Every summer, our town holds a massive outdoor art fair. Over the last 30-odd years or so, it's grown from a fairly modest event, featuring mostly local vendors, whose wares took up roughly half a dozen blocks, to one of the nation's premiere art fairs. It's a spectacle that stretches out over the whole downtown area, starts with a massive Friday night kickoff party, live music, and a silent auction -- one that attracts vendors from 25-30 states nationwide.
I've covered about half a dozen fairs in my time, which usually requires interviewing some vendors, to pop the inevitable question: What motivates you to load a trailer full of your own art, or somebody else's work, and lug it all over the country? Can you really make a living that way?
I once posed that question to an elderly gentleman from Georgia, who responded, without blinking: "Yes, you can. I spend about 20-25 weekends every year, doing shows like this." Then he paused, to drop the punchline, with a sly grin: "But let's remember something. Art isn't anything that people need, because they have to do silly things like buy gas, and pay their mortgage."
That conversation always cracks me up, whenever I revisit it. You can just imagine the average person's thought process, right?
Ah, who cares about those silly comic book people? My kid could do that! That isn't a real job! They should be out here, on the coffee bar/gas pump/loading dock/supermarket checkout station/scut job of your choice with me, blah-blah-blah-blah... And so on, and so forth.
I thought about that conversation again, after hearing of the delay in the Stateside arrival of a new book, Bitchy: The Exasperating Existence Of Midge McCracken. For alternative comics mavens, this anthology counts as a major event, marking the first compilation of Roberta Gregory's groundbreaking character...essentially, every comic between two covers, but didn't save under your bed, hoard in your drawer, or something along those lines.
For those who don't know Bitchy or her creator, this snapshot summary from TV Tropes does the job: "A series of comic books by Robert Gregory, featuring the titular character Midge and her coworkers. Midge is permanently stuck in a bad mood -- hating her coworkers as well as all other people, and giving them every reason to hate her. Published as stand alone albums, as well as in Naughty Bits. Has a spin-off called Bitchy Butch." (Examples of signature stories follow the quote, which I also recommend, for those who aren't already in the know, to catch the drift.)
Suffice to say, Bitchy ranks among the signature characters in the alternative comics pantheon. If you're having a crappy day, or can't put up with all the shit sandwiches the world keeps slinging, this is one of the comics to read. You'd either end up feeling slightly better about your latest predicament, or at the least, you could take comfort, knowing that someone else out there felt as pissed off as you were.
And you wouldn't get a ton of social-work-speak blather ("You can't control what other people do," blah-blah-blah). It was okay to feel that way, because once you finally got a better place, whatever pissed you off wouldn't matter, anyway. Unlike a lot of creators, Gregory doesn't talk down to her audience, or invalidate how they feel, which was one of the reasons I enjoy her comics.
The anticipation for the Bitchy anthology kept building, as Gregory posted periodic updates to her Facebook pages. Fantagraphics, her publisher, began taking pre-orders. I could feel the excitement jumping off those Facebooks page, as fans weighed in on what they looked forward to seeing...
...until that one Iranian missile struck a certain ship, bound with print runs of the Bitchy anthology, and The Atlas Comics Library No. 9, as Fantagraphics announced on March 13 (edited for punctuation and space):
"Both books had been scheduled to go on sale in early June, but that timeframe now seems unlikely. If the books themselves were not damaged and the crippled ship's cargo can be offloaded to another vessel, and that vessel can then safely exit the danger zone, it could add a month or more to the delivery time.
"We have no information on the cargo ship’s itinerary, but our speculation is that it was dropping off other cargo from India to that region or picking up additional cargo bound for the U.S."
"Bitchy Bitch is most exasperated by this unexpected turn of events, echoing the title of one of Weird World's horror stories "When a World Goes Mad!"
While bound printed matter like books have been exempted from the tariffs, that break doesn't apply to the materials and processes required to produce it, which raises major headaches for foreign publishers. (Nor does it apply to apparel or games, two major income sources in their own right.) As Gregory and her fellow creators have already noted, most mass printing jobs end up happening overseas -- in countries like Canada, China, and India -- for boring economic reasons, like affordability and flexibility. It's an ironic twist for globally conscientious publishers pining for more domestic options, as Uncivilized's supremo, Tom Kaczynski, openly admits: "I’d prefer domestic production. Everything becomes simpler: shipping, timelines, and other logistics become easier to manage.” Makes sense, right? But there are some interesting knock-on effects that audiences may not consider, starting with an overall reduction or restructuring in foreign-USA business, while publishers and creators struggle to find workarounds for whatever ails their bottom line, as François Vigneault, marketing manager for Pow Pow, of Canada, suggests:
"Negotiating distribution contracts, deciding on print runs, and figuring out shipping times, it's all much more complicated than it ought to be. Every hour you have to spend trying to figure out what is going on, and how you are going to respond to this stuff, is an hour you can't spend on the fundamental elements of the business of publishing great graphic novels."
For newcomers, those realities may require taking a back seat to better-established peers -- if someone else publishes them -- or scaling back the ambition and frequency of their ventures, if they're putting out their own work. It also likely means fewer opportunities to interact and collaborate, as Conundrum's publisher, Andy Brown, makes clear:
“As a Canadian I am far more concerned about the fact that the very independence of my country is under threat due to this ‘trade war.’ I will not cross the border into the U.S.A. And many of the artists I publish have told me they feel concern for their safety if they do. So that means no more U.S. festivals, no in person sales conferences, no U.S. tours. So that will affect sales and the bottom line far more than tariffs. I will be seeking out European markets even more.”
And remember, the Journal article ran in May 2025 -- before images of innocent people getting beaten, kidnapped and murdered on the streets of Chicago and Minneapolis by anonymous masked goons became horrifyingly familiar sights everywhere. It's not hard to imagine a foreign publisher pausing over the latest Trump regime outrages that they may spot online, as they sigh: "Right, we're giving the good old USA a miss this year. And maybe for a couple more years, too."
This is the perverse flipside of protectionism, as critics are reminding everyone right now, with a wink and a gloat. Domestic businesses that try to plan for the future, and build a stable profit structure, end up getting punished, because they're responding to arbitrary policies, rather than real market conditions, as the Journal suggests.
The end result is a less competitive, less responsive market, and a shrinking audience pool. With tariff-related costs estimated at $3,800 per household, it's fair to say that comics might rank well below those "silly things," like gas and housing costs.
While yesterday's announcement of a two-week cease fire -- if it holds -- may come as welcome relief for Bitchy Bitch fans, it doesn't address the broader economic pain caused by Trump's "now you see it, now you don't" style of governance. Uncertainty tends to exert a serious drag at the box office, now that all those cherished MAGA assumptions about trade -- that there's an army of idle natives who can't wait to make shoes, or pick fruit, in searing 90-degree temperatures -- haven't panned out.
If nothing else, the current chaotic spectacle should extinguish, once and for all, the Trumpian notion of some uber-creative amateur pulling out the royal flush that's magically eluded the other players at the card table. But, hey, what do those silly comic book creators know, right?
For that matter, what do the working man and woman, struggling to pay for "silly things" -- like gas in the tank, or the monthly mortgage -- know, as they watch those costs soar up, up and out of sight, even as their wallets stay flatter and more parched than ever? Time will tell how that struggle plays out in the November midterms, but we'll just have to grit our teeth through it, before the course correction finally comes. Until then? To put it kindly -- there is much work to be done. "Much," as Marley's ghost would say. --The Reckoner
Links To Go: Hurry, Hurry, Before Comics
Cost More Than The Gas In Your Tank:
Comics Beat
Two Fantagraphics Collections Delayed:
https://www.comicsbeat.com/two-fantagraphics-collections-delayed-after-cargo-ship-damaged-by-iranian-missile/
The Comics Journal
Comics And Trump's Tariffs 2.0:
https://www.tcj.com/comics-and-trumps-tariffs-2-0-they-might-fuck-us-up-at-any-moment/
The Duck Webcomics
War Is A Bitch:
https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2026/mar/17/war-is-a-bitch/
TV Tropes
Bitchy Bitch Entry
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBook/BitchyBitch
Roberta Gregory poses proudly with her creation>:
