I’ve enjoyed going to Small Press Expo every year since I discovered it existed at all, but this is the first time I’ve gotten around to writing a review of it. I just buy too many awesome things to keep track of and then wait too long to read them all. So this year, I’m just going to review the ones I’ve finished.

OTP Book One
Written and Illustrated by Maki Naro
published by: Box Plot Comic

This is an educational pre-historical romance between a thrinaxodon and a broomistega and it is adorable! Oh my heart! I was lying on the floor cooing at this book as I read it. It’s more of a BroTP in my opinion, but that just makes it even better! Best friendship is the best.

I also find is darkly reassuring to hear about the Great Dying that involved ocean acidification wiping out nearly all sea life and the only known mass extinction of insects. Because the world continued on and life evolved new and different animals.

Zenith
Written and Illustrated by Iasmin Omar Ata

This is described as “a post-apocalyptic adventure about the phases of the moon, islamic futures, and asserting your identity” but I read as more of a fantasy-world look at being bi-racial. In some ways it reminded me of that aspect from InuYasha, but with more detailed look at growing up among animals deities as a half-human.

Also, I love that apparently The Six Pleasures of Medieval Islam were drink, clothing, intercourse, scent, sound and food, with food being the greatest of them all. That seems accurate to me.

A Courtesan’s Tale
Written by: Lynn Novella
Published by: Pretty Dark Tales

First of all, this is a tiny book, with measurements of about 1.5” x 3” x 0.5” and is hand bound. Adorable! And Lynn Novella was at SPX creating more of these books as she sat at her stall. She’s also adorable. We agreed that clearly people needed books sized appropriately to be able to carry anywhere and everywhere, so you could always have a book on you at any given time.

It’s not a graphic novel, just text, but the story is awesome and adorable and hilarious in the way it interacts with the stereotypical fairytale by adding practical characters who aren’t putting up with any of this nonsense. And if you’re in a terribly dangerous situation… get out while the getting’s good.

Can These Cookies Stop Islamophobia?
Written and Illustrated by Marguerite Dabaie

I really wanted to buy this one, but the author was away from her stall when I first saw it and didn’t return in the time it took me to read it. By the time I returned, she’d left early.

But since I’d wound up reading the whole thing while standing there, I’m going to review it here, because it’s sweet and socially aware. Rather than a standard graphic novel, it’s more like an illustrated treatise, a combination of love story to the middle-eastern cookies ma’amoul and a discussion of how blindly fearful people in the west have gotten about a whole culture and language.

PREVIOUS YEARS:

I haven’t read the rest of my acquisitions from this year, so I’ll need to post on them individually as I get to them. But I also want to take a moment to go back to a couple of my all-time favorite acquisitions from years past:

The Rabbit Hero
Written and Illustrated by Tony Brandl

This doesn’t really have a plot, per se, just character who get their only summaries. The titular rabbit hero is the first to be introduced: “Once, not so long ago, there lived among us, a Rabbit Hero. He was strong, and very brave, of course, but mostly, he could jump.”

It’s a small book that has a fun binding and while there’s no plot, the character summaries and illustrations (with the rabbit hero either present or just out of frame with only his plaid scarf visible) provide such potential for interaction that it’s inspiring. The reader is left to imagine how the story goes.

Kingdom of Wenramen
Illustrated by Wendy Pham
published by Clandestine Republic

This is another book without plot or even words this time, just a series of images that create a whole world of magic and spirits and animals and food. The central theme is definitely food, ramen in particular.

They’re just beautiful illustrations that really supports the classic idiom “a picture is worth a thousand words” because there’s so much world building going on in these pictures as well as successfully conveying a sense memory of eating really good ramen. I bought this book before I’d ever actually had any restaurant ramen, and really enjoyed it then, but now that I know what good ramen tastes like, ooh, this is so good, but also makes me hungry.

Rebecca and I look forward to the Small Press Expo all year, where independently published artists and writers sell their comic books and graphic novels. Each year, we assure each other that we are going to post a review on the blog about all of our excellent purchases, but each year, we get home exhausted, and stretch the reading out over several months, and never quite get around to putting together a cohesive review. But this year will be different!

…Okay, so SPX was a few weeks months ago, but we’ve still got a couple of great finds to share with you!

The Shadow Hero

By Gene Luen Yang (author) and Sonny Liew (artist)

I picked up this graphic novel almost immediately upon entering the floor, and it turned out to be my favorite purchase. The author and artist are both Asian Americans, who had discovered a very short run of what was likely the first Asian American superhero, the Green Turtle. They elaborate more on the source material in the back of the book, but the short version is that it was written by a Chinese American author during World War II, showing allied China defending American against Japanese agents. The Green Turtle himself is kept very mysterious in the original books, and is never given any sort of backstory, which Yang and Liew decide to correct in their update.

The update works brilliantly! The plot is very clever, characters are all so wonderful, and the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny. I was giggling through the whole thing, much to Rebecca’s amusement and exasperation. (When she read it, she laughed, too, but also said that it might hit her second-hand-embarrassment squick a bit much for her to fully enjoy.)

Innsmouth

By Megan James

Innsmouth was a close second, though only the first three issues were available (the fourth one has come out in the time it took me to actually post this review), of what will hopefully be a long-running series. (The only drawback to the independent publishing is, who knows how long there will be funding for any given project. If only I were a millionaire!)

It takes place in the fictional town of Innsmouth, MA, made famous by Lovecraft in his stories. In this narrative, Innsmouth is a fairly normal New England town, with a small university, and a religious cult that worships Cthulhu, which pretty much everyone tries to tolerate by ignoring.

You can read the first issue online, introducing Randolph Higgle, who is a junior acolyte of the cult, basically doing door-to-door evangelizing, until he is forced into more responsibility than he can handle and he goes to outside help for advice. The author comments that she always loved the Lovecraft stories, while pretty much despising the man himself, so it is her ambition to capture as much of a the gloomy fun as possible without any of the racism and other bigotry.