2dc @ Rain Taxi's Twin Cities Book Festival

Us 2d Cloud folk were expecting to be pulling double duty this upcoming weekend, having part of the camp over at Fallcon and the rest at Rain Taxi's Twin Cities Book Festival. When we were asked by one of our GMN contributors, Anna Bongiovanni, if she could share our table this year, we realized we hadn't had any formal communication with the MCBA people for a while, so Raighne took it upon himself to confirm our table. We were told that unfortunately they couldn't accommodate as many creators this year due to the smaller size of the show, meaning that we would have to wait until Springcon to peddle our wares in the ghost-town that is the State Fair Grounds. Looking at the creator list for Fallcon this year, it looks like people from the Big Time Attic/Cartoonist Conspiracy clans have spots as well as some of our GMN contributors, such as Toby Jones, Madeline Queripel and Sean Lynch. The rest of the non-superhero/genre comics scene seems to be setting up shop at the Rain Taxi show (as of now I believe that in addition to us will be Tom K., Will Dinski, Tim Sievert and probably a few other people I'm [Justin] not aware of). 


Raighne and I were speculating as to why so many of the indie cartoonists who have tabled at both MCBA events in years past did not have a table this year, and the first reason that popped into our heads was the existence of MIX. Maybe the MCBA feels that since there's a big show devoted to the local indie comics scene, they need to give the superhero/genre comics creators and fans a little more precedence when it comes to a show with limited space. At first I was a little offended that we weren't invited to Fallcon, but the more I think about it, I think it's really just an indication that the comics scene in Minnesota as a whole has grown to the point that there are enough cartoonists and fans to populate two shows simultaneously, which ultimately is just a testament to the health of the medium.


With that said, we are more than happy to be a part of the Rain Taxi show.Their continued support of comics, both locally and nationally, is also encouraging in terms of the increasing legitimacy of comics to the larger reading public. Dealing with the persistence of a sort of inferiority complex that still crops up in a lot of discussions regarding comics as they relate to casual readers can get a little tiresome, but nevertheless we are glad that our work is considered to have enough merit to be included. There will be a panel at the show, Minnesota Comics, that I believe will highlight the current strength of the local comics scene and will help demonstrate what I mentioned above about the diversity and size of the comics community currently in Minnesota. Not to foster any rivalry between the two shows, but we'll be at the one with free admission, which means more dollars to drop on comics! Hope to see you there.