MoCCA minis motivate missives

One great thing about MoCCA (and comics conventions in general, really) is the ambitious nature of the attendees, ready to conquer the world with their works of art. Tables abound that are covered with minicomics, many of them photocopied and stapled together by hand, but others professionally printed and presented with love by people that want you to give them a chance. Even though I only picked up a small assortment of these sorts of books, I would have loved to grab more; it's a great way to survey the talent that's out there. But here's some of what I did get:

Pope Hats #1

By Ethan Rilly

Distributed by Adhouse Books

This Xeric Grant-winning self-published pamphlet is over all too quickly; Rilly seems to be building a Scott Pilgrim-style graphic novel here, and this first chapter is just a small taste. But it's a good taste, one that makes you eager to read more. The cover is a good indication of the contents, with a couple of attractive young women in the city (one of them drunk), but the added layer of fantasy that comes from them riding on a horse. The interior contains no equine presence; but there is a bit of the fantastical, in that the main character keeps being haunted by an annoying ghost. But we don't even find out about that aspect until several scenes into the story; at first, it's just a tale of young people living their lives, with Lauren, who eventually coheres as the lead, kind of starting out in the background as her more outgoing roommate Vickie celebrates her first taste of fried chicken after a stint of vegetarianism, gets excited to meet a guy at a bar, and gets drunk enough to puke in an alley. But we soon realize that Lauren is kind of the more dowdy member of the pair, the one with a bit more common sense and less flightiness. She's the "normal" one, except she thinks she's going crazy due to the stupid spirit that's ineptly haunting her, acting as more of a pain in the ass than a supernatural threat:

The Scott Pilgrim comparison is kind of unfair, since this is much more sedate, but it does share the same well-realized look at early adulthood, with that feeling of insecurity about the future and habits of slacking off before needing to get things together and grow up. The art does a great job of defining the urban Canadian setting (Toronto?), and while it's cartoony enough to seem simplistic, Rilly actually captures realistic gestures and body language such that you never feel like the characters are less than real. It's a really nice little book, and Rilly is obviously very talented, delivering a funny, enjoyable bit of what will hopefully be a longer story. At the rate these things come out, it will probably be years before it's finished, but I'm willing to wait; I've got a hunch that it will be worth it.

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Jin & Jam #1

By Hellen Jo

Published by Sparkplug Books

People all over the comics internet have been talking about this book for months now, and rightly so, because it's a riot, a great bit of goofy fun. Taking an influence from Taiyo Matsumoto (and not hiding it, with a quote from Black & White on the dedication page), creator Hellen Jo presents a few incidents in the lives of the eponymous characters, two (pre-?)teen punks who hang out in San Jose. It's wildly enjoyable; in the course of 31 pages, they meet outside a church, get in a fight with a pair of bullying conjoined twins, get chased around by a bicycle cop with a lasso, try to get into a rock concert, and swing on some swings at a playground across from the bar they couldn't get into. Jo gives everything an expressive feel, with characters wildly flailing around, faces contorting into strange expressions, and fighters smashing everything in their vicinity:

But it has a lived-in feel as well, as if Jo is drawing characters, settings, and incidents straight out of the real world and just exaggerating them a bit. The kids hang around on streets, make fun of each other, and think about the future just like real kids do, and the climactic swinging scene has the quality of excitement and hopefulness that comes with the beginning of a friendship. Jo might be throwing plenty of wacky, hilarious stuff onto the page, but it's got a foundation of believability that makes it more than just a cheap thrill. Now I can't wait for issue number two.

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There Once Was a Girl...

By Jamie Tanner

This short, handmade minicomic by the creator of The Aviary is a sort of fairy tale about a pregnant woman who gets a magical infection of sorts when she sees some kind of wolf demon, causing her baby to be born looking like a wolf. Her husband forces her to try to find a cure for the boy's condition, but each new treatment only makes the problem worse, until she is forced to take drastic actions. It's a strange, creepy tale, especially due to Tanner's moody, heavily-cross-hatched art, and one could read a variety of metaphors into the situation. Thought-provoking comics are good; now I really need to read The Aviary.

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The Middle

By Connor Willumsen

I really think Connor Willumsen could be the next big thing, from what I've seen of his art. He reminds me of Paul Pope with his fluid, dynamic style that captures an incredible sense of movement. The Pope influence also extends to cool ideas in this mini, which relates a couple variations on scenes of a futuristic (alien?) astronaut seeking the center of the universe and encountering strange effects when he discovers it. It's a fun idea, making for some interesting uses of symmetry, some weird technology, and a wonderful sense of low-gravity perambulation:

This is gorgeous stuff; I can't wait to read more from him.

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These Kids Today...

Written by Eric Skillman

Art by Connor Willumsen

Willumsen also contributed art to this short mini, which reprints a story that was published in Popgun volume 3 (you can also read it online here). It's a three-page crime story about a guy who has a one night stand with a girl and gets too attached, with the art probably being the most interesting aspect. Willumsen contributes some nicely scratchy urban settings, fluid anatomy, and a good use of color. See, he can illustrate other people's scripts too; let's get him working on a big project, comics people!

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Cold Feet

Written by Eric Skillman

Art by Evan Bryce

Below the Fold

Written by Eric Skillman

Art by Jorge Coelho

These are two more crime stories from writer Eric Skillman, one about a reporter searching for the truth behind an apparent drug overdose and finding some unfortunate political connections, and the other being a bit of action during a heist. Skillman doesn't do a bad job here, but he's especially good at picking collaborators, with Jorge Coelho being especially noteworthy, putting plenty of detail, good facial expressions, and moody color into the tale for maximum effect. "Below the Fold" is available (along with the item above) in Skillman's book Egg: Hard Boiled Stories #1 (which is available for purchase here, and looks to be online in full here). Skillman looks to be pretty good at what he does, although it would be interesting to see him stretch a bit and tell something longer. Crime is a growing genre in comics, so there's definitely room for him to tell his stories. Hopefully he'll be able to continue plying his trade.

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Why Did I Put this Town on My Face?

By Matt Weigle

Available from Partyka

This is a collection of short stories from Matt Weigle, and they're enough to make me want to pick up his more well-known minis, like The Four Husbands or Seven More Days of Not Getting Eaten. I especially liked "Prairie Dog Encountered by the Corps of Discovery", an account of the Lewis and Clark expedition trying to capture a specimen of the titular species. I'm not sure if it's accurate (although it has the tone of a historical story), but it's interesting. "[anchor symbol]" is a fun little tale of a tattoed guy dressed like a pirate who apparently has the power to make pictures come to life, with gruesome results. "The Omega Dome" is a pretty hilarious alien-invasion story involving child abductions and farts, and "Your Career Is Not Working Out Like What You Had Planned" is a hilarious one-pager that illustrates four humorous examples of the title. I love Weigle's style, which uses lots of thick lines, heavy blacks, and some expressively chunky cartoon physiology:

He's a guy that definitely deserves more exposure. If you want to see more, several of these stories are available to read online here.

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Whiskey Jack and Kid Coyote Meet the King of Stink

By Shawn Cheng

Available from Partyka

Shawn Cheng has a cute, detailed style, and he's good at telling short, humorous stories (or more serious ones, like his and Sara Edward-Corbett's entry in The Best American Comics 2008), like this little hand-stitched mini about a couple animals who transform into Power Rangers-style heroes to fight a giant skunk who is terrorizing the countryside with his farts. It's silly and gross, a fun little bit of fluff. I need to read The Would-Be Bridegrooms, which features the same characters, and I do hope Cheng will do more and longer work in the future.

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Nerd Burglar

By Sarah Oleksyk, Elijah Brubaker, Chris Cilla, Jennifer Parks, Bobby Madness, Shawn Granton, Tim Root, Aron Nels Steinke, and E.D. Nilsson

Published by Tugboat Press, Teenage Dinosaur, and Sparkplug Comics

This was a free sampler book published by the three companies listed above in 2008 (they followed it up in 2009 with Bird Hurdler). It features short comics by a range of creators, and it's a great way to get excited about some of the indie comics artists that are working. Sarah Oleksyk begins the volume with what might be the strongest entry, "Fifteen Variations on 'The First Day We Met'"; it sees two characters interacting with each other at various points in their life, from childhood to old age, and it's breathtakingly beautiful in the way that makes you realize that everyone on earth has a story to tell. Oleksyk is another creator who was included in The Best American Comics 2008, and she's obviously a rising star, someone to keep an eye on. Elijah Brubaker's (untitled?) entry is a sort of illustrated sea shanty about a woman who is enticed to leave her husband and run off with a former lover, to dire results. Brubaker has a wonderfully expressive, cartoony style that features a lot of scratchy blacks and a hint of a German expressionism; his series Reich always gets lots of acclaim, and this makes me really want to read it.

Those are the highlights of the volume, but some of the other stories are notable, including Jennifer Park's surreal "A Lone Wolf and the Search for the Missing Babooshka", Shawn Granton's look at Portland's proposed Mount Hood Freeway, and Tim Root's goofy tale of teenage parties, rock and roll, and odd superpowers. It's a nice little comic, and you can get it from Sparkplug for only 1 cent plus postage. Check out Bird Hurdler too while you're there; it's the same price.

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Look Out!! Monsters

By Geoff Grogan

I've been hearing about this comic for a while; it's another Xeric Grant-winner, and a fascinating use of monster movie imagery to comment on current and recent events, most notably the events of September 11, 2001. It's also kind of out of place in this post, since you can't call it a minicomic at the huge size of 11 x 13.5 inches. Creator Geoff Grogan uses a collage of torn up bits of newspaper as a canvas on which he paints images of Frankenstein's monster, bits of weird science, violence, and tributes to Stan Lee/Jack Kirby comics. It's fascinating stuff to behold, and the almost complete lack of description or illumination leaves interpretation up to the reader, although visible newspaper pictures of the World Trade Center wreckage or headlines involving terrorism do provide a clue. It's very thought-provoking, and I'm still not exactly sure what I think it all means; perhaps the "creature" created by mad science correlates to the arming of anti-Soviet militants that eventually used their skills against their "creators? Or you could go even more general, with the weapons of war that man creates being our eventual undoing. I especially found the close-up views of Benday dots that we see contain bits of newsprint interesting, as if they're pointing out the way the nuclear age informed the creators of old comics, whose simple morality seems to have taken over much of the modern political discourse.

This is definitely a fascinating book, a wonderful bit of art that sticks in the mind and makes the reader ponder its message long after the reading experience ends. If you're interested, you can purchase it from Grogan here.

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That's definitely not the last of what I got, but everything else that I wanted to talk about is of the longer, book-style books, so they'll take more time to read and probably merit longer entries. So stay tuned; I'll get to them eventually.

MoCCA 2009: Sketchy Sketchy

More MoCCA content tomorrow, I hope, but for now, here are the various sketches I got from creators, either in books when they signed them, or in my Groo sketchbook, shared because I love that sort of thing.

First up: Jason! I was surprised and excited when he said he knew of the blog, since for some reason, he was not somebody I expected to know of my existence. His new book, Low Moon, was on sale, but I decided not to buy it, figuring I can easily pick it up elsewhere and focus on buying the more obscure stuff. So instead, I had my copy of Meow, Baby! on hand, having brought it to read on the plane (and blazed through it, because it's hilarious), and he signed it and did a quick sketch:

One of the big debuts of the show was the second volume of Kazimir Strzepek's The Mourning Star, but I had yet to pick up the first one, so it looks like part two will have to wait until later. But I did buy part one, and here's Kaz's dedication:

I was also quite excited to finally get my hands on Tom Neely's The Blot, a self-published book that you had to order directly from the artist (or shop at a store that does so). I'm really excited to read it, and here's Neely's dedication, drawn around the ink blot that's printed on the page:

I've been hearing about Lamar Abrams' Remake, and Adhouse was nice enough to comp me a review copy. Luckily, Abrams was right there, so he signed it and drew a cute depiction of the main character:

Adhouse also gave me a copy of Mike Dawson's Ace-Face, and after I talked to Dawson and expressed affection for his two superpowered kid characters (who are in the book, it turns out), he drew this sketch when he signed it:

Finally (as far as books featuring signatures and sketches go), I made sure to get the second and third volumes of Templar, Arizona, since I liked volume one so much. Spike drew some cute sketches inside, with volume two sporting a cuttlefish:

And volume 3 featuring a dragon who is kind of jowly, and maybe also hung over:

And that's it for book inscriptions, but now comes the really cool part. The Groo sketchbook! I got a bunch of good entries last year at Wizard World Chicago, and this was my chance to get even more. First up: Paul Hornschemeier gets all modern art with what might be my new favorite entry:

Tom Neely goes all gory:

Kazimir Strzepek contributes the first Rufferto (but not the last!):

Becky Cloonan tries to dilute the testosterone with a female character (I'm happy to have more of the supporting cast):

Fred Chao goes for the cute (and throws in another Rufferto!):

Jamie Tanner gets meticulous (it was really cool to watch him draw all those little lines):

Matt Weigle gives us some bodily emissions:

Connor Willumsen goes for the slapstick:

Nate Powell does anger:

Scott Campbell also does cute, but throws in some dismemberment:

And one more bit of cuteness, from Lucy Knisley:

God, I love these. Thanks so much to everybody who contributed. You guys are all awesome.

MoCCA 2009: I want to take comics behind the middle school and get it pregnant

I feel vitalized; my faith in comics is greater than it has ever been. Not that I was worried about the future of the medium or anything, since I don’t think anything short of worldwide apocalypse will wipe it out, but there’s nothing like being in huge room surrounded by more talent than the mind can fully comprehend to shore up one’s faith. And spending time with others that are as excited about comics as I am only increases the feeling. It’s pure sequential art euphoria.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. To fully explain: this past weekend saw the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art Festival held in New York City, and I was fortunate enough to make the trip from Chicago to be there. Held in the Lexington Avenue Armory, the show was a huge room packed with comics goodness, hundreds of cartoonists and publishers showing off their art. It was an amazing sight, and even more astonishing upon browsing the tables and seeing how high the level of quality is at a show like this. Having been to Wizard World Chicago the last two years, I’ve seen the kind of talent that congregates around the world of superheroes. Sure, there are some good artists there, but they’re diamonds in the rough; most of the space is taken by poor-to-mediocre drawings of Batman and Wolverine or hideous posters of scantily-clad superheroines. And that’s just in “artists’ alley”; don’t even get me started on the idiocy of the rest of the show floor. But MoCCA is different; it’s like the very best of the indie stuff has separated itself into its own organism, then multiplied to fill an equivalent space with greatness. I couldn’t get enough of it.

And that's good, because there was more there than I had time or energy for. I saw and talked to many creators, but missed a bunch more. It's hard to know where to start talking about it, but from a starting point, here's the pile of stuff I came home with:

I'll be talking about a lot of that stuff over the next few days or weeks, but I do want to point out a couple items of interest. The poster/brochure in the upper right is a Kevin Huizenga strip promoting the Center for Cartoon Studies, which is doing the hard work of training the next generation of cartoonists; they're pretty awesome.

Just to the left of that is a free handout from the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring an amazing fold-out poster (which you can see here) by John Kerschbaum that is packed full of detail and seeming to reproduce the entire contents of the museum. It's pretty incredible, and Kerschbaum suggests that you should go to the Met's site and email them to request that they sell it as a print in their gift shop. I've done so already.

Also, note the flyer for Transmission X, a great webcomics site that features work by creators like Cameron Stewart, Karl Kerschl, Michael Cho, Ramon Perez, and others. Give it a look; it's free!

Other people that I saw or talked to, mentioned as they occur to me:

John Meijas and the Paping people were pretty interesting. I probably would have spoken to Meijas more if I had realized he was the guy who did "The Teachers Edition", which I wrote about when I reviewed The Best American Comics 2008. Their anthologies are pretty awesome though, including the volume that is handmade with wood covers and bound with shoelace:

I ended up talking to Matt Weigle the most out of the group, and also Shawn Cheng (who also had a story in Best American).

I saw Becky Cloonan and Brian Wood at the Vertigo booth and got to look at the first issue of their upcoming second volume of Demo (which comes out in the fall), which I'm pretty excited about. Cloonan also has the collected Pixu book (which she worked on with Vasilis Lolos, Fabio Moon, and Gabriel Ba) coming out this fall from Dark Horse, and the preview copy of that volume she had looked great. And don't forget about her webcomic, KGB, which I mentioned yesterday!

Kevin Church and Benjamin Birdie were fun to talk to, and they had copies of their new collection of their webcomic The Rack. That's a great strip, and hopefully they'll have the book available to purchase online soon (if they do already and I missed it, sorry). you can purchase the book online here.

I was happy to meet Connor Willumsen, whom I happened across online a couple years ago and got excited about. I'm glad to report that he has only gotten better, as you can see from the art samples he posts on his blog. He had some pages from a graphic novel that he's working on (tentatively titled Everett) that were just mindblowingly good. If there's any justice in the world, this kid will be the next big thing.

That's the great thing about these conventions; stumbling on some undiscovered talent. Joshua Ray Stephens is another guy that I met, and I really regret not purchasing his book The Moth or the Flame; it looks incredible. Hopefully, I'll be able to remedy that mistake in the future.

I was also happy to meet Dean Haspiel and see his enthusiasm for the stuff going on at Act-I-Vate, especially their print anthology that's coming out this fall. They had a preview copy of the book, and it looks gorgeous, full of great work by the talents that are constantly making new comics available at the site.

And speaking of previews, Fantagraphics had a copy of their upcoming Abstract Comics, and that book also looks incredible. I'll have to seek it out when it comes out; here's an article all about it if you want to know more.

I met and talked to plenty of other people, including Kate Beaton, Kazimir Strzepek, Tom Neely, Matt Kindt, Evan Dorkin, Lucy Knisley, Fred Van Lente, Miriam Libicki, Jason, Frank Santoro, Spike, Paul Hornschemeier, Charles Hatfield, Lamar Abrams, Fred Chao, Jamie Tanner, Mike Dawson, Nate Powell, Leigh Walton, Scott Campbell, Bob Fingerman, Laura Hudson, Cameron Stewart, Mike Baehr, Hope Larson, and Hellen Jo. Whew!

And I also missed meeting a bunch of people who were there, like Ryan Dunlavey, Lilli Carre, Jog, Sean T. Collins, Kiel Phegley, Tim Callahan, Geoff Grogan (although I did buy his book Look Out! Monsters), Brian Ralph (I wanted to buy Daybreak, but ran out of money), Michael Kupperman, Adrian Tomine, Seth, and Gabrielle Bell.

I do want to give a shout out to fellow blogger Sandy Bilius; he and I met up, browsed through a bunch of tables, and attended a panel together, and I'm pleased to report that he's a great guy, not at all stunted by any affection for Rob Liefeld.

And I also want to send enormous thanks to my generous hosts Tucker and Nina Stone, who let me crash on their couch and shepherded me around the big city; I would probably have been in way over my head without them. It was wonderful getting to spend a buch of time with online friends and finding out that they're cool and fun in real life as well.

Like I said above, it was an incredible weekend, and I don't think I could have had a better time. This is what comics conventions should be all about. I should have more posts up within the next few days, including reviews of stuff that I picked up and possibly coverage of the panels I attended. So keep reading!

Edit: I've posted photos here; don't miss the ones of Tucker bringing the karaoke house down with "Smells Like Teen Spirit".