXC in Columbus. The Comics Crossroads festival is now in its second year, and the whole roll out as an arts festival around Columbus and a two day comics festival is in place for the first time with guests like  Garry TRudeau (what COULD be be talking about?) Charles BUrns and Raina Telgemeier, along with such little seen at comcis events people like New Yorker artist Ed Koren and editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, and the usual crew of amazing cartoonsits like Keith Knight, Sergio Aragones and…damn I wish I was there. All my cool friends went.

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If you’re in the area, all the information on the show is here. There’s a fantastic interview with show director Tom Spurgeon which I should have linked to earlier in the week here:

I can’t speak for everyone involved, but I felt we had to get pretty big pretty quickly for a couple of reasons. The first is that the convention/festival schedule is crowded as hell, and I thought we needed to make a case for our place on the schedule pretty quickly as opposed to last decade’s model, where you could kind of grow the show for five or six years as the audience got used to attending.

The second is that one of the original conceptions is that this be a city-wide show. One of our explicit goals is to show off Columbus, even. So we run CXC out of about six venues in two different general locations: up on campus Thursday and Friday for the academic conference, peer to peer panels and auditorium presentations like Trudeau, then downtown Saturday and Sunday for the Expo part in our public library main branch with satellite events at the Columbus Museum of Art and Columbus College of Art and Design. We even move our late-night parties around.

The result is that there’s intense interest from about 15 civic groups to be involved, and we want to catch as much of that energy as early on as we can. You can’t tell excited people “hey, wait a few years; we’ll find something for you.” That just leads to people hating you if you’re successful and bailing on the idea if you’re not. But the resources they bring are an amazing thing, and more than worth any challenge in having that many moving parts.

So what can you expect? I hope a pretty full-service show. You can come Wednesday to Friday and see kind of the nerdier aspects, the gallery shows and the academic conference and the night-time presentations, all up on campus. You can come Saturday and Sunday to our downtown and attend a regular expo-type small press show, 100 tables, with four panel tracks. We even have hosted parties Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We have everyone from Image Comics to Youth In Decline in the Expo room; please, oh please God buy something. Or many things.

If you’re in the area, the two-day comics show kicks off tomorrow at the Columbus  Metropolitan LIbrary at 11 am, and there’s all of tonights events in case you are reading the Beat instead of doing cool things at CXC.

 

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And here’s the list of attending publishers:

PUBLISHERS

* 2-Headed Monster (James Moore)

* AdHouse Books (Chris Pitzer)

* Alternative Comics (Marc Arsenault)

* Cartoon Books (Jeff Smith)

* Czap Books (Kevin Czap)

* Fantagraphics (Eric Reynolds)

* Hidden Fortress Press (Paul Lyons)

* Image Comics (Eric Stephenson, Emi Lenox, Jeffrey Stang)

* Legacy Rising Publications (Doug Simms)

* Library Of American Comics/IDW (Dean Mullaney)

* Locust Moon Comics (Josh O’Neill)

* Nix Comics (Ken Eppstein)

* Ohio State University Press (Jared Gardner)

* Rosarium Books (Bill Campbell; SÕL-CON 2016 Guest)

* Sunday Press Books (Peter Maresca)

* Uncivilized Books (Jordan Shiveley)

* Youth In Decline (Ryan Sands)

 

Follow along at the Twitter account and at the hashtag . Here’s a photo

And a cute cartoon by Melanie Gillman.

 

Nest year, Columbus, NEXT YEAR.

 

 

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