Sunday - Mister Taru, a diabetic feline suffered a major seizure around 11:00 pm. Fortunately, medical attention came quickly and Mister Taru was stabilized.

"It was a frightening experiences," notes Gavin Schmitt, who was first on the scene. "I thought he was just having a bad dream at first. Then, as he began to claw around on his side, I thought he was chasing a small bug."

Like many who've recently purchased Media Molecule's Little Big Planet for the play station 3, Gavin was awake much later than normal Sunday night. Had he not, Taru's silent attack would have gone unnoticed until morning when, without any doubt, he would no longer be a living cat.

"I didn't even pause the game. I just ran to the kitchen cabinet and grabbed a bottle of honey," Schmitt recalls. "After four fingers of honey, Taru became alert and was able to eat some food."

As of this morning, Mister Taru remains in stable condition.

John Lucien and Cristina Montejo Keisha Lucien are two Washington DC based artists I met at SPX on Sunday.

John experiments with comics (pictured above), and created several on non traditional media like cardboard chips and discarded paper. One in particular was drawn on top of an economic report someone had hand written on graph paper.

John also had several boldly colored oil paintings for sale. The paintings featured a similar bird like creature, but each painting presented it in a different color. If I understood correctly, he generally works at live events, which could explain the repetition.

John's work is interesting because it presents each comic as unique piece, much like paintings, and not the "each print of a comic is the same" mentality we expect as comic consumers.

Cristina is a paper & book artist. Unfortunately, I was a zombie Sunday, and mistakenly thought John was reffering to Cristina as his wife and not an exhibiting artist, and subsequently did not get to see her work. Oddly, I'm fairly certainly I was sitting next to Cristina at the Japan Culture + Hyper Culture show at the Kennedy Center earlier this year.

Keisha Lucien (who IS John's wife) is a licensed makeup artist and editor for John's comic Sticky Rice. She attended SPX to let everyone know that all of the comic's stories are actually true to life.

(I'm glad everyone was amused by the Cristina error. Just goes to show I should not use blogs and profile pictures to reassess my own notes ;-) )

Check out John's blog here: http://logicalexplosion.blogspot.com/

Check out Cristina's blog here: http://www.cristinamontejo.com/

Maryland's Small Press Expo is a two day event, which presents the indie art and artists who are generally not seen in main stream retail.

Indie & self published comics are the dominant feature. However everything from oil paintings to hand stitched plush dolls was available at the expo. The variety is very exciting, if not overwhelming at times.

The expo moved to Saturday and Sunday this year (it was Friday and Saturday in previous years) and attendance seems remarkably improved. The hall was packed both days, with the only dip in traffic happening on Saturday evening when a raffle was held outside the main hall way.

All in all, it was an enjoyable and productive experience, which we look forward to digesting and posting about for the next couple of days. So check back tomorrow for more specifics & photos from the show.

whoot!

What: SPX brings together over 400 artists and publishers to meet their readers, booksellers, distributors, and each other. SPX is open to the public from 11am Saturday, October 4th and run through 7pm that evening. The celebration continues Sunday from noon to 6pm.

Robot Martini Comic artists Dan Greene (SideScroller), David Lovejoy (Astrobrot), and Gavin Schmitt (Floppies) will be exhibiting at the expo. They will be selling printed versions of their comics, in addition RM tshirts and all of RM's games.

Where: Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center

Admission: One day memberships: $8.00 Weekend memberships: $15.00

visit the SPX website for more details