My piece on the sustainability of Artist Alley got a lot of comments, and brought up a lot of additional points. Most of the comments on social media were along the lines of “Yeah, it’s getting too expensive to table,” which is no surprise but is a bummer. A few more points that I should have mentioned or that came to me later follow:
- I definitely should have mentioned HeroesCon, which has a tremendous guest list – it’s not an “Artist Alley” exactly but it is one of the best places to meet artists. It’s also kept affordable for artists because the con hosts a huge art auction, the proceeds of which defray costs of hotel and travel for guests. I haven’t been since before the pandemic, sadly, but from all reports, it’s still the same great show.
- Baltimore Comic Con is another great show for artists that stays focused on comics, and it’s another great place to see creators. As I mentioned several times during my trip there in September, it’s just right: the right size, the right number of guests, the right spot in the city. It also has a very large Artist Alley, featuring artists from veterans to newcomers, but more of the latter.
- I got some push back on saying that NYCC has the best Artist Alley, but no other show brings in so many artists from around the world. You won’t see European and South American artists like Adi Granov, Esad Ribic, Bilquis Evely, Werther Dell’Edera and so on at any other con, at least not all at once. SDCC has a much smaller list of international artists since the pandemic, due to the exorbitant cost of flying there (it’s much cheaper and more accessible to fly to NYC from just about anywhere.) And of course, many foreign artists just don’t want to come to the United States these days.
- The last time I went (February 2020) C2E2 had a really good artist alley, at least from an attendee’s perspective. Just below the “super shows” are the “big cons” like MegaCon, ECCC, Planet Comicon, Fan Expo Canada and WonderCon, but setting up and making table at a big show is still a major undertaking.
- Most fans at shows would rather get their books signed by creators in Artist Alley than at a publisher’s booth. The lines are usually shorter and the interaction is often less stressed, at least for big names. Aside from the huge costs of setting up at shows, I feel this is one of the reasons why comics publishers don’t really set up at cons outside of NYCC and SDCC. They just don’t sell enough books.
- Another HUGE aspect of the eCONomy is the rise of art reps/con reps like Comic Sketch Arts, Essential Sequential,Felix Comic Artand so on, but a thorough examination of this element would take a much longer and better researched article. David Harper tackled it a few years ago and….holy cow that was in 2015! Suffice to say that although the rise of art reps is controversial to many, having a class of “middlemen” allows creators to spend more time creating and less time fretting about the time consuming task of planning a convention appearance (ask me how I know). For the kind of established and busy names who these agents handle, that has to be a big time saver.
- That said, these reps take up more and more space at artist alley, squeezing out more and more smaller creators.
- As a side note, there was a recent kerfuffle between Comic Sketch Art and the Galaxy Con family of shows, that briefly saw CSA pulling out of the shows, as posted by Timothy Zahn on FB. The official story is that, well, it was a kerfuffle, with a dispute about how a CSA creator was being treated then mishandled by someone at Galaxy Con who is no longer working there. I heard a slightly different version privately from a third party, but it seems everything got smoothed over quickly, and Galaxy Con and CSA are working together again. While the details of the issue may never become public it does highlight the high stakes presence of art reps at mid-level shows. I do think it is time for a deep dive on this again. David?
- I would also refer people to my April piece on BICS (Brooklyn Indie Comics Showcase), which I called“a sort of Venn diagram of a comic con, zine fest and craft fair, with…a bit of a flea market vibe to it.” With 400 tables from many unknowns, and low sales for established creators, this seems to fit into the “Comiket” model a bit. As I mentioned then, this kind of wide open show is a good place for people to learn and grow.
- All of the above applies to traditional comic cons like the ones I’ve mentioned. Anime shows and “comic art fests” like MoCCA, SPX, TCAF and so on both have completely different economies.
- And then there are library and book shows! Like I keep saying, look what we did with $2 billion!
There was a lot of chatter yesterday about artist alley on social media, but Chris Schweizer and a long, interesting posting on BlueSkythat I think is worth preserving here. Schweizer is the kind of artist you think of when you think Artist Alley – someone with a solid body of work, a friendly presence, and new projects to promote – so I think his thoughts are quite germane. I’ve cleaned it up a bit for clarity.
One of the reasons that I, and so many others, so esteem HeroesCon, is that they curate and comp tables for a LOT of artists, including “new” artists. My first “real” table was at Heroes twenty years ago this upcoming summer. I had a book in the works, but had only done minis and anthologies at that point. I still have readers (many of whom have become friends) who I met tabling at that first show. A show that size is not one whose table I’d’ve been able to afford at that point.
There’s definitely a “shows are a business” with a lot of conventions, and sustainability absolutely matters. But, as mentioned in the article, what GENERALLY sells isn’t books, but prints and other ephemera (my hands-down bestseller is a set of Appalachian Folk Monster cards). And when shows cost a pretty penny, artists, especially young artists, are financially and logistically incentivized to spend their attention on that ephemera.
I make ephemera for fun (and have generally turned what I do for fun into regular Patreon offerings), and if I do a couple of new prints a year then it is a big year. Comics are and continue to be my main artistic output, but at shows? You wouldn’t know it!
After a disastrous book tour more than a decade ago when I received books late, and the wrong ones, I washed my hands of trying to get copies of my own books from publishers. I’ll sell my comps, and that’s it. It’s not worth it to have to pay 50% of the cover price and shipping. And since I’m not trying to grow a readership at shows – if book publishers want you to, via direct sales and gladhanding, they don’t make it easy – I only do the shows where I know I’m making money. And those shows tend to lend themselves to prints and ephemera (I bring my art books, and those sell well enough, but hardly match what I make on my Santas or my Appalachian folklore stuff).
Next year, I’ll be changing my approach – aside from something like ALA, which is important for different reasons, I want to make sure I don’t go in the hole, but growing a readership for Outlaw’s Apprentice is something I both want to do AND have the agency to do, having my own stock; I’ll do shows where I don’t necessarily make bill-paying money in order to get copies into peoples’ hands. BUT this means that a lot of mid-size shows are out; if they’re not giving me a table but charging a few hundred bucks for one, the math doesn’t add up.
Since my prices are pretty low (important to me, having been poor at various times) I have to do a lot of sales, and quantity of offerings becomes necessary. Which puts me back into the ephemera territory.
Don’t get me wrong – I love making the ephemera, and sharing it! The Christmas stuff, the paper figures, the mountain monsters – it’s still storytelling, it’s still stuff with which I have a deep emotional connection. But it ain’t comics!
Let’s say a mid-size show (somewhere in the neighborhood of 40K attendees), and let’s say the table costs $350. If you were pushing a $20 book that you get from the publisher for 10, you have to sell 35 copies just to make the table back. That’s a lot of copies for a book people don’t know!
You only have to sell 18 prints at $20 to make back table because they only cost you $2 each to print. 18 is not a lot for a print! The math favors prints, stickers, doohickies. Were costs less, would we see more comics/books? Maybe!
A wholly-free-and-curation model built whose costs are entirely on attendee tickets isn’t a perfect answer; it encourages a talent pool of exclusively established artists whose presence encourages attendance. Prioritize new folks, and established folks whose popularity may be waning get shuffled off and make an already trying time in a career more precarious. I have no idea what an ideal setup might look like, or if there even is one – I love that different shows have very different approaches.
Anyway, I love Heroescon, and its auction, which helps to make it to where they CAN comp tables to folks who may not yet be an audience draw but who show promise. Giving them a chance to reach and grow an audience is so important!
Schweizer brings up a very important point: prints are much more profitable to sell than trades or comics. That’s why you see so many of them, and I’ve definitely bought a few even though I have nowhere to put them, because they are so cool looking. After investigating all of this, I have a lot more understanding of the elaborate gift shops that so many booths in artist alleys everywhere have become.
Anyway, this is a BRIEF look at the state of artist alley, truly one of the foundational parts of the comic con experience. And yes, it’s all tied in with the shrinkage of con amenities, and the expansion of con exclusives. It’s all one giant whirling ball of economics. And now my head hurts, so I will go read some comics.
All photos from various shows I attended this year. God, I go to a lot of shows.
