Here are some of the coolest things we saw from the selection of nearly 50 vendors.
A Look At Public Napping In Asia, Jessica Winniford
Jessica Winniford worked as a photographer and designer for The Chapel, an Asia-based humanitarian nonprofit. Spanning from 2012-2019, Winniford chronicled her experience in part with a series of street photographs that showed locals sleeping on sidewalks, job counters, massage chairs and even standing up on trains. “Each napper with only one goal,” she describes on her website. “To detach from the pressure of their never-ending work day and just breathe. What if we could simply unplug where we are, take a deep breath, close our weary eyes and let go?”
So We Party in Deep Ellum and So I Work in Deep Ellum, Rosalind Bellamy-Hicks
Target audience! If there are two things we relate to at the Observer, it’s working and partying in Deep Ellum. Rosalind Bellamy-Hicks’ cartoon depictions of Dallas landmarks such as Deep Ellum Art Co., the Traveling Man sculpture and the wall of toilets at Double Wide inspire a sort of present-nostalgia in us. It’s an oxymoron, but so is seeing familiarity depicted in a way you’ve never seen before.
Endless Monsoon, Sarah Welch
For as much as we do love a good ol’ indie zine, far too many of them are just short collections of art. Sarah Welch’s Endless Monsoon stood out as a coming-of-age comic series told in five 50-page issues. It has the dimensions of a DIY zine, about 5 by 7 inches, but with the kind of artwork you’d see in an Image comic and the same sort of storytelling. Welch’s story follows Jess, the young adult protagonist as she travels through Southeast Texas in search of a stable life. It’s presented in an almost monochrome fashion, with each page graced with a light green soy-based ink. We blew through the entire series at the mandatory post-fair coffee run, and it was well worth our time and money, with issues being sold for $10 each or $35 for the entire collection.
DERPS Collection, The Cauldron Press
The Cauldron Press makes its basketball allegiance known. The Oklahoma City-based Risograph printshop backs its hometown Thunder, who currently sit atop the NBA’s Western Conference with a staggering 56-12 record. The team’s leader and favorite to win league MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, has his own card in the company’s DERPS Collection of custom-made NBA trading cards. Inspired by Pokemon, the cards come in specialty booster packs that could feature Gilgeous-Alexander or another young star like Ja Morant or Anthony Edwards.
Win Free Stuff!, Michael Scott Griffith
Independent creative spheres should always be collaborative, and artist Michael Scott Griffith ensured this weekend’s events were especially. Next to his table of mini comedy zines about the Houston Astros cheating and Spotify playlists exclusively featuring covers of Radiohead’s “Creep,” Griffith had a “Win Free Stuff” machine. It looked to be one of those temporary tattoo machines you’d see in restaurant corners, where inserting 50 cents might earn you a peel-and-press photo of Spiderman. This time, those two quarters were worth a coupon to use at another table in the event, good for things like stickers or buttons.
Rejected Pro Wrestlers, Konstantine Soldatos
We opened one page of this zine and were immediately confronted with a ripped caricature of a sleezy pastor called “Stone Cold Joel Osteen,” one of 10 pages of fictional renderings and descriptions of “unsung warriors from the undercard.” It’s hard to find an easier sell than that. Artist Konstantine Soldatos infuses an equal helping of pro wrestling inside jokes with palatable comic whimsy throughout his three volumes of Rejected Pro Wrestlers, which we think could have a lot of potential as a coffee table book.
