The third annual MoCCA Art Fest was this weekend, and it seemed to be a more…professional affair than the previous two years’ shows. Overall, I think that’s a good thing.
For starters, the show was spread over both Saturday and Sunday this time around, a necessary expansion indeed. The first MoCCA (like “Frankenstein,” the creation has stolen the creator’s name) received such positive word of mouth that the second MoCCA (as I mentioned in my report on the event) was about as crowded as that Who concert where people got trampled to death. The addition of a second day meant that festival goers could, y’know, move around freely; it also made all of the tables accessible, whereas last year the crowds around the more popular retailers and creators were sometimes thick enough to actually prevent browsing of their wares.
The second day meant added room, board, and meal expenses for the exhibitors, though. Those I spoke to all seemed moderately pleased with their takes–for the bigger small-press entities going to a con is usually a break-even proposition at best, so even landing just slightly in the black is a pleasant surprise. In terms of busyness, I heard multiple accounts from multiple people as to whether Saturday or Sunday was The Big Day, so I’ll take that as a sign that sales were spread out pretty evenly over the course of the weekend. (I’d imagine that post-Harvey Award hangovers knocked quite a few shoppers (and sellers) out of commission on Sunday morning, however.)
Aside from the second day, the other big difference between this year’s show and last year’s was the absence of a giant breakout success story, a gauntlet thrown down in the collective face of alt/artcomix. Last year saw the debut of two enormous, powder-blue books–Craig Thompson’s Blankets and editor Sammy Harkham’s Kramer’s Ergot 4–that not only set the con-goer conversational agenda but continue to have a massive impact on the alternative comics scene. Indeed, several factors seemed to compound the sense that these books were Something Big: the relative youth of their creators; their out-of-nowhere, unprecedented place in the artists’ respective ouevres; their publication by relative upstarts (Blankets publisher Top Shelf boasted From Hell in its stable but had yet to home-grow a true breakout book; Kramers was, for all intents and purposes, self-published); and, of course, the massive, Mjolnir-esque size of the books themselves. The buzz books of MoCCA 2004, by comparison, were long-awaited installments in long-respected ouevres from long-admired creators published by a long-running institution: Daniel Clowes’s Eightball #23 and Gary Panter’s Jimbo in Purgatory, both from Fantagraphics. Jimbo was big, by the way–it’s a tall hardcover not unlike the Quimby the Mouse volume Fanta published last year–but even so it failed to have the heft of last year’s smashes (literally if not literarily, of course). The fact that Fanta sold out of both books by Saturday afternoon could either have heightened or diluted their buzz, depending on your outlook.
From an personal perspective, another change in the make-up of MoCCA was the relative preponderance of more professional-style self-publishers and indie houses, as opposed to the DIY minicomics creators who dominated years one and two. This may have been all a matter of perception: This year I was actually on a budget, so I was hesitant to walk up to a doe-eyed mini maker and flip through his or her wares, knowing as I did that it’d have to knock me out to persuade me to buy something, and knowing as I did that this was unlikely. In other words, I sort of had my starving-artist blinders on. But observers of the scene may recall an early (and largely hyperbolic) outcry from the mini types about what was perceived to be a shift toward glossy, semi-pro, genre-centric, pamphlet-sized publishers of the type reminiscent of the 1980s black and white boom or the third-tier Image titles of the Valentino era. To these eyes, it seems like this did happen, at least a little bit.
The big story of the con is likely to be Craig Thompson’s sweep of the Harveys. Capping off a success story that began in earnest at this same place last year, Thompson came to MoCCA still riding the success of Blankets (he was by far the most popular creator on the floor, if autograph lines are any indication) and left with Harveys for Best Artist, Best Original Graphic Album or whatever the heck they call it, and Best Cartoonist, the three categories in which he and his work were nominated. Thompson’s trumping of brilliant veterans like Chester Brown, Joe Sacco, and Jaime Hernandez is unlikely to temper the anti-Blankets backlash, nor ease tensions between what for want of better terms have come to be known as the Team Comix camp (centered around Top Shelf) and the Fuck Team Comix camp (centered around Fantagraphics), but I’d be a lot more upset if he didn’t actually deserve the accolades. Thompson’s fellow creators, it seems, think the book is indeed all it’s cracked up to be. (Despite my initial misgivings, they’re right.)
My personal big story of the con was all the time I got to spend with a couple of my favorite cartoonists. While they were in town, Jeffrey Brown stayed with the Missus’s best friend Karolyn, while Craig Thompson stayed with the Missus and myself. Both of these gentlemen are talented, dedicated artists, and both also happen to be really nice guys. It was a pleasure to host them. (By the way, Brown’s new minicomics and Thompson’s new collection of portrait prints, along with the new Eightball, the most recent folk tale adaptation by Matt Wiegle, and Phoebe Gloeckner-heavy issues of the Comics Journal and the Comics Journal Special Edition, were the finds of the con for me.)
Special thanks this year go out to the illustrious Jim Dougan, with whom I wish I could have spent more time; Brett Warnock, Chris Staros, and the entire Top Shelf crew, whose behind-the-bar booth served as an unofficial home base for us over the course of the con; Karolyn, who advised us that security at the Harveys gets pretty lax when everyone’s had five or six Grey Gooses (indeed it does!); the good folks at La Rondure; and everyone who recommended The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to the Missus and I, who watched it in our belated-anniversary-getaway hotel room before crashing the aforementioned lightly guarded award ceremony. See you in San Diego!