A Few Final Notes About Last Weekend’s Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival

I had a couple of lingering questions about last week's inaugural Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, none of them having to do with the relative spiritual influence of Gary Panter vs. Jack Kirby, and show organizer Gabe Fowler was nice enough to indulge me.

First, while it's difficult to tell if a show is successful by walking up and asking random exhibitors how they're doing sales-wise and impossible to tell by measure of relative quality of programming or feelings of community-ness, I had a different measure in mind: did the show itself break even? Fowler says the show "did better than break even -- we covered all of our expenses and paid for the printing of a new issue of [free, all-comics newspaper] Smoke Signal." This is important not just because whether the show made money or not seems an obvious measure of success/failure, but because as a first show whether or not the selected model works becomes key in determining whether there can be a next show and what it might look like.

Second, one of the things about the lead up to the show that was slightly controversial was that unlike many comics shows of its type the Brooklyn Comics And Graphics Festival was rumored to be strongly curated, with show organizers wielding a heavier-than-usual hand when it came to deciding who and who wouldn't exhibit. Fowler explained that this was only half-true. They began by approaching artists and publishers they liked, but when the poster popped up on-line they had a flood of interest and applications. The numbers received were admittedly a challenge in terms of processing them fairly. Fowler says they'll definitely streamline the application process at any future shows to avoid hard feelings from rejected applicants, and may consider an invite-only show to get around the rejection problem entirely. "We're figuring it out," he told CR.

Third, I wondered how much future shows might look like that first show. While Fowler replied that it was too early to say for sure, and confirmed earlier statements that a bigger space to hold both exhibitors and programming would be desirable, he did in fact favor certain aspects of the festival's first time out. He emphasized a desire to keep the show free -- "we know it needs to stay free to the public, so we'll keep that in mind as we move forward" and stated a personal preference for the first weekend in December because of the tie-in to holiday shopping. For now he prefers a single-day event, and also notes, "it has to stay in north Brooklyn."
 
posted 10:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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