APE—the Alternative Press Expo—moves to San Jose next year, and it will be held in the San Jose Convention Center, which already hosts the more mainstream Big Wow Comics Fest in April. APE will stay in its fall dates, in this case October 3-4. The dates, and more plans for the show, were revealed in a wide ranging interview with show runner Dan Vado conducted by Deb Aoki for Publishers Weekly. Although indie CAFs haven’t exactly thrived in traditional convention centers—Stumptown in Portland springs to mind—Vado has big plans to tie the comic fest in more with other local San Jose cultural events:
Undeterred, Vado is moving forward with his plans to make APE 2015 a uniquely San Jose show. APE’s new home, the San Jose Convention Center South Hall is adjacent to galleries, restaurants, and music venues, including The Art Boutiki, a gallery/comics shop/live-music venue owned and operated by Vado. With this in mind, Vado is hoping to make APE a bigger part of the San Jose art, music and culture scene.
“It’s been a goal of mine to make APE into a multi-venue event, with additional events, and programming in the nearby SoFa district in downtown San Jose, within a few blocks from the show. If we get participation from the nearby galleries, I think it’ll be an exciting opportunity to give this show a more European flavor,” said Vado.
Besides having numerous places to eat, shop, and socialize, Downtown San Jose is also home to San Jose State University, a large public library, and is easily accessible by the South Bay light rail system. “What makes Downtown San Jose unique is its immediacy and intimacy,” raved Vado. APE 2015 will be held on the weekend after First Friday, the monthly event that attracts art lovers to downtown San Jose. “I think people will be surprised at how big the art scene is in San Jose,” he said.
Aoki also reports on tentative steps towards starting some kind of new CAF in SF, as discussed at a town hall meeting several weeks ago.
There’s been a bunch of scuttlebutt going on around APE, the Alternative Press Expo now unfolding in San Francisco, and it is being announced today that CCI, which runs APE, the San Diego Comic-Con and WonderCon is returning ownership of the show to founder Dan Vado starting next year. Vado founded the show in his home base of San Jose in 1994 as part of the then-burgeoning scene of indie comics events that included the Small Press Expo in Bethesda and SPACE in Columbus. CCI took it over in 1995, eventually moving it to San Francisco. Vado has been mostly uninvolved with the show in recent years, while expanding SLG, his comics company, to a storefront and event space. And of course, CAFs have blown up everywhere, with TCAF, SPX, MoCCA, CAB, MeCAF, Thought Bubble, Short Run and many more showcasing the indie comics side of today’s comics world.
The Beat had a chance to speak briefly with Vado about taking the show back. He plans to move the event out of San Francisco and back to San Jose, and move it away from a date that conflicts with New York Comic Con. While he doesn’t have a venue secured yet, “My first choice is to work something out with the MLK Library here and run it in the same style as TCAF,” he told The Beat. “Mainly, free admission, lower table costs, trying to keep it as open as possible for new people.” Unlike TCAF, he doesn’t expect to run it on the curated model. However, like TCAF and MoCCA, he sees APE as expanding to a festival-like event with several venues and possibly a music festival attached.
Vado is hoping to get sponsorships from larger corporations involved, as well.
While Vado has often spoken fondly of APE in the past, taking on running a small press comics show in the middle of a boom seems like a big task. So why? “I kind of feel like I have some unfinished business with it,” he said. “APE was the first of its kind. I think it is a great show, and I’m happy to be able to continue it.
“Hopefully APE will turn into something even cooler than what it is,” he concluded.
While as we’ve reported here many times in the past, SF is the one city that doesn’t seem very interested in comics culture—despite or maybe because of being home to the dot-com culture that seems to love comics culture—it’s also home to the companies that have helped comics grow digitally such as Google and Apple. So there seems to be real potential to create a regional CAF with that taps into the unique culture of the area.
A panel is being held right now announcing the switchover.
I’m looking forward to it! (Full disclosure: I worked for Dan for more than ten years.)
As a clarifying point, the picture on this post is of the main hall. The South Hall looks like this: http://www.larein.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/fanime_southhall_map1.jpg