* Secret Acres has a blog! At the link you’ll find their plans for MoCCA and the whole rest of the year. (Via Theo Ellsworth.)

* Isaac Moylan has a blog! At the link you’ll find a page from his strange, NSFW superhero-ish comic.

* I’ll tell you what: If this weren’t MoCCA weekend, I’d be sorely tempted to hoof it northward for the Boston Comic Con. Sergio Aragones, Jim Lee, Michael Golden, Mike Mignola, Eric Powell, Joe Quinones, Steve Rude, Bill Sienkiewicz, Jim Starlin, Cameron Stewart, Ben Templesmith, and J.H. Williams III could put a real hurting on my Bowie sketchbook.

* I forgot all about the Thirty Days Gallery curated by the Family Bookstore of Sammy Harkham fame. Maybe I’ll check it out this weekend. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are performing there tomorrow!

* Tom Spurgeon has updated his post on the 2010 Eisner nominees with his thoughts on them. Since it perhaps behooves me to elaborate on what I thought rather than chiming in with a douchey one-liner, I’ll say this: You probably don’t need me to tell you how frustrating I find the year-to-year prominence of adequate-to-good front-of-Previews titles versus the actual best comics of the year. That’s the same complaint everyone has about every award show every year–well, the Oscars at least, and the Emmys to an extent; no one’s cared about the Grammys since at least as long ago as Metallica and Guns n’ Roses lost to Jethro Tull.

But I think what’s uniquely flummoxing about this year’s nominees is that it’s pretty easy for all of us to put together a list of Eisner-bait DC/Marvel/Dark Horse books from the year that was, based on the typical Eisner nomination pattern. A few squeaked in there–J.H. Williams III and Dave Stewart got individual nods for their Detective Comics stuff, there’s the usual slew of Vertigo books and big-name artists who mostly do covers rather than interiors, The Walking Dead made it in there, Ed Brubaker appears to have joined the “what he does gets nominated” pantheon, etc. But so many of the obvious “Eisner books”–and regardless of their actual merits I think Batman and Robin, Wednesday Comics, Ex Machina, Strange Tales, Invincible Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Hellboy, B.P.R.D., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror are very much “Eisner books”–were passed over in favor of comics regarded as junk even by junk fans, or as popcorn fare at best. It sort of rips the band-aid off of how arbitrary the process is even at the best of times, how non-rigorous the standards being applied are.

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