Festivals Extra: Ten Photos From SPACE 2016

Here are 12 photos my brother Whit Spurgeon took during the weekend of SPACE 2016: April 11-12. It was held in a performing arts center space on the north side of Columbus, Ohio.

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Here are people in the back room of the Laughing Ogre comics shop enjoying the food and drink made available for the Night Before party. SPACE is one of those shows that attracts a certain group of people who come year after year, so a great deal of this party was about people seeing old friends and catching up. The rest was meeting tired CCAD students who spent the week getting their work prepared including a bunch of prints in a handmade box that was to be a sales feature of the CCAD/Spitball table over the weekend.

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The front door. SPACE is seven minutes from my house in a performing arts center that easily holds everyone that wants a table. There were more food trucks this year, although the cold-ass weather kept one or two home on Saturday, maybe? I never checked. It looked good, though.

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Here's the show in its set-up stage, with all of these tables to eventually be claimed and used by eager comics-makers plying their wares. I was there to promote CXC, give away some doubles I had to eager comics readers, and to get people to sign up for the CXC mailing list. (Scroll down the page on that initial CXC link and please sign up yourself!) My table mate was our board member Rebecca Damsen. She was extremely prepared and eager to talk to people: basically she was everything I'm not, so thank God for that. I hadn't done a show behind a table since the 1995 San Diego Comic-Con. It's actually nice to have stuff to do.

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That's a nice bunch of t-shirts at affordable prices. I'm too big for t-shirts right now, but I did buy a piece of Matt Feazell art -- a jam-packed city-scape that was the line art for a collection of his newspaper strip -- and I have to say, owning it makes me very happy. I don't think I own any other pieces that I've bought, that's how rare it is for me to buy art. So it was a good weekend for me just on that level.

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There were a lot of geese around the place, I think because of a small body of water at next door's animal shelter. Loud, horrible animals.

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I'm not sure why this photo of a Tee-Jaye's is in there, but convention weekends will always remind me of cheap comfort food even as I'm old enough that my friends and I mostly go to fine to very fine restaurants now. SPACE is next to a road in Columbus called Morse that is stuffed with strip mall food of a very high order, and I hope everyone partook.

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This is the great Carol Tyler blowing everyone away with her presentation on her great book Soldier's Heart. I got to talk to Carol later that first day about her next book project, which sounds amazing. Everyone should give her writer's grants or whatever it takes for her to get the next book done in a way that is easier on Tyler than the full-scale assault that Soldier's Heart seemed to be.

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Nearly every exhibitor to whom I spoke said Sunday was better than Saturday. I don't have any pictures of Sunday, so here's another one of Saturday.

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Caitlin McGurk was on hand to throw her yearly Saturday night party, which consists of cartoonist readings and if it can be managed, some sort of music. McGurk was suffering from flu-like symptoms, but rallied like a champ and did her usual great job. I enjoyed some of the readings so much it has led me to reconsider the work of the cartoonists involved. It also struck me that no one read their comics 20 years ago (James Kochalka sang his, I guess) but it's an almost expected thing now.

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This was one of the Saturday evening readings, by Amy Coelho. She does comics about her kids, and folded them into her reading. Little kids shouting curse words with vigor as Mom looks on approvingly is always funny.

Although there was a lot more SPACE left at the point this photo was taken, it was the last one we took. I spent the second day talking up the show, same as the first, and meeting a lot of nice people. Sean Keefeld was there from Chicago! It's always nice to see another devoted writer about comics. Julian Dassai broke my heart by stopping by after the show was over to point out a dealer was selling rare French-language comics anthologies 20 feet from where I sat the previous couple of days. Next time I'll follow my own advice: canvas the entire room. That minor disappointment aside, I had a good time. Thanks to everyone I got to meet at this very nice show, double thanks to its organizer Bob Corby and I'll see you back on Columbus' north side for next year's SPACE 2017 preview, where we need to have a very serious talk about the Chicken 65 appetizer at Namaste.

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