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Collection Small Press Expo Comic and Comic Art Web Archive

About this Collection

Collection Period:
August 9, 2011 to ongoing.

The Small Press Expo (SPX) is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit created in 1994 to promote artists and publishers who produce independent comics. SPX hosts an annual festival that provides a forum for artists, writers and publishers of comic art in its various forms to present to the public comic art not accessible through normal commercial channels. The Small Press Expo Collection at the Library of Congress was established to preserve the history of both the artistic output of the creators who come to SPX, as well as the art that SPX itself generates as part of its yearly festival. The Small Press Expo and Comic Art Web Archive includes the website of the festival itself, as well as Ignatz Award nominees and winners. Since 1997, the Small Press Expo has awarded the Ignatz Awards - named for the character in the classic comic strip Krazy Kat by George Herriman - to recognize outstanding achievement in comics and cartooning in a variety of categories. The award for Outstanding Online Comic, established in 2001, includes a wide variety of webcomic styles and subjects, such as diary/autobiographical comics, long form stories, single comic panels/strips, fantasy comics, and others. These selected sites are continuously archived over time to create an archival record of the website – some archived sites may still have an active web presence, changing and evolving, while others now exist only in the archive as they appeared at the time they were nominated for the Ignatz Award. The content of these websites is captured as it was originally produced and may include content that is not suitable for all ages.