It's not all sadness and tears. New York's regular Mocca festival is a mind-bending experience, very much a ‘cup-runneth over' type event for anybody who likes their art to be comics, and their comics to be good. It's a place where you get to meet the type of people so committed to the form that they'll stay up late after fulltime jobs so they can publish a comic that will end up reaching a tiny audience, people who are operating as far outside the mainstream aspects of the comic book culture as is possible without a membership in Scientology.

This list, like any other list, is completely arbitrary, based totally in personal taste, and doesn't include some totally fantastic work solely because I didn't purchase it at the show. It's safe to say that you can certainly find some terrible comics at Mocca—but I didn't. For me, it came down to these ten if you were to ask "What rocked you like a hurricane, Mr. Ship Is Totally Sinking?"

10. Call All My Dawgs #1, By Samuel Gaskin. Although Mr. Gaskin also released his first "proper" collection at Mocca, the also fantastic Fatal Faux-Pas, I'd been lucky enough to check out a review copy of that prior to the show, courtesy of his publisher, Secret Acres. Dawgs is pretty much exactly what the title sounds like—it's a short mini-comic about three dogs, their love of Nas & Wu-Tang, an all-dog talent show, and a Zen-like discussion regarding a chew toy. In other words, it's what we all wish Moon Knight was a lot more like.

9. Wall City, by Alex Kim. Alex Kim is one of the latest graduates from the Center of Cartoon Studies, and Wall City is his latest graphic novel. Larger in scope, form or size than any of Kim's work to date, Wall City is also his most "mature" story to date, a relatively nuanced and astute study in grief, but unlike the larger portion of comics that deal with death and loss, it's a strongly imaginative work. It is also an excellent read, and despite its obvious DIY budget, it serves as an intelligent, wryly cryptic introduction to an exciting young talent.

8. Sundays 2, by the students of The Center of Cartoon Studies. The second anthology from various authors, all affiliated in some way with the graduating class at the CCS, Sundays 2 is a strong collection of some really unique voices—while some of the work is a bit young, all the authors here are well represented. One stand-out piece, by Ken Dahl, is without a doubt the funniest thing I purchased at the show.

7. Cold Heat Special 4, by Frank Santoro and Jim Rugg. As the months of 2008 bring us that much closer to the full publication of Frank Santoro's 240 page Cold Heat, the author has been kind enough to drop of few of these tasty morsels along the way. While all of the Specials so far have been excellent pieces of work, 4, a team-up with the enormously talented Jim Rugg set the bar even higher. As long as Mr. Santoro feels like publishing this kind of work, I'll be ready to pay for them.

6. Snake Oil #2, by Chuck Forsman. Another thesis completion from a C.C.S. student, Snake Oil #2 is probably most exciting when read back to back with the first issue—while it's unknowable what happened in the scant weeks between the listed publication date, everything that seemed amateurish about the first issue is gone completely, and if Mr. Forsman can continue with this type of growth, it won't be too long before Snake Oil gets picked up by a larger publisher. Although it may look like countless other mini-comics with multiple short narratives, Forsman's ability to capture subtle emotional shifts is extraordinarily acute from such a young writer.

5. Pocket Full Of Rain, by Jason. It's tempting to lie and claim that Jason and I go back a long way, but the embarrassing reality is that this is the first of the man's work that I've purchased. I've read his work in a few anthologies, and meant to pick some up, but had yet to get around to it. Rectifying that, despite my belief that Mocca purchases should mostly be devoted to books that are hard to come by, was a plan from the get go. While this volume is a compilation of earlier stuff, it's a fantastic book that only cements the belief that I should have gotten on the Jason bandwagon months ago. Funny, clever, and a showcase of his estimable skills, Pocket Full is one of those rare comics that actually might make headway with those people that don't have time for or interest in comics. (I believe those people make up the majority of the population of the English-speaking world.)

4. Cold Heat Special 5, by Ryan Cecil Smith & Frank Santoro. Hey, it's not cheating to put two from the same series on a list, as long as you're the guy making the rules. You can pretty much repeat exactly what I said about Special 4, only exchanging Jim Rugg for Mr. Smith—the only minor thing that made this stand out was the rough, handmade quality it has about it, as opposed to Special 4's classic newspaper format. Once again, Cold Heat—keep an eye out for that title!

3. The Goddess of War, by Lauren Weinstein. Now that we're entering the top 3, it should be acknowledged that all three of these books are from the "came out of nowhere" variety. I may have known these comics were going to be available at Mocca, but I was surprised that they turned out to be my favorites—they were all "check it out, and maybe I'll buy it" table decisions. Goddess of War is a huge comic, the first in a series regarding the adventures of its titular mythological character. It's an incredibly good piece of work, incorporating an excellent sense of design with a lively cartooning style that flows as if the book was drawn as it was imagined—whatever creative wellspring that Ms. Weinstein tapped into, she could bottle it and make millions.

2. Angst, The Best Norwegian Comics: Vol 2, by Various Authors. A friend had mentioned the heartbeat at the center of this volume—a true "lost comic" by Pushwagner that had only been found when the author's luggage turned up in 2002, after disappearing in the mid 70's. While the entire comic was only viewable in a copy of scans at the kindly Norwegian table, Angst contained fourteen pages of it, making this an immediate purchase. Upon reading it, I was struck by how different it was when cast against American art-comics anthologies—not in a negative way, but in an almost complete tonal shift. Angst is almost completely unconcerned with trying to force some type of fictive labeling to any of it's stories, regardless of what style or genre they're told in. It's a diverse, mixed bag of work, all of which stems from varied opinions on what the art of comics can do and the only thing that ties each individual piece together is the matched professionalism on display. Whereas Pushwagner's Soft City excerpt was the reason behind the purchase, there wasn't a story in the volume that didn't stick with me in some way.

1. Skyscrapers of the Midwest, by Joshua Cotter. In the face of all this serious art, with serious design, and serious seriousness, it's easy for me to forget that, sometimes, a great comic is the one that gets you laughing out loud while taking the cutesy and sentimental and flipping it on its axis. I knew going into Mocca that I was going to be on the look-out for Skyscrapers—although I hadn't taken the time to read reviews of it yet, I'd actually written the title into my phone as "one to check into." Upon glancing through the book, I wondered if I really was going to drop a twenty on something with crying funny animals—thankfully, I didn't decide based on that one page. By the time I got around to reading this pristine hardcover collection of Joshua Cotter's four issue series, I was an exhausted comic reader—besides the books mentioned here, I'd also filled in a lot of gaps on a lot of other highly recommended mini-comics, and I still had Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button to go. Skyscrapers of the Midwest—which is far more than a page of crying funny animals—was a breath of fresh air. A torturously funny coming-of-age story, a brilliant satire of Mid-western stereotypes, and an inventive, willfully complex structure, this was easily my favorite purchase at the show. Brilliantly incorporating so much of what makes comic books funny and smart, Cotter's story ends the way all great literature should—begging, with red eyes and a choked laugh, for more.