Comics Bust Out at MoCCA 2007

by Douglas Wolk, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 6/26/2007

New York City's biggest indie-comics gathering, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival, seems to get bigger every year. This year's festival, held June 23 and 24, was straining at the seams of its home, the Puck Building in downtown Manhattan.

Exhibitors' tables expanded to fill the sunlit seventh-floor area that had been reserved for panels in previous years, in addition to the three ground-floor rooms they've always occupied. The programming, in turn, was inconveniently relocated to the museum's offices a few blocks away. Alison Bechdel (recipient of this year's MoCCA Art Festival Award), Kim Deitch, Keith Knight, Lauren Weinstein and novelist Austin Grossman all took their turns in the spotlight; the best-attended panel, according to MoCCA organizers, was Jeffrey Brown's spotlight, at which the Chicago cartoonist announced plans to publish a regular 32-page comic book (and narrated his unpublished Wolverine story).

MoCCA's audience is more of a fine art crowd than most other conventions', and the bags shoppers were carrying around at the show were as full of limited-edition prints and objets d'art as they were of books, comics and minicomics. But the mainstream comics world is now starting to build bridges to the festival's art comics, too: Wizard magazine, the comics fan and trade publication, and the new magazine-about-comics, Comic Foundry, and even DC's Vertigo and Minx imprints had a booth in the upstairs hall, where creators Percy Carey (Sentences) and G. Willow Wilson (Cairo) put in appearances. Some popular tables featured cartoonists who straddle the mainstream and indie worlds, including writer Brian Wood, artists Cameron Stewart, Zander Cannon, Rick Veitch and Becky Cloonan, who debuted "Minis," a collection of her early work.

Two of the weekend's most talked-about books both sold out during signings on Saturday: Paul Pope's art book, PulpHope (AdHouse blew through half its 80-copy supply of the book in the festival's first hour and a half), and the late Fletcher Hanks's I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! signed at Fantagraphics' booth by the book's editor and compiler Paul Karasik. Olivier Schrauwen's tribute to early 20th-century strips, My Boy, imported by the Belgian publisher Bries, was a word-of-mouth hit as well, selling out by early on Sunday. The look of those early strips was also echoed in Sundays, a nicely packaged anthology put together by students from the Center for Cartoon Studies.

As usual, the larger indie publishers brought along artists to sign copies of their new books. Fantagraphics had signings by a host of cartoonists, including Michael Kupperman and a handful of contributors to the new issue of its periodical anthology MOME; Joel Orff and K. Thor Jensen were in the Alternative Comics pavilion, signing their new book, Thunderhead Underground Falls, and newish Red Eye, Black Eye; Jamie Tanner debuted his new graphic novel, The Aviary with AdHouse; and Drawn & Quarterly's supply of Joe Matt's Spent was rapidly exhausted, thanks to a rare appearance at MoCCA by the artist. D&Q also sold a pile of Quill nominee Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds and debuted the first issue of a new Lucky series by Gabrielle Bell.

Traffic at this year's show seemed a little more manageable than last year's, thanks to the expanded exhibit space. The one consistently crowded area was the back of the room, which featured the Dumbrella collective and a table shared by Bryan Lee O'Malley, Hope Larson and Lucy Knisley. Knisley was the only one of the three to have a major new book at this show (her impressive self-published travel memoir, French Milk), although the Norwegian comics table upstairs was selling Sigbjørn Lilleeng's Nebelgrad Blues, a series very clearly and very heavily influenced by O'Malley.

Elsewhere, Houghton Mifflin previewed its two major fall comics releases: an English-language edition of Frederik Peeters's romance-and-HIV memoir, Blue Pills, and this year's Best American Comics anthology, edited by Chris Ware. Next year's editors, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, were everywhere at the show, scouting out possible inclusions and showing off pages from their First Second textbook Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, as well as Abel's Life Sucks, both due next year. First Second, meanwhile, was promoting its spring and fall 2007 releases—Eddie Campbell's The Black Diamond Detective Agency did well.

Top Shelf, as always, was set up in the "bar" area on the ground floor, which always had half a dozen or so Top Shelf cartoonists behind it. Top Shelf's big new releases included Matt Kindt's Super Spy and Jeffrey Brown's full-color Transformers parody Incredible Change-Bots, but the book that moved the greatest number of copies was a massive paperback sampler of new and forthcoming projects being handed out as a freebie. The company's 10th anniversary bash, held Saturday night, was the one after-hours party everyone showed up for; it spilled out onto the sidewalk outside the Manhattan bar Gstaad, and on a perfect New York evening scores of art-comics producers and readers were excitedly showing each other their new discoveries.

(Additional reporting by Wil Moss)