Comic-Con!

Last week I had my first experience at San Diego Comic-Con International, generally understood to be the hulking unwieldy behemoth of comic conventions. Many of my friends have already been and view it as an experience one ought to have once and then perhaps never again.

I'll keep myself from passing personal judgments on the whole deal, but here's the relevant info I picked up while I was there! This is weeded extensively from my epic report on my personal journal, with the idea of keeping things pertinent to comics, cartooning, and printmaking!

In brief:

On Friday, I attended the Bongo comics panel, starring (among others) Sammy Harkham and Sergio Aragonés. Ben Jones, though listed on the schedule, was sadly not there. Sammy Harkham was there presenting Treehouse of Horror #15, which he is guest editing.

Treehouse of Horror is an annual horror-themed Simpsons comic anthology that has been going since 1995. As you can see from the link to Sammy's blog, the contributors are all pretty amazing and embody styles and genres that haven't been represented in this anthology before. I snagged a photo, showing Sammy second from the right and a page by Ben Jones up on the screen.

Some discussion has being going on over at the EAZB about the depressing lack of female cartoonists. If I were at home in Providence I'd pull out Kramers Ergot 5-7 to see which ladies have worked in those... at any rate, there's more detailed information about the creators and their stories over at Robot 6; it should be coming out around Halloween and I'm going to buy the hell out of it!

The Buenaventura Press booth had lots of great stuff -- minicomics and comics as well as their prints, which are very impressively done.

I grabbed a copy of Tom Gauld's The Gigantic Robot and the minicomic Stay Away From Other People by Lisa Hanawalt, who was also luckily signing when I came by. I introduced myself to her (since we both worked on the impending Electric Ant #2's Body Horror comic jam) and she was very nice!

I also coveted (but did not buy) the recently released Permagel, by Charles Burns. From what I gather the story is morbid horror inspired by Tintin; a fansite for the upcoming Tintin movie has a cover comparison. I have to say that it was excruciatingly well-printed (on 170gr off-white Rives, as it advertised). But it was also huge (16x12) and not hardcover so I didn't want to worry about transporting it. But I'm sure to snap it up eventually, as I'm a huge fan of both Tintin and Burns (though the combination would never have occurred to me).

Nearby was the Fantagraphics booth, pictured here, with lovely Jordan Crane prints. That reminds me - I have Uptight #1 and #3, but not #2, and I just hate it when I do that.

The next day I had the good luck to meet and speak with Angie Wang, a sublimely talented illustrator from Portland.

I had the bad luck of winding up in a panel about motion comics while waiting for the Rifftrax panel... I know motion comics don't actually interest anyone (at least not people who are legit in my book :|) but I gotta say, they really gross me out. My personal journal has a longer rant.

Since I have done some Flash marionette animation (and I learned it all from KJ!), I do genuinely believe that you can go the route of manipulating hand-drawn assets in the marionette style and have it be actually good, but you have to understand that certain drawing styles are appropriate to being animated in that way, and others will always look awkward and ridiculous. Marvel simply does not get it.

Tangentially related to cartooning we have cartoons! I went to the Venture Brothers panel on Saturday, and had the delight of seeing creators/voice actors Jackson Publick, Doc Hammer, James Urbaniak, and Mike Sinterniklaas. The season 4 preview was very exciting. There was also a reel of new and old Adult Swim titles, which served excellently to reinforce my perception that Venture Brothers is the best show on Adult Swim.

I went to the Drawn and Quarterly booth as well. They had the new and improved copies of Adrian Tomine's 32 Stories, which I'd seen him present at a joint lecture with Seth that he did in San Francisco a while back. I like the design, but I'm going to hang on to my beat-up old original copy (that apparently embarrasses Adrian to no end) because now I know it'll earn me hella cred one day. (not really)

I also picked up Sammy Harkham's Crickets while I was there.

I visited a few other booths - Top Shelf was showing off their fancy new edition of Lost Girls (oh god what is the technical term for the semi-box like thing you slide bunches of books into? I know there's one! Anyway, it's three volumes in one of those).

I also bought and read Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole on the very day it won an Eisner! Hurrah!

I also bought and read Eddie Campbell's Black Diamond Detective Agency. I have been following his very informative, very refreshing blog for a month or so now, and am eagerly anticipating The Years Have Pants. Look at that praise! I love Eddie's autobio work (Fate of the Artist, After the Snoother), his less well-known collaborations with Alan Moore (A Disease of Language - so good, I've read it from the library but ought to buy my own copy), and of course his mega well known collaborations with Alan Moore (From Hell, currently clocking in as my 2nd favorite Alan Moore work).

I also bought a volume of Tiny Kitten Teeth. All of the panels are hand-painted in gouache. There are no words.

That about does it! I can't do as much reporting as I'd like, since I was basically focused on enjoying myself.

But I met many swell people and bought a lot of (but not too many) comics, so I consider it a success!

M-M-M-MoCCA!

MoCCA was a whole lot of crazy and I'm still not entirely sure how this all worked out. Sophia and I applied for a half table back at the beginning of March but we were wait-listed. Until last Monday when I got an e-mail at 3 in the morning saying 'Hey, remember that table you applied for? Do yous still want it?...' Unfortunately Sophia was already in San Fransisco by this point but I had been planning to make some stuff to trade with people so I managed to make a few copies of some older stuff as well and grab a random assortments of prints to decorate the table with before we headed off for New York.

Comics!

On the bus

Main Entrance to the Armory

Everything was little bit late in getting started on Saturday but ultimately it all went smoothly. I had traveled down to New York with Alexandra and Ali and we met up with our friend Jose before heading over to the Armory. Since there were four of us we were able to take shifts manning the table so we all got to walk around and see what was going on.

The Alexandras runnin' the booth

I managed to go to a couple of the lectures on Saturday. Making Good Comics in a New Era with a whole bunch of different folks (Alvin Buenaventura, Mats Jonsson, Tom Neely, Brett Warnock, Julia Wertz, and Dylan Williams) was all about comics and the economy and to sum up its basic conclusion: Comics are too small to fail. Most of the self-published pannelists said they hadn't really seen a significant decrease in people buying their stuff because of the economy and Brett Warnock, the guy from Top Shelf said while they'd had to push a lot of books back, they hadn't had to cancel anything yet, which is good, I suppose? I don't know but it gave me hope for being only normally screwed rather super extra screwed when I graduate next spring. The other pannel I went to was the final one of the day, Paul Karasik's The Twisted Genius of Fletcher Hanks which was also pretty awesome. I love Paul! He's the coolest dude! I had him as a professor for the past semester and he has been super encouraging and extremely hilarious and you should all go buy his books because their full of wacky shit. The first one won an eisner and the second one just premiered this past weekend and together they collect all the work of Fletcher Hanks who's this crazy cartoonist from the late thirties. Paul's done some other nifty stuff too so I will direct you to his website to check it out. Anyway, the lecture was mostly about how strange Fletcher Hanks and the story surrounding him are and it was quite entertaining.

Hamlet Regrets Not Being Sold

Jose went back to Jersey late Saturday night and Alexandra left for Denver early Sunday morning so Ali and I were left to man the table Sunday. We hadn't really done that well on Saturday but a lot more people bought comics on Sunday and a many of them were interested in the screenprints I'd brought with me which I was able to sell because of some paperwork issues. (damn New York tax laws!) (btw if you were one of those folks and you're looking at this e-mail me and we'll work something out) Sunday was also good because I ran into Paul first thing and he said 'Here take this' and gave me a giant stack of minis! Ali and I read through them while we were chilling at the table and picked up our own copies of our more favorite finds including Indestructable Universe Quarterly by Morgan Pielli and Freddy by Melissa Mendes.

Mini's!

The other thing I did on Sunday was go to the Gary Panter and Frank Santoro panel which was all about comics and fine art which is a topic close to my heart bein' a RISD kid and all. It ended up being a sort of crash course in 20th century art relevant to comics and I wish I could remember the names of half of the people they talked about but it an information overload. A lot of it was just the two of them talking to each other which was pretty entertaining in itself. I know the guy I was standing next to was filming it so I'm hoping it will end up on youtube so I can get the names of all of those artists...

I'd only been to MoCCA once before, as an attendee last year and even then I thought it was pretty mind blowingly awesome and it was even more fun as an exhibitor. I guess really my favorite thing is just that at least half of the people walking around in there are other comics creators and it's fun just to be able to see what everyone's doing and trade comics and meet new folks and all that jazz. It was a ton of fun and I'm planning to go back in 2010 and hopefully Sophia will be there as well this time. That's about all I've got. Let's make it a a year full of comics between now and then!

What's with this you being on the other side of the country thing...