Small Press Expo 2017: The Struggle and Triumph for Participants of Color

I’ll admit it: even as a passionate comic reviewer and enthusiast, it was Twitter that really got me excited about Small Press Expo this year. It wasn’t the size that initially caused wariness or even the location; I’ve been going to conventions of this sort since middle school and many of my firsts were small-scale and not in a populous area, so I was used to a more intimate setting and schedule. Instead, it was that every time I saw a promotion, there were white or white-passing faces attached to it which is typically a red flag for POC in these sorts of spaces. The closer it got to the weekend, though, the more the creators of color on my timeline began to list their SPX tables in their twitter names and the more I began to relax my guard, especially as the #DrawingWhileBlack hashtag by SPX attendee Annabelle Hayford began to take off. Was this a mistake? Well, as a first-time POC and more specifically Black participant, here’s why my experience left me both wanting to return but also knowing that some serious intentional work needs to be done to before folks like me can feel totally welcome.

Exhibitors

As I mentioned above, this was my number one reason for attending, both because of limited edition or debut prints and because of the face to face time with creators whose work I admired. Like many attendees, I misjudged my own memory and assumed I would be able to find the tables on my list right away, and I found on my first walkthrough Saturday morning that this was …