Small Press Expo '98

In September 1998 I attended the fifth annual Small Press Expo here in Montgomery County, Maryland, but I didn't get around to writing this report until now. Some of it is going to sound familiar, since I'm using the '97 report as a template, and things weren't all that different. Updates in this color are from 2015. I don't seem to have mentioned here that if you click on a cover image, you should get a look at a much larger, clearer image.

The SPX moved back from Silver Spring to Bethesda, at the same hotel as the third but not the grouchy one where the first two were held. I believe the number of exhibitors was up; I don't know about attendance, but it wasn't bad.

The purpose of the SPX is to give readers (and writers and artists and publishers) a chance to see what cool stuff is out there that they hadn't seen elsewhere. Here's what I found.

That's it for new stuff, but there are also some

Returning Favorites:

You may notice that most of these reviews are positive. I didn't buy anything unless I was pretty sure I was going to like it. I did have negative things to say about a couple I got free, but that's the risk a creator takes when using that particular promotional method.

In general, though, the stuff above is what I considered the best. Check it out.

Oh, one final note -- each year the SPX publishes its own comic, compiling work by several of the exhibitors. For 1998 it wasn't ready in time. I did eventually buy and read it, a few weeks after the show -- but I didn't think much of it, so I don't have anything to say about it here beyond admitting it was a disappointment, not at all up to the level of the '97 edition.

There's a lot of nifty stuff being done in comics these days. Eventually I want to put up a few pages about it. For now, though, I'll just direct you to one link for now, as a starting point.

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For those who somehow stumbled in here by accident -- hi! I'm Lawrence Watt-Evans. I'm the author of more than three dozen novels and over a hundred short stories, as well as innumerable articles, comic scripts, poems, and other miscellany. This is my personal website, the Misenchanted Page; the name is a reference to my bestselling novel The Misenchanted Sword.

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