06/20/08
Text: Susie Cagle
The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival has coalesced every June at the Puck Building since its inception in 2002 to celebrate and sell the comics, prints and artsy merch of anyone willing to cough up the cash for a table (it is a fundraiser, after all). It isn't the only one of its kind ‒ the Small Press Expo takes over Bethesda, Maryland every October and the Alternative Press Expo convenes on San Francisco in the fall. But this is New York City, with its massive creative unclass, the artsy home to all that is respected in the ivory concrete tower. Last year, the convention grew so much they had to take over an entire 'nother floor of the place. It now draws upwards of 6,000 visitors.
Sure, none of those visitors were wearing Princess Leia outfits, but there was still plenty of base MoCCA excitement, even besides the heavy drinking: head wounds! a fire scare and building evacuation! Fascist-y con volunteers with big megaphones to compensate for personal inadequacies! But I digress (again: heavy drinking). This year's MoCCA fest was preceded by a day-long series of conversations with funny-book bigwigs on our American culture's new embrace of comics as a legit medium instead of a genre built around adolescent male fantasies.
So yeah, those big guns: the chain-smoking Art Spiegelman, the effusive Lynda Barry, the avant-gardey Gary Panter, the shoe-gazing Adrian Tomine, the inexplicable Michel Gondry. But while those guys have risen to the top and found great success (best way to sell comics: be Michel Gondry), they are just the tiny tip of a culture that's still pretty submerged underwater. So, uh, let's go swimming!
MoCCA is anchored by the biggest little publishing houses in comics: Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly, Top Shelf and a few others pumping out graphic novels ranging from nonsensically poetic artsy doodles to the most heart-breakingly clean-lined autobiographical twee. But the real finds at MoCCA are the ones you only get by picking up nearly every single Xeroxed and Goccoed hand-stapled, rubber-banded or sewn mini-comic laid out expectantly on the long series of folding card tables.
With a lower threshold for disseminating their work, minis allow cartoonists to hone their craft while still interacting with a readership. In that wondrous vintage pre-Internet age, they were one of the very few ways to do this. But how about a mostly sincere hooray for technological democracy! In our 2.0 age, when content is freefreefree and most anyone can slap together a decent self-promoting Web site, it takes a certain D.I.Y. motivation to get ones ass down to Kinko's to make copies and cut and staple them together (whether you pay for that shit yourself, or simply have friends in low places).
But here, of course, you face another situation unique only to the smallest of the small press: the dude (or lady!) who made that little booklet, slaved, really, for hours, got more than a few sliced fingertips from wayward staples and papercutters – he or she is sitting right behind that table, watching you flip through their life’s work so dismissively. (Salt in the wound: minicomics are often autobio themed, so that big-nosed awkward kid in the comic getting dumped by his cute girlfriend is probably the same one now looking at you with watery doe eyes. It might just be that he’s hungover, but still.) This can be incredibly depressing (do not make eye contact) or empowering ‒ how often do you get to meet your favorite authors in the flesh? And how often do they ask if they can draw you? Or if you'll buy them a beer?
Minis are also how new talent gets noticed by this new round of book publishers ‒ Simon and Schuster, Harper Collins, Random House, Scholastic ‒ who are beginning to swoop in and skim the cream off the crop. If you're smart you'll snap these things up while they still cost $5; you don't even have to brave the Puck Building! (Thanks, Internet!)
A few places to start:
Atomic Books (has a ton): Aron Nels Steinke, Ryan Cecil Smith, Laura Park, ...
Bodega Distribution: Sam Gaskin, Frank Santoro, Megan Kelso...
Global Hobo: Jason Shiga, Lark Pien, Joe Sayers...
I Know Joe Kimpel (the Center for Cartoon Studies): Ken Dahl, Colleen Frakes, Joe Lambert...
One Percent Press: JP Coovert, Alexis Frederick-Frost, James Hindle...
U.S.S. Catastrophe: John Porcellino, Kevin Huizenga, Alixopolus, ...
