MoCCA 2012

May 2

Written By

Last weekend I headed back to The Armory for my second MoCCA Arts Festival. I walked past the Flatiron building on my way to and from the show. New York City brought its finest spring weather, perfect for people to leave their cramped apartments and explore the offerings of hundreds of talented cartoonists.In my hotel room I played a little game. I could see, unobstructed, a tiny parking lot. The lot had a mechanism that could lift a car up so another car could be parked directly underneath. This doubled the amount of cars they could fit in the narrow space. My question was, what if the first person in that morning wanted his car out for lunch? He'd be on the top in the back. They'd have to move at least five cars to get to his. But there is not enough room to move five cars at once. So how does it work? The show itself was great. I sold more books there than any show since 2010. I met some cool people and reconnected with so many others. Here's an incomplete list of the fine folks that made MoCCA the epicenter of minicomics in New York City.*The Longstreths! Galen and Alec A carload of Australians!Sam Sharpe Palle Schmidt Tom Gauld Ruben Bolling Robyn Chapman Pranas Naujokaitis Kayla Jones Erika Harada Dingding Hu Kenan Rubenstein, my Wonderwall, was once again my tablemate and we both had the good fortune of standing next to Neil Brideau. Tyrell Cannon (YES! THAT IS HIS REAL NAME) was also there; he was showing off his amazing new volume of collected works. I'll be seeing all of them again in Chicago for CAKE, which happens in June. Dear readers, if you haven't checked out the work of these fine cartoonists after all the linking I've done, I'm obviously not typing hard enough.The real downside to this year's show was that the Stumptown Comics Fest happened the very same weekend. My good friends Reid Psaltis and Matt Ocasio were here, making sure Portland lives up to its nickname "City of Cartoonists."* It was a bummer to split up the group, but come June we'll be together again in Chicago, AS NATURE INTENDED.

I took an extra day to see the city. I lived in New York one summer, so I went back to my old stomping grounds near Columbia University. My friend Swati was also visiting, so we met up and wandered the halls of the Natural History Museum, then drank chai then saw the Dakota building and the Imagine mosaic. I had such a good time I hope to meet up with a Portland friend (HINT HINT) on each convention trip I take forever until the end of time.I knew this was going to be a good show. Nikola Tesla was looking out for me.