Deadline at the Photocopy Shop

• Chapter 1 The 1997 Small Press Expo Dream
• Chapter 2 Pencils, Pens, and Panic
• Chapter 3 The Last-Minute Rewrite
• Chapter 4 Midnight at the Drafting Table
• Chapter 5 Inking the Final Page
• Chapter 6 White-Out to the Rescue
• Chapter 7 Page 12 Is Missing!
• Chapter 8 Running Out of Bristol Board
• Chapter 9 The Bus Ride to Kinko's
• Chapter 10 11:15 PM: Pushing Through the Glass Doors
• Chapter 11 The Fluorescent Glow of Urgency
• Chapter 12 Picking the Paper Stock
• Chapter 13 Machine No. 4 Is Jammed
• Chapter 14 Toner Low, Tempers High
• Chapter 15 The Smell of Heated Ink
• Chapter 16 The Double-Sided Dilemma
• Chapter 17 The Collating Counter
• Chapter 18 Margins Cut Too Close
• Chapter 19 The Long-Arm Stapler
• Chapter 20 Fold, Crease, Repeat
• Chapter 21 Count the Covers
• Chapter 22 Boxed Up at 11:58 PM
• Chapter 23 Paying with Pocket Change
• Chapter 24 Into the Cold Night Air
• Chapter 25 Suitcase Full of Zines
• Chapter 26 Destination: SPX '97

The autumn of 1997 smelled like rubber cement, damp autumn leaves, and the metallic tang of electric pencil sharpeners. In the independent comics scene, the Small Press Expo—known simply to everyone who cared as SPX—was the absolute center of the universe. Held in Bethesda, Maryland, it wasn't like the massive media conventions in San Diego or Chicago. There were no movie stars hyping blockbuster film adaptations, no studio executives handing out glossy promotional folders, and no giant foam mascots wandering the aisles. SPX was a sacred, chaotic, low-fi gathering of weirdos, obsessives, introverts, and self-taught artists who lived to put ink on paper, staple it down the middle, and sell it out of cardboard boxes to anyone willing to part with two dollars.

I had spent the entire summer in my cramped, third-floor apartment talking about SPX as if it were a holy pilgrimage. My friends, most of whom had sensible jobs or were at least pretending to finish their college degrees, nodded along with polite skepticism. To them, drawing little pictures inside tiny square boxes seemed like a harmless, child-like hobby, the sort of thing you outgrew once the reality of paying rent set in. But to me, self-publishing a mini-comic was the ultimate declaration of artistic independence. In 1997, you didn’t need an agent, a publisher, an editor, or a web domain. You didn’t need permission from anyone. All you needed was a black felt-tip pen, a stack of blank paper, access to a high-speed photocopier, and the guts to sit behind a half-table in a hotel conference room while strangers flipped through your soul's deepest output.

The dream had taken a firm hold of me back in July when a battered envelope arrived in my mailbox. Inside was a single-sheet, tri-folded flyer printed on bright neon-green paper. It was the registration confirmation for SPX '97. I had officially secured half of a six-foot folding table in the main exhibition hall. It had cost me forty dollars—an amount that represented roughly thirty percent of my total weekly grocery budget—but holding that flyer felt like possessing a golden ticket. I was no longer just a kid sitting on the floor scribbling in a spiral sketchbook; I was an independent publisher. I was a creator with a designated space in the grand ecosystem of underground art.

The plan was simple, elegant, and entirely unrealistic. I was going to create a brand-new, twelve-page mini-comic specifically for the show. It would be my masterpiece, the book that put my name on the map alongside indie icons like Adrian Tomine, Daniel Clowes, and Seth. I envisioned people queuing up at my modest half-table, crisp dollar bills in hand, eager to grab a freshly stapled copy of my work. I saw myself engaged in quiet, intellectual conversations with legendary cartoonists, exchanging folded papers like secret agents trading classified dossiers in a cold-war thriller. The convention was scheduled for mid-September, which, back in July, felt like an infinite horizon of open time. I had weeks. Months, almost. There was plenty of time to pencil, ink, letter, duplicate, fold, and staple.

What I failed to account for was the paralysis of ambition. When you dream about a project, it exists in a state of absolute perfection. The lines are crisp, the jokes are universally hilarious, the pacing is cinematic, and the emotional beats land with devastating precision. The moment your pen actually touches the surface of a blank piece of Bristol board, however, reality intrudes. The ink bleeds slightly into the grain. The proportions of your main character’s head look inexplicably like a lopsided grapefruit. The clever dialogue you rehearsed in the shower suddenly reads like clunky, pretentious drivel when lettered in black ink.

For all of July and the first half of August, the SPX dream remained largely an abstract concept. I bought supplies with the zeal of an evangelist. I purchased heavy Bristol board, clear plastic rulers, Ames lettering guides, Higgins waterproof India ink, and a handful of fine-line Micron pens that sat in a neat, pristine row on my desk like surgical instruments. I spent hours clearing off my drafting table, adjusting the angle of my desk lamp, and making curated cassette mixtapes to provide the optimal audio backdrop for my creative explosion. I organized my workspace with meticulous care, convincing myself that preparation was the same thing as productivity.

Every night, I would sit in front of the blank board, adjust the lamp, hit play on the tape deck, and stare. I would think about the hundreds of other cartoonists across the country who were likely doing the same thing. They were in small towns and big cities, bent over drafting tables in basements and attics, tirelessly filling pages with cross-hatching and brush strokes, building their tiny paper empires for Bethesda. The thought was both exhilarating and utterly terrifying. The mini-comic world was tiny, but it was fiercely passionate. A bad book wouldn't just be ignored; it would feel like a wasted opportunity to belong to a community I desperately wanted to join.

As September approached, the abstract dream began to mutate into something much sharper and far less romantic. The calendar on my kitchen wall seemed to accelerate. The space between the numbers grew smaller, the days slipping past without yielding a single completed page. The local comics shop started putting up fliers for the show, complete with lists of attending artists, panel discussions, and late-night slide shows. Every time I walked past that flyer to buy my weekly stack of books, the neon green confirmation paper sitting on my desk back home seemed to glow with an increasingly hostile light.

The dream of SPX '97 wasn't just about selling a few booklets for a dollar apiece; it was about validation. It was about proving to myself that I was actually a cartoonist, not just someone who talked about making art while working shifts at a record store. The deadline wasn't a soft suggestion from an editor—it was a hard, immovable wall. The doors of the Bethesda convention center were going to open at 10:00 AM on Saturday morning whether I had my books ready or not. The table would be there, cold and bare, waiting to reveal to the world whether I was a real creator or just an impostor with an expensive collection of drawing supplies.

With three weeks left before the show, the ambient fantasy finally dissolved, leaving behind the hard, terrifying reality of the work. The time for grand visions of artistic triumph was over. The time for clean, tidy preparation was gone. If I was going to make it to Maryland with a finished mini-comic in my hands, I was going to have to stop dreaming about the destination and start wrestling with the ugly, chaotic process of getting the ink onto the page.

The transition from conceptualizing a comic to actually putting lead on paper is where the panic truly sets in. It is one thing to hold a plot in your head, full of sharp dialogue and clever panel transitions; it is quite another to force a graphite point to translate those grand ideas into recognizable shapes on a flat sheet of 2-ply Strathmore paper. With less than three weeks before I had to pack my bag for Maryland, the luxury of contemplation was gone. I sat at my drafting table, bathed in the harsh, yellow glare of an adjustable swing-arm lamp, holding a blue non-repro