STAPLE! 2009 report

[Paul Czege]

STAPLE!, The Independent Media Expo, was Saturday, March 7th, at the Monarch Event Center in Austin, Texas, from 10:00 to 7:00.

The whole damn thing, from pre-party Friday night through the show, and the after party on Saturday night still has my head spinning more than two weeks later.

Going into it I was thinking the indie RPG community could learn a lot from the way the indie comics community does its shows, the way comics guys maintain their creative vitality by forming up into projects, splintering off into side projects, and doing special event projects, the way they recognize that a creative identity is about both independence *and* finding shared purposes, and the way their shows and their fans support this. And I wasn't wrong.

Friday (the pre-party)

The pre-party was Friday night at

Austin Books and Comics. Picture the cleanest and best stocked comics shop you can imagine: traditional titles, manga, and small press, with a heavy emphasis on graphic novels and collections, and a surprisingly reduced emphasis on McFarlanes and toys and collectibles. Realize that it has the soul of a comic store, not of a geekly knick-knack store that sells comics. Now imagine it having more floor space and being twice as well stocked (and put in a life size Hulk statue) and you're still probably not doing it justice.

It's populated with small groups of folks mingling and chatting. No name badges. And Danielle and I don't know anyone.

We browse a bit. Then I ask a guy behind the register to point me at Chris Nicholas, the guy who created Staple!, and whom I've emailed with a bit, and he does, but Chris is in a heated conversation. So we browse a bit more and end up in a conversation with an aspiring filmmaker dude.

Well, would you believe that despite a lack of name badges I got discovered by a fan of My Life with Master? (I took this as a very good omen.) I was in the process of handing my business card to the filmmaker that Danielle and I were talking to and another guy came up and asked if I was Paul Czege. We had a cool conversation. (He wouldn't be at the show, however, as it conflicted with him running a game.)

And I did briefly get to meet and shake hands with Chris Nicholas.

Lessons learned: name badges!
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Saturday (the show)

Danielle and I did a shared Half Meme Press and Cream Alien Games table. The table cost $75. Half tables cost $40.

At the show itself we sold 8 copies of

My Life with Master at $17 each, 5 copies of Bacchanal at $4 each, and 4 copies of Danielle's Kagematsu ashcan, which she offered at a "Show Special" price of $6. I think that's fantastic for a one day show with a largely comics focus.

Also, I'd been asked to participate in a panel at the show, "Self-Gratification: The Joys of Independence in Multiple Mediums," by local Austin podcaster Mercedes Martinez. It was a blast, and I think, also strongly indicative of Staple's interest in being more than an indie comics show. The other panelists were Will Terrell, My Life with Master's awesome cover artist, and the indie comics source of positive energy on the order of Luke Crane, Zachary Kent of the Dial-a-Stranger podcast, and Leo McGovern, publisher of New Orleans's Antigravity Magazine and author of the webcomic Firesquito.

The panel was recorded. Expect some linkage from me here when it's available for download.

In my head:

Danielle and I had low sales expectations. She wanted to sell one copy of Kagematsu. I wanted to sell one copy of Bacchanal and one set of Bacchanal dice. Jeff Bent, who did the artwork for Grey Ranks, is an Austin native. He's done STAPLE before and had written to me that he's had "much more success selling my wares at Staple than I have at two other big indie conventions, APE and SPX" and that folks who come to STAPLE "seem more willing to take a chance on new things".

And I think he was totally right; Staple! attendees are a breed apart from the attendees at other indie comics shows:

Roleplaying games face two big barriers at a comics show, I think:



• A much higher necessary investment of time and creativity than comics. You can read a comic in ten minutes, and you're done. RPGs take time, social effort, and creativity to fully appreciate.
• A higher price point than what the comics fan is expecting. Will Terrell can create a comic he sells for $3 in less than a day, in less than eight hours. If you want an RPG to be consistently playable and fun you put a lot more time into it than that. But attendees are expecting to buy stuff priced between $1 and $5.

But still, my one day at Staple! this year was more successful sales-wise than any single Gen Con day of the past two years. It's clear to me from Staple! this year that there's a yet larger audience for the kinds of creative tools I make, and that the indie community has a very inward-looking, selling to each other, circle of musk-oxen dynamic that's a huge millstone around our necks.

Also, something I didn't see at Staple! that surprised me was lots of trading. At other comics shows there seems to be more of a culture of trading, at the expense of a culture of creator-exhibitors buying from each other. But at Staple! everyone was buying from each other. At other shows I've seen attendees with comics they've slapped together going from table to table trading for books with a much higher unit cost of manufacturing than what they were offering. And if not fully appreciated, this always seemed like a culturally accepted form of participation. I've seen counter-offers, but I've never seen an exhibitor at a show outright decline a proposed trade. But I didn't see any of this at Staple! (Another indication that Staple! is different.)

Jeff Bent is the coolest, mellowest creative dude you'll ever meet. His little Sculpey monster sculptures are way cool. I want to game with Jeff.

Dennis Sustare was at the show. He seemed to enjoy having discovered me selling games at a comics show. And he seemed charmed by My Life with Master.

I picked up Robert Stickmanz' novel Prelude to a Change of Mind, and his Nod's Way dice oracle. My early impression of the book: "What if Carlos Castaneda were writing about dwarves and elves?"

I love some of the cultural institutions of the indie comics shows. One of them is that most indie comics creators will do art commissions at the show. So you get folks going from table to table with sketchbooks commissioning artists to do pieces in them. Often the guy with the sketchbook has an obsession with some specific subject matter. Will Terrell's first commission of the day was to draw Raven, from the Teen Titans. The fan had some comics for use as references by artists who didn't know Raven. Later I saw Will doing a drawing of Medusa. He said the most he'd ever done at a show was eight commissions.

There's something really important about the interactions between attendees and exhibitors that I haven't quite wrapped my head around. What exactly is a guy commissioning drawings of Raven a fan of? I can't really see that he's a fan of Will. I'm thinking a lot of folks who come to comics shows are rather hooked on connecting with creators, and sketchbook commissions is one way it's done.

I got a bump in sales after the panel discussion, selling maybe three or four copies in the hour or so after it wrapped up, presumably to folks who'd seen the panel, or who'd talked to someone who had. I think these sales were a different kind of interaction between me and them. I think these folks were up to something else; I think they'd had a whiff of something they hadn't seen before, and a sense that it was creatively empowering. They had a different kind of interest than the guys with sketchbooks. Understanding this better will be important to getting storytelling and narrativist roleplaying games out into less gamer venues.

Also, holy shit, to have your own table and control the presentation and placement of your stuff is so. damn. great. We had a fabulous ($27) piece of black fabric for a table cloth. Danielle had a great piece of Japanese cloth as a cross-wise table runner under her Kagematsu books. I had polycarbonite wine glasses set up with Bacchanal dice, and could do quick "here's how the dice drive your storytelling" demos. My advice to Gen Con still stands.
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Saturday (the after-party)

The Staple! after-party was at Red 7, a club in downtown Austin. There are several streets in Austin that are closed to vehicles at night. They're all lined with clubs, and bars, a few souvenir shops, and then some vendors peddling food. You can hear the music loud in the streets from the open doors and walled yards of the clubs. And there are people everywhere, on the sidewalks and in the streets, almost entirely college kids. It was hopping. Red 7 was right on the edge of this. The Staple! event was in an open air walled yard at the back of the club. There was a DJ at first, and then a nerdcore performance by a group named Terp2it, who were led by an energetic Jesus looking dude in monk's robes wearing a big wrestling trophy belt, and whose rhymes were largely about holding on to your dick.

In front of the stage they had three 4' x 8' pieces of plywood, set up like giant easels. They roped various comic artists to come up and tape down paper or cardboard or whatever and work standing up in front of the crowd. Paint, draw. And then the pieces were priced and sold to benefit a local co-op radio station.

Some photos

here at show guest-of-honor Stan Sakai's LiveJournal.

It was fun, and fascinating. So much more culturally outwardly focused than the indie RPG community ever is. Some of these guys would go up with a swagger and claim their piece of posterboard and markers or whatever. Some guys were sheepish. A drawing by Chris Onstad, one of the show's guests of honor was priced at $300. I have no idea how much the one by Stan Sakai sold for.

I think we need to figure out how to do shit like this, to get out of our inward focus.
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Questions? Thoughts?

Paul

[Ben Lehman]

Sounds like a pretty fantastic experience. I think there's a lot of interesting directions to go in, not sure exactly where yet. There's something to do with the commissions and optional rules. I would totally write a new rule in someone's game-book in some sort of commissioning environment.

I hope I can make it next year. I should have some cheap stuff to sell that might appeal to the minicomics crowd as well as the bigger ticket items.

yrs--
--Ben

[ejh]

It was fun, and fascinating. So much more culturally outwardly focused than the indie RPG community ever is. Some of these guys would go up with a swagger and claim their piece of posterboard and markers or whatever. Some guys were sheepish. A drawing by Chris Onstad, one of the show's guests of honor was priced at $300. I have no idea how much the one by Stan Sakai sold for.

I think we need to figure out how to do shit like this, to get out of our inward focus.

Can you spell it out a little more for us what was "culturally outwardly focused" there?  Specific things that were done, or just an attitude?  If the latter how was it expressed?  (If what you're talking about is what you've already described, dumb it down and spell it out -- how did the parties, etc, constitute an outward focus?)

Thanks for the report.  Staples just went on my "places I want to be someday" list.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ed,

Specific details? I would point to the following:

• The event was integrated with and took some of its energy from other cultural artforms (turntablism by DJs, and live nerdcore)
• The venue was open to, and attended by non-members of the indie comics community
• The event prominently featured a presentation of a form of the community's cultural artforms that could be appreciated by non-members of the community
• The event fed the product of the evening to an external cultural concern (the funding of the co-op radio station)

In short, the event demonstrated appreciation for and connection to other cultural artforms, demonstrated awareness of the accessibility of its own cultural artforms to non-insiders, cultivated the interest of non-insiders in a non self-conscious way, and expressed interest in cultural concerns.

Paul

[ModusVivendi]

It takes Will Terrell more than 1 day to make one of those comics. I know I have watched him. He introduced me and my wife through his Lubbock Sketchclub.

[Paul Czege]

Hey man,

Will did the cover art for My Life with Master for me back in 2003, banging out a series of revisions and refinements one after another over the course of three or four nights in response to my feedback. So when he told me the story of the Monsters comic he was selling at STAPLE, that he'd started a 24 hour comic, realized more than 12 hours into it that he didn't want to finish it, and used the remaining time to start and complete Monsters, I had no problem believing it was true.

You're in El Sketcho Clubbo? Do you have any of your stuff online?

Paul

[ModusVivendi]

lucaspuryear.deviantart.com


THAT comic. I remember that. He had some awesome detail going then switched at the 1/2 way point. Now I have "Bat Bottom Girls" running through my head. I need to find my 24hr comic cause it is part of my game system I am working on.