The first time I went to MoCCA, it was right after I'd done this thing where couples go to Crate & Barrel before they open to the public so they can set up their wedding gift registry. It's really nice, because everybody in there is engaged and relatively happy about being engaged, and all the employees are working extra hard for you to use the little scan gun to add items to your registry. You're not really shopping, because you never know if anybody is going to actually like you enough to buy the random crap you're picking out, but it still feels like you've won a game show. Crate & Barrel was right up the street from MoCCA's old home, the Puck Building, and so after my fiance and I were finished, I went to MoCCA to check it out and she went...somewhere? I can't remember, but it wasn't far away, because I called her after about 20 minutes of wandering the first floor and said "Wait, you might actually not hate this."
Since then, I've had a soft spot for MoCCA. I don't cotton to the idea of comics advocacy so much--I figure that quality will out, and as long as there are good comics, they'll eventually find their audience. (Diamond seems to disagree with that notion lately, but hey, Idealism. It's still fun, even after you realize that Naomi Klein is a crazy person lacking a solid grasp on economic principles.) My wife may read comics when I ask her too, but with the exception of
Nana, the only time her excitement about them rivals mine is when we're wandering around hot rooms watching Evan Dorkin bite the heads off of live chickens while some random person tries to sell us another copy of
Girls Don't Poop. (I really think 12 months is long enough to do a
Girls Don't Poop sequel, whoever you are.)
I'm sad to say that this was my least favorite MoCCA convention I've attended. I couldn't nail 95 reasons to the 69th Regiment Armory doors that would explain that feeling. I just didn't dig it as much as I have in the past. The heat might have been a factor, although it didn't really strike me as being too much of a problem until I started wondering what it would be like if I was one of those people stuck behind a table all day, as opposed to being able to bail out anytime the need struck me. The fact that the Coke Zero machine didn't stock Coke Zero irritated my wife, but I'm only mildly empathetic on that one, as I think Coke Zero tastes like pancake syrup mixed with artificial sweetener. I was disappointed that most of my great moments in conversation consisted of talking to people who I already speak with on a regular basis (via email, for the most part), as opposed to previous years, when there was a generally more open dialog to be had with the publishers and creators I've come to respect most highly. As with anything, I'm willing to take the heavy share of blame myself--but still. There's got to a reason beyond the heat why so many of the MoCCA reports have come bearing a sort of "I liked it...but" tone. I have no plans not to return--a good share of the criticism could definitely be attributed to "growing pains"--but when I think of MoCCA 2009 in the coming months, it's going to be a different kind of memory than the ones I cherish of the time I wandered around the Puck Building. With that, I'll turn back into the lazy writer that I am, and we'll do this list style.
The Book I Bought And Then Forced Other People To Buy
At MoCCA 2008, I picked up
Angst Vol 2., a comic anthology that contained a few sample pages of the rediscovered
Soft City comic created by Terje "Pushwagner" Brofos. If you're into legend,
Soft City is probably a top-fiver--the original comic was lost for over twenty years, a time during which Brofos ended up defrauded into homelessness. Its rediscovery in 2002 occurred roughly around the time that Brofos' life took a turn for the better, and it was eventually published in total last year. It's not an easy book to come by though, and it was only a random mention by comics critic Chris Mautner that sent me looking for it at this year's show. Although I trust Chris more than I trust most men, I'll admit to still being a little surprised to see a stack of copies sitting amongst Scandinavia's finest.
It's a knockout. While I'd have a difficult time naming what the number two book of this year's show would be, for my personal taste,
Soft City is the only contender for number one. I'm really excited to dive into all of the purchases I made this past weekend, but they're going to have to be comic books that french kiss me while singing At The Drive In's entire catalog to knock
Soft City out of the top spot. It's beyond remarkable, and I can't stop wondering what the "canon" would look like if the original pages hadn't been lost in a suitcase since the mid 70's. There were a ton of comics and creators at this year's show that are possessed with a talent I remain in awe of--people like Gary Panter, Frank Santoro, Seth, David Mazzucchelli and more--but my experience of
Soft City is best described as being kicked in the stomach by skill alone. It's a brilliant work of art. Unfortunately,
Soft City seems to be one of those "buy it at a show" comics, but if you can't track one down for purchase, Karen Green will be adding it to the library at Columbia University. That's probably a shorter trip.
The Publisher Who Ended Up With Most Of My Money
I made a deal with myself before attending that I'd try not to reenact the folly of my 2007 adventure to the festival, where I spent the lion's share of my disposable MoCCA income at the Fantagraphics table only to look back and question why I was buying Fantagraphics collections that were easily available at about a million other locations while a whole bunch of young cartoonists bucked to "make table". So I marveled at Karasik's new Fletcher Hanks collection, I oohed and ahhed at Mazzucchelli's
Asterios Polyp, and I rubbed my fingers across the interior pages of
Far Arden. And then I went and bought a bunch of cheap mini-comics, most of which are probably about feelings and sick family members. But there was one publisher that escaped my "no big purchases" law, and that was Picturebox. Although I continue to be privately disappointed that Dan Nadel is a relatively approachable guy, as the look and feel of Picturebox releases get me fantasizing that its publisher is going to be some kind of chain-smoking deviant who sits behind his wares doing lines of cocaine off a copy of
The Book Of Mormon, my sadness isn't enough to keep me from stopping by the table. (Which I did so often that I probably should've paid for a chair.)
Of course, making a rule that I'd limit my purchases would have been a bit hard to keep, considering the amount of stuff that Nadel and Company brought to the show--besides Frank Santoro's back issues of
Nam,
Paradax and
The Shadow, I walked away with the latest
Cold Heat Special, Mat Brinkman's surprise release of
Multiforce, the third issue of
1-800 MICE, and a whole stack of Raw Dog's
REAL DEAL,which Dan had tracked down a little over a month ago. While I'm a bit disappointed to hear that it's not financially worthwhile for Picturebox to put these comics through the Diamond system, they will at least be available for the time being at the
Picturebox website. Sadly, the one comic that I mulled over all night on Saturday ended up selling before I could get back to the table, so I've given up on my dream to someday regale my future spawn with the tale of the time when
Dennis The Menace Went To Mexico.
The Upcoming Comic I'm More Excited About Than Marvel's Strange Tales With Johnny Ryan
Earlier this year, I had picked up a lion's share of John Kerschbaum's comics--
The Wiggly Reader,
Homecoming,
Timberdoodle,
Dumb Cluck--and ended up corresponding a bit with Kerschbaum after I sat down and plowed through them over a heady weekend of comic book isolation. When I stopped by to check in with John, I asked if there was anything else that I could add to the Kerschbaum Collection I'd started building, and was surprised to find out that he remembered me from that six-month old email exchange. Saturday was a big day for John, as the Fantagraphics table was in the midst of selling out every copy of his
Petey & Pussey collection they'd trucked over from the Groth/Thompson/Reynolds warehouse, but he and I chatted for a bit. While I was only able to purchase one comic from him that I didn't already own--his
If New York Was The World collection--he did hip me to an upcoming issue of Bongo's
Treehouse of Horror series (issue #15) that will not only feature new work from him, but also Kevin Huizenga, Jordan Crane, Jeffrey Brown, C.F. and Dan Zettwoch, and if you're not excited by that news...well. I hope it's because you can't read. Anyway,
Treehouse of Horror #15. There was probably some other news that came out of the convention too, but that's the piece of news that got me the most excited. Knowing that a whole bunch of people ended up walking out of the first day of MoCCA with Kerschbaum's
Petey & Pussey collection was pretty great too. (David Mazzucchelli and Kevin Cannon also walked away from MoCCA with the coveted "sold all our copies" prize, and I'm sure there were a few others as well.)
Frank Santoro Versus Gary Panter
A word on the title there--that's something I created in my head. There was no fighting or arguing between Panter and Santoro. That's just where my head goes when I see anything that uses two names as a title. I remember being really angry when I read Salman Rushdie in conversation with Terry Gilliam and neither of them made fun of each other's physical appearance. I'd attended a Frank Santoro panel at MoCCA before, and while I was as excited as all get out to do it again, it would be difficult to pretend that the idea of sitting in a room with Gary Panter wasn't the primary draw. I've been a fan of Panter's work for a while, and a big portion of this year has been spent navigating my way through the two volume anthology of his work that Picturebox published a few years ago. (Why I waited to buy it, I couldn't tell you.) The panel, which took place in a room adorned with a mural depicting my second favorite subject (violence), was probably best described by surprise guest Raymond Sohn, when he referred to the conversations between Panter and Santoro as a "master class" in art.
Accompanied by a slideshow depicting images from the artists that Panter believes carry the DNA of comics without neccassirly being "cartoonists", Gary spent almost the entirety of the hour delivering a torrent of information in a style that was as vividly personal as it was informative. Santoro, notepad in hand, prodded Gary to go into more detail when things slowed down, reminding him of the arguments and discussions the three men had gotten into when they were painting a mural in Roanoke Virginia back in January. It was a tremendously entertaining panel, one that has been covered in greater detail at the blog
Squally Showers, and you can hear an audio recording of the panel at the
Comics Comics blog.
If I had a complaint--which I do--it would only be regarding the exhaustion I have with the notion brought up during the Q&A portion of the show, that comics criticism is somehow missing out due to the lack of a specific language with which to criticize the comics themselves. The idea that the intellectually masturbatory world of art criticism has something to offer comics readers or artists is one I'm glad to see being held by the minority. I'll never understand anyone looking at the current state of the post-graduate art school critique and seeing it as anything more than an ivory tower built almost completely out of strangled prose and empty proselytizing. If the sort of intellectual superiority provided by the selection committees of museums is going to be the admission one has to pay for comics to be universally "accepted" alongside the Pollocks and the de Koonings?
Yikes, I think I just made myself throw up. In my own mouth. A little.
And One Last Thing About The Armory
Okay, so yeah, I have to bump into this place on a semi-regular basis. It's a weird joint, one that used to earn a sexy $30,000-a-day in bribes for a guy named James Jackson. That's on top of the daily rental fee, which I've seen argued down to $6,000 for one day of use. (Oh, and I'm sure that the bribery thing is totally done with, as Jackson was busted in 2008 and we all know how corrupt officials are a one-of-a-kind occurrence in New York City.) There's a show coming up in the near future at the Armory that will cost a little under $8,000 a day, so it's still a pretty cheap place to throw a convention when you consider its size and convenience. If MoCCA paid a lot more than that, they need to hire a new negotiator.
But you can't have that show in June and not provide air conditioning. Like I mentioned above, it didn't really bother me personally. If I got uncomfortable, I left and came back. If I'd been a cartoonist, I'm sure I would have been pretty disappointed in it, but I probably would have stuck it out. But if I'd had a kid there? Or if I was one of the people lucky enough to have any of those post-70 comic legends at my table? Give me a break. That's just a stupid, risky thing to do. Old people and little ones don't do well in the heat, and MoCCA should have known better. Air conditioning the Armory isn't that cheap--some people are currently claiming they've done it for as little as $20,000 a day, but the show I checked on that's coming up is paying a daily cost of $40,000. If MoCCA wants to use the Armory, good for them. With some actual decorating, a more interesting layout, the Armory can and does work on a constant basis for all kinds of events.
But the real cost of that location has to include the cost of air conditioning. All it would take is one horrible occurrence involving somebody--an elderly cartoonist, the child of a struggling artist--for absolutely every sold out book and every Looky At This Cool Comic to be completely meaningless. That's the kind of thing that wouldn't just ruin the career of the organizer, the Museum itself, but the lives of everyone in attendance. It's a small enough show right now that these are the kinds of problems that are completely fixable. When you've got fair warning--and the equation of heat plus old people and children is fair warning--you don't get to use the word tragedy. You use the word crime. Man up. It's that simple.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
