Spent most of yesterday at the MoCCA Arts Fest in Manhattan, wandering the aisles looking for comics treasures and talking shop with fellow artists. MoCCA isn't like a regular consumer-focused comics convention. I speculate that maybe 80% of the crowd was carrying a sketchbook with them. It's a smaller affair that feels truly populated by artists--making friends, showing off work, talking craft.
Mike Mignola (of Hellboy fame) was probably the biggest name there, sitting at an unadorned table that nevertheless got swarmed by fans and artistic supplicants. Illustrator Yuko Shimizu did a signing at Beehive Books. I had a nice chat with cartoonist Allison Conway about the economics of tabling at conventions and spend a good chunk of time talking art life with Max Wilkins, Ian Gabriel, Turner Mohan, and Ariel Colon.
I met cartoonist Alec Longstreth and picked up his "Isle of Elsi" comic (which I read on the bus ride home and am now hopelessly addicted to.) We talked about his love of Carl Barks and Don Rosa, and it shows in his work; dense panelwork generous with plot and a pleasant, iconic art style that casually pulls you into an unbreakable narrative trance.
You can read Isle of Elsi completely online, although for my sanity I plan to go back and buy the complete Book 1 this afternoon. Alec also has a lecture about Carl Barks on YouTube, which I'm linking to here as a reminder to watch it later.
I also picked up Jesse Lonergan's latest comic, Faster, which is a racing book with a massive cast, all of whom you meet as the cars blasts toward the finish line. As evident in past books like Hedra and Planet Paradise, Lonergan is a formalist with the comics page. There are a ton of inventive panel layouts built on a 24-panel grid, many of which explore different ways of delineating speed, from a rain of brushstrokes against plumes of smoke, to moving arrows that arc out bezier trajectories against blacked-out squares.
It's a lot to digest, and it's made even richer by the beautiful printing of the book. Faster is completely risographed with a bright red and blue on heavy weight paper. It gives the proceedings a glorious texture unlike most other comics out there, and even in the pure blacks there is a haze of magenta, like TV static, that imparts a loving, handmade feeling to the book.
Anyway, that's enough blather from me this morning. I'm gonna try to bang out another page of comics this morning and then I'll probably pop back to MoCCA this afternoon to pick up a few more books. It's a good weekend to be inspired.
Andrew Drilon / New York / 4.3.2022