SPACE maintains a hands-on approach to comics

Certain aspects of the long-running Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo (SPACE) have changed over the 25-plus years the comics fair has been in existence, particularly the diversity of exhibitors, who were largely white and male in the early days and now reflect a much larger cross-section of society.

“Originally it was all us guys, and then couples started showing up,” said founder Bob Corby, who staged the first SPACE in 2000 when he noticed comics artists getting squeezed out of Mid-Ohio Con as the convention gave over more real estate to professional wrestlers, actors, and the like. “And then the web-comics people showed up, and the LGBT community. And it just kept evolving.”

One thing that has remained consistent, however, is a deep reverence among these exhibitors for the physical form of comics.

“When the internet came along and people started making web comics and things of that nature, they kept saying, ‘Oh, print is dead,’” said Corby, who will be on site when SPACE returns to the Ohio Expo Center on Saturday and Sunday, April 26 and 27. (A full roster of exhibitors can be viewed here.) “And what we’ve seen even more of in the last few years, I think, is people looking more for tactile things, and a book that’s been put together by hand. … I’m a pretty old guy, and I used to think when us old guys died off, that would be the end of it. But when you go to SPACE, you see six tables of CCAD students all bringing print copies of their comics. It just seems like people still enjoy holding a book.”

Corby said this idea has gained even more traction among creators in response to the increased prevalence of artificial intelligence, with artists and authors rightly lamenting the way different AI models have been trained on their work, which is stolen and incorporated absent credit or compensation. In March, OpenAI released an image generator capable of creating Studio Ghibli-style animations, for example, raising legal questions and ethical concerns related to copyright law, among other issues. (In a resurfaced video filmed in 2016, Studio Ghibli cofounder Hayao Miyazaki described AI-generated art as an “insult to life itself.”)

A couple of years back, Corby joined with other artists to create a mini comic for SPACE in response to this AI-driven artistic misappropriation, which the crew designed and printed without the aid of computers as a means of keeping the material wholly inaccessible to online training models. 

“With that first one, it was completely mechanical, and I put it together the same way I did it making comics back in the ’80s,’” said Corby, who utilized Wite-Out tape, rubber cement, and copy machines in assembling the first book before loosening restrictions on the artists for later mini comics, including a new one that will debut this year at SPACE. “Now, we can use computers, but it can’t be connected to the internet when we’re working, so nothing goes out.”

Corby initially launched SPACE with the aim of keeping attention on comics creators, and this has remained his focus for the more than two decades that have passed since. 

“That’s really my driving force in keeping it going, that these people have a place to show their work,” said Corby, who continues to release his own books via Back Porch Comics, an imprint named for the place where he used to sit and draw at his mother’s house and reflective of the sense of wonder for the form he’s preserved from childhood. “I still remember when I was 6 and I used to borrow comics from my cousin, who was a couple years older than me and a big collector, mainly D.C. Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes. And one day we were talking, and he said, ‘You know, someone actually drew that.’ And I was astounded that somebody could do that. And from that day on, I was just kind of amazed, and I had to read them. I had to do it.”