High Anxiety

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UNARMED and abandoned, we walked into Comic Arts Brooklyn. All of our artists ditched us at once, albeit with plenty of warning and with a plethora of reasons, but still. Can you blame us for our feels? At the very least, two of our gang showed up at the Mt. Carmel Gymnasium, namely Sean Ford and Brendan Leach. However, Brendan split early, called away on business, and Sean set up shop at his own digs, downstairs from us. Piling on, come the middle of the day, a billionaire summoned one half of us, the Secret Acres duo, to his billionaire’s lair. Biting the hand that feeds usually bites you in the ass, so for the majority of the day at CAB, Secret Acres was a total solo operation. A couple of years ago, in the days of the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, we boasted a record (for us) ten folks behind two tables at the Mt. Carmel gym. Our circumstances for CAB 2015 looked absolutely disastrous on paper. And yet…

Somehow, we sold more books than we did last year. An interesting note: in terms of the number of sales, we ended up slightly behind. The saving grace was that fewer people bought more books. Allowing for the tiny sample size of us, this is a trend for 2015. Do we blame, or rather, thank, income inequality? Surely, Milton Griepp will tell us.

 

PUBS

 

Despite one moment of panic, it turned out okay, going solo behind the table. Then again, CAB blessed us with the finest of neighbors in Koyama Press‘ Ed Kanerva (how we love you, Ed) and Annie herself. We bow to you, Annie! Meanwhile, Sean took away half our copies of Only Skin en route to a big day ditching all his copies of Shadow Hills. Brendan’s depature hurt sales of his Iron Bound not at all. We joked about making table while we packed up. Other than the lack of shopping time for us, CAB kinda killed it again. And yet…

We’re tempted to tell people to toughen up. Like last year’s CAB, some folks, who shall remain nameless because we’re not like that, panicked early. Come to Williamsburg and see the empty streets on a Sunday morning. Everyone knows the beautiful people sleep in. Enough with the hand-wringing already. CAB delivers a seriously inside crowd. People sold our books to each other. They’re so plugged in, in fact, that, for us, listening to them recommend the books on our table to each other remains the highlight of the show, maybe even our year. One woman quoted Rob Sergel’s Eschew to her friends. More than a few asked after Joe Lambert before foisting every last copy we had of I Will Bite You! onto their gangs. We dissappointed some folks who were asking if there was a new Curio Cabinet. We ran out of everything Corinne Mucha, largely because one customer kept brining others to the table all day. Allow us to retweet Sean:

 

Tweet

 

Forgive us, but we’re old and we skipped the party to have a fancy dinner with some out of towners from Canada who were in town for the show. We were, nonetheless, roped into the Beat‘s (forthcoming) podcast, mostly talking mini-comics storage. Kevin H himself expressed mini-comics storage concerns earlier, which gave us a leg up for Heidi. So, for you mini maniacs out there, we recommend nesting tables. Get some. Trust us. Surely, Heidi’s podcast offers every conceivable solution, too, but nesting tables.

 

Shelves

 

Anyhow, this is where we get off, show-wise, for the year. You can still follow Farel Dalrymple and MK Reed on their international Palefire tour. Farel will be deep in the Leeds at Thought Bubble UK (that’s in England) this weekend, lucky bastard. MK will be joining him in the City of Angels for Comic Arts Los Angeles on December 5th. Even before all that, catch Edie Fake and some Memory Palaces action at the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Imaginary Worlds this very Friday. We’ll keep you abrest of all this on our Twitter and tumblr and Facebook, and we’ll be back here again for a very special look ahead to 2016. We promise big news for that one.

Your Pals,

Barry and Leon

 

 

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