The Small Press Expo, “North America’s premiere independent cartooning and comic arts festival,” will be taking place this weekend on Saturday September 19th (11 am to 7 pm) and Sunday September 20th (Noon to 6 pm) at the Marriott Bethesda North Hotel and Conference Center in Bethesda, Maryland. A small contingency of Boston Comics Roundtablers will be in attendance, so if you are heading to Maryland for the weekend, do stop in and say hello!
Artists EJ Barnes (Table K6A), Eric Boeker (Table D5A), and B. Doug De Rocher (Table B2B) will all be displaying work in the exhibitors hall.
EJ Barnes is a professional artist and art teacher in Cambridge. She has published many of her own comics as well as contributing to such anthologies as Hellbound, Inbound, and Colonial Comics. She has also exhibited and sold her work across the country. You can find more about EJ Barnes’s work at www.ejbarnes.com.
Eric Boeker is the cartoonist behind the weekly, Gen-X, zombie sitcom comic “Commute of the Living Dead,” which can be seen online as part of Dig Boston’s Sunday Comics Project and at www.commuteofthelivingdead.com. He is also known to draw giant monsters and cute animals wearing dashing hats, when under extreme duress.
B. Doug De Rocher is from Cambridge, Massachusetts, now living in Somerville, MA. He creates comics using cut paper collage. De Rocher uses paint samples, found papers, and some higher end art paper to create his pages. He received a M.I.C.E. grant for his comic book Monarch Monkey and Other Stories and has been published in a number of anthologies including Show and Tell and Greatest of All Time. De Rocher has also shown art in the Doodle juried show at the Nave Gallery.
Also our very own Dan Mazur will be featured on a Saturday panel entitled Creative Collaboration in 
Comics Collectives taking place from 12:30 to 1:30 pm in the White Flint Auditorium. The SPX description of the panel is as follows: “Build a Comics Collective in your hometown! Local creators Andrew Cohen (DC Conspiracy), Monica Gallagher (Bmore Into Comics), Emily Gillis (Square City Comics) and guest Dan Mazur (Boston Comics Roundtable) discuss the fun and friendships to be found in a comics collective! Moderated by Matt Dembicki.”
Mazur wears many hats in the Boston comics community. He’s the creative force behind Ninth Art Press, the “unofficial publishing arm” of the BCR, co-director of M.I.C.E. (Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo), and an acclaimed author, cartoonist, and comics scholar. Most recently he is known for the compendium “Comics: A Global History.” His latest comic, “The Jernegan Solution,” can be purchased here!
It promises to be a fun weekend for all manner of independent comics creators and enthusiasts! For more information about SPX, please see their website: http://www.spxpo.com.
*Featured image is ©Gemma Correll and SPX.