This year's comic con in Singapore will be brought forward to August, from December.

The organisers, Reed Exhibitions, have started sending out emails asking artists to sign up for Artist Alley.

This year, they have decided to increase the price of their 2x2m exhibition space (bold is theirs) to $600 from last year's $400 (early bird registration).

Oh, and this year's comic con is only 2 days. So they reduced it by a day, and increased the price by 50%.

It's not cool when you're trying to squeeze more money out of artists.

This puts artists at a great disadvantage. If you're making $2 for a sketchbook sold, you've to sell over 300 sketchbooks just to break even - by the way, you do not sell that much books during comic con. I don't know if the "priceless opportunities to tie-in" with local and regional personalities will make up for it.

I know many artists will be giving Artist Alley a miss, or joining bigger booths (like 10 people per booth) to share the cost.

An artist friend of mine is even considering organising the comic event ourselves, just for comics - no toys, no performances, no video games - basically none of the high expense stuff. Maybe we should.

If you were exhibiting at last year's STGCC, tell me what you think.