Wednesday, March 23, 2011

SPACE 2011 Recap

I've had a couple days to sit back and reflect on SPACE and thought I would share my thoughts with the Internets. I drove up Friday night instead of Saturday morning (which is when I went up last year) and that was a very smart move. The kids had time to go swimming, we went out for pizza and it gave me plenty of time to set up Saturday morning rather than rushing around (I hate rushing).

Views from my table:


The show seemed slower than last year. You could come with all kinds of reasons (two actually): C2E2 was the same weekend and OSU was on spring break. I think those two definitely had an impact on attendance, but whether it meant 10 fewer attendees or 100 fewer, I don't know. My sales were certainly down from last year, by maybe 30% (which sounds like a lot of money, but really equates to about $10), but what I really noticed was much less traffic than last year. There were a lot fewer people NOT buying my comics this year.


I don't go to SPACE expecting to sell enough comics to pay my mortgage, so with that said, I had a really great time. There were six Candy or Medicine contributors (not including myself). I met a lot of new people, re-connected with others I've met before and did a lot of trading (two bags this year!). SPACE also inspired my artistic side: I participated in a couple of jams and even started a few myself. One will be showing up real soon as a poster and the other two will ends up as mini-comics in the coming months. More on that later.

SPACE Loot
 
The weekend turned out to live up to my expectations and so I was really glad to be a part of this fun show. I'm already looking forward to SPACE 2012.

 Derek Croston

 Katie Omberg

 Dan W. Taylor

 Matt Feazell

 Bruce Chrislip and Steve Willis

 Steven Myers

 Nick Marino

  John Porcellino

3 comments:

Sam Spina said...

Awesome! That looks like a blast, I wish it wasn't so far away from me so I could go. Also it's pretty rad seeing those people hold the CoM that I drew the cover to! ha

Josh Blair said...

A couple people gave positive comments about your cover, Sam!

Unknown said...

@Sam: I love that cover!!!

@Josh: Good seeing you this year! I agree with pretty much everything you said, and I think you described the decrease in foot traffic accurately. At first I thought it seemed lighter because of where our tables were this year, but everyone else noticed it was a little slower this year too.