Saturday afternoon I begged off covering the Maryland-Rutgers football game (good choice!) primarily because of a lot of schoolwork, but Sara and I took a break for a few hours and ventured to Bethesda and the Small Press Expo.
For those of you who have never heard of SPX - and that's probably most people, since I'm fairly plugged in to that world and I didn't know about it until recently - I'll quote from their website: "In its fourteenth year SPX now serves as the preeminent showcase for the exhibition of independent comic books and the discovery of new creative talent. SPX will bring together over 400 artists and publishers to meet their readers, booksellers, distributors, and each other."
Coming in to the weekend I was most looking forward to meeting the artists of a few of my favorites webcomics: Diesel Sweeties, Scary Go Round (now Bad Machinery), Questionable Content, Goats, and Hark! A Vagrant.
It was fantastic to meet all of them, and I got some great sketches, but one of the highlights was meeting an artist I have heard of but did not know would be at SPX: Rob Ullman.
Ullman is a multi-talented artist who currently has a strip, Traffic & Weather, at Richmond Magazine and has appeared in lots of other places in print and online. I know him through what can be termed a fascination with him at Uni Watch Blog, a paean to all things related to sports uniforms. Paul Lukas, the blog's proprietor, absolutely loves another aspect of Ullman's oeuvre: his pin-up illustrations of women wearing (and only wearing) lovingly-rendered jerseys.
It's quite possible Ullman was the only exhibitor at SPX to have anything remotely related to sports at his Atom-Bomb Bikini table, but he did, and hooray for that. He had quite a few collection of his Teeny Bikini pin-up collections (one of which, with the cover on the left, I bought) in addition to other pin-ups and illustrations he did while an illustrator for Dan Savage's Savage Love column.
He also had a fantastic short collection of illustrated stories from the Original Six era, Old-Time Hockey Tales!. Dollar for dollar it was the best $2 I spent that day. Ullman's tales were ones I know well - Bill Barilko, Terry Sawchuk, the Rocket Richard riots - but the treatment and obvious love of the artist for the subject matter made it a great little text.
Though this was my first SPX I've been to a few San Diego Comic-Con's and other similar conventions, and it's a pretty true characterization to say every actual artist sitting behind a booth is usually thrilled to talk with a fan or prospective fan, and Ullman was no exception. We talked for maybe 5 minutes about hockey, Uni Watch Blog, and other stuff.
Ulmman is a true hockey fan, which was great to hear. He is also a Pittsburgh Penguins fan, which is nice for him but not so good otherwise. He did refrain from any gloating after I mentioned my Capitals fandom, and actually gave me some words of sympathy. He also proffered a couple of stickers with the image at the top of this post, a gorgeous dark-haired woman in an old-school Caps uniform, which he said he made as a peace offering for any Caps fans he might meet (he'll also be at the Baltimore Comic-Con in two weeks, where I imagine he'll be handing out a few more of those).
All in all it was a great afternoon, and wonderful to meet Ullman in addition to the other writers, artists, and publishers at SPX. Maybe I'll commission a pin-up some time...Sara in a Stanley Cup, maybe?
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