As I discovered “last year”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000095.html, my buddy Joe not only knows and loves comics, but has the uncanny (to me, anyway) ability to get cool people talking with him about them as if they’ve known him forever. So it’s a very good thing he was with me to pick up “Mike Mignola”:http://www.lambiek.net/mignola.htm at Union Station and deliver him to this year’s “Small Press Expo”:http://www.spxpo.com/. I’m a big Hellboy fan but I’m terrible at making small talk with strangers that I admire, so I drove the car and played fly-on-the-wall while Joe got Mignola talking about early twentieth-century illustration, a subject that occupied them both nearly the whole ride there. Movie chitchat covered the rest of the trip.

It doesn’t seem like a year ago that I went to “my first SPX”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000073.html, but I didn’t have a ten-month old daughter then, and I do now, which strongly suggests that it has been at least that long. Ella was with me there this year, and while she had a good time and attracted plenty of attention, it did mean that I didn’t get a chance to browse around quite as much as I’d like. (No costume for her this year, though she was very taken with the toddler who was dressed as Spider-Man.) I did pick up a copy of “Owly”:http://www.icomics.com/rev_063004_owly.shtml, which I highly recommend, and which will be waiting in the wings in order to someday bear the honor of being Ella’s First Comic Book. I also spent some time browsing _Stuff and Nonsense_, a book of really cool illustrations and early comics by “A.B. Frost”:http://www.coconino-world.com/sites_auteurs/ab-frost/Menus/mn_frost.htm from the 1880s. For a brief shining moment I thought I had made A Find, but when I showed it to Joe he of course already knew all about it.

I’ll include bloglinks to other SPX chatter here as I come across it.