CAFs

While doing research on my German comics article, I discovered an interesting press release in the Erlangen Comics Salon website.  The news?  Five comics...

While the mainstream comics world was getting reaquainted and dusting off their drinking pants at Emerald City this weekend, the year in CAFS also kicked off in Providence, RI with RIPE, the Rhode Island Independent Publishing Expo. Now in it's second year, this is a show in a town with a solid comics history and within driving distance of lots of other scenes. Robyn Chapman, cartoonist, First Second editor, and Tiny Report mastermind, has a report on the show, and she had me w2ith the first photo above. Was this expo held in a Greek temple to the sun god Apollo??? No, just the Providence Public Library.

The can-do spirit of Bay Area comics folks has come together for the San Francisco Comics Fest, which just launched a website and announced plans for a full week of comics-related activities kicking off on Sunday May 3 and ongoing all week with with will probably be a CAF-type event May 9-10.

There's a CAF (comic arts festival) born every minute! Here's a new one, the New South Fest in Austin. They have a tumblr and a FB page, and some art...and exhibitor applications are now open. The plan is an outdoor books and comics event to be held June 6th, 2015 at the French Legation Museum in Austin, Texas. "Our goal is to celebrate independent literature, alternative comics, small presses, and print culture. New South will be highly curated, focused, fresh, and irreverent."

UPDATE: Oops should have dug a little more. This event seems to be run by Danithan Mejia of the Foxing Review, website under construction.

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...

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:

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...

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...

The jury for next year's MoCCA Arts Festival Awards of Excellence -- a prize for cartoonists has been announced and it's stellar:  Charles Burns, Annie...

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.