I managed to spend about 3.5 hours at the MOCCA festival in New York on Sunday. I wandered the exhibit hall for over an hour, browsing and buying. There were more tables than I expected but the majority of it looked either really bad or really boring (it’s hard walking by all those lonely faces hoping to sell comics that look so boring, cliched, or just out right crappy). The big indie publishers were there: Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, and Top Shelf as well as some of the newer book publishers doing comics: First Second, Houghton-Mifflin, Pantheon. I didn’t see anything new at any of those tables except First Second had previews of their fall line, including Joann Sfar’s Klezmer, which coincidentally I had been reading in the original French edition earlier in the day. It is a beautifully illustrated comic with bright watercolors and Sfar’s sketchy line (even more so than in other works, the lines almost fall apart in their erratic brevity). I haven’t finished reading it yet so no comments on the story.
I saw a number of familiar names and books and discovered a few new ones. A highlight for me was the appearance of Belgian publisher Bries who had what appeared to mostly be silent books. I picked up two I’ve had my eye on at their website for months: Lewis Trondheim’s Mister I (a companion book to his Mister O) and Stefan J.H. Van Dinther’s CHRZ.
Picturebox had a great set-up with the only books I had gone to the festival planning to buy already: “Cold Heat” by Frank Santoro and BJ (with Cometbus lettering!?), “Incanto” by Frank Santoro, and the new free “Comics Comics” magazine. All look great. Having reading “Incanto” already I highly recommend it. It is beautiful. (Probably the first review that will come out of this.)
Zak Sally of La Mano drew a weird duck figure for me in a copy of his Recidivist book that I finally bought (after hearing so much praise of it). Right next to him was Mark Burrier whose work caught both my and my fiancee’s eye. I picked up “The Intruder” and she “Our Love Story.” Burrier has a wonderful simplicity to it. We commiserated over a love of Tom Gauld’s work (Mark had this fold-out Gauld monster thing that Buenaventura Press was selling but seemed to be sold-out by the time I got to their table).
One of the great finds of the festival was James McShane’s “Peck”, a very thick and tiny book (smaller than a post-it, thick as a big pack of gum) with circular panels one to a page. Haven’t read it yet, but it looks great. We also stumbled upon the work of Mollie Goldstrom who had a few nautically themed mini-comics. Unfortunately she wasn’t there when the fiancee bought her mini “Sea-man Lamprey”, but Austin English was at the table and sang her praises a bit (and gave me a chance to compliment Allison Cole on her book as she was sitting there too).
Global Hobo was on hand and I picked up Jesse Reklaw’s latest “Couch Tag” #3. Tom Hart had a newsprint sampling of recent Hutch Owen strips and a very large photocopy/print out of a Hutch Owen book he’s shopping around. Gary Sullivan had a new issue of “Elsewhere” #2 that he was kind enough to give me and sold me on picking up Jerel’s Machine Vision #1 from the same table.
Saw a few tables of webcomics folks selling books and merchandise. The folks from The Paping had some crazy silk-screened books with wooden covers (that were burned into to make images).
Finally met Matt Madden, who introduced me to Tom Spurgeon (who happened to be standing nearby), whom I chatted with briefly and who introduced me even more briefly to Chris Butcher. I’m not the most social of people, so that was pretty much the extent of my socializing.
We caught Dan Nadel’s presentation about his Art Out of Time book, which I have but haven’t looked at much yet. Nadel’s talk added some context to a few of the artists and his enthusiasm for the work made me more enthusiastic to read his book. After Dan, Jessica Abel talked a bit, read from a slide presentation, and answered some questions from Calvin Reid. My fiancee was interested enough to ask me for some of Jessica’s comics to read when we got home that night. Two points I found particularly curious: 1) her use of a looser style in La Perdida allowed her to imply more in a setting, with her older tighter style she felt the need to put in all the details of setting and character 2) while trying to change her style she redrew the same page at larger and smaller sizes and ended up doing La Perdida at a very small size (6 X 9 I think). Also, when asked about the autobiographical aspect of the book (everyone wants stories to be autographical, a pet peeve of mine) she noted it was mostly in the setting rather than the characters or events.
The fiancee wants me to note that she thought there was a proponderance of beards and green clothes. I think she spent more time people watching than I did.
Didn’t have time to get to the She Draws Comics exhibit at the MOCCA museum, but it’s up all summer. Plenty of time to go back.
All in all a fun little trip to comics land. It’s got me thinking about making the trip to SPX in October which is probably about as far, travel-wise, as MOCCA.
Tags: Comics, festival, minicomics
Post a Comment